How to talk about money without seeming to talk about money

Face it. Your comfortable, suburban members could be giving much more to the mission, but they are distracted by baubles and entertainments (not the ones emanating from the worship center). Here are a few ways to encourage them to be more sacrificial in their giving, without scaring them away.

Sophisticated servant-leaders know how to shame and beg creatively and distinctively -- while seeming to be above all the nasty, but necessary, money talk.

What to do, what to do... Well, you could write a letter to your sheep, full of other matters but sandwiching in the need for funds, somewhere in the middle. But that is pretty obvious unless your members are new to church.

You can whip up enthusiasm by tagging the sheep as part of the growing excitement of a growing movement. Also, you can cast every fundraising success as proof your group is on the verge of bringing in the next new wave of innovation and change.

Alternately, you can convince older members to leave you their retirement income when they die.

If all else fails, blog about not caring about numbers, growth and celebrity. Watch the offerings pour in when you are perceived as a humble servant, uncaring about those things you spend the most time thinking about, brainstorming about, blogging about and conferencing about.

How can you make church pay off?

Now that many churches are fully automated, are pastors irrelevant? We can pipe celebrity pastor holograms into our services, or at the very least purchase someone else's sermon packages, so we don't have to even go to the trouble of opening the Bible anymore.

Church management software does all the  heavy lifting, and pastoral "care" is pre-sorted, pre-printed, mail-merged and totally pre-formatted.

The sound and lights guys take care of the ambiance. They keep the masses coming, so evangelism is no longer so urgent.

Because of these church changes, a question emerges:

How can we still make money?

New way to boost numbers: Watch for it!

The main thing is the main thing, we all know, and the main thing is growth. We want to grow, both in numbers and in spiritual façade, and that means bringing in the sheaves: the young, healthy, financially and organizationally stable members that will help us build from the ground up.
So, how do we ensure that upwardly mobile couples flow into our worship centers and decrepit oldsters file out? One popular way – and we are beginning to see it everywhere now – is to talk about SEX. We need to show that we are cool with SEXand not like those uptight, arthritic fundamentalists of days gone by.

No more keeping sex between a man and his wife, secretly celebrating the beauty of male and female in the confines of the marriage bed. NO! We will now smear SEX, in great, big, bold fonts on our web pages and church marquees, because we know it will hit home and draw crowds, especially the crowds of young couples with spending money who watch crude TV shows anyway.
We’ll throw in a bare minimum of scripture to make it a bit different from Oprah, and we’ll hold off on the lingerie shows at women's prayer group and Viagra spots in the church bulletins for a few months. We might not perform the Vagina Monologues for a year or so, but we’ll make it clear that we are not like your parents and that we are as open about SEX as the strippers down the street.
   When the congregation is ready, we might introduce a pole dance or two with our interpretive dancers on a Wednesday evening to make it clear just how relevant we are.

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