I suspect that a good percent of active East Valley church-goers are “in debt” to their congregations. They have pledged to their churches for building and expansion campaigns — campaigns with eminently lofty titles like Building for Faith Tomorrow or Building for the Harvest or On the Wings of Faithful Vision.” They could just call it. “We Need Big Money Again.”You can’t be around very long in a faith community and not be part of a fund-raising campaign to buy land or build or renovate. Of course, a building campaign is no longer an undertaking a congregation wants to necessarily try itself. It takes big-time logistics and following some strategies of making the asks that amateurs should not risk doing by themselves. So call in the consultants with the trolling for dollars expertise, folks who can show you can, in fact, get blood from turnips.
The fund-raising science requires that a small army of church members be recruited for all sorts of duties — some logical and some a bit stiff but surely created to create the team spirit and the notion that everyone has a hand in the campaign. There are things like prayer teams to pray for the campaign. People to contact (and recontact) everyone in the congregation and get them to informational meetings, people to take care of the hospitality for events, those who mine for big pre-kickoff campaign money, others to prepare the promotional materials like hand-out videos and colorful brochures. People to involved the youth. People to keep the pledgers reminded they pledged and should be periodically paying it off.
Key people takes the whole membership rosters and determine which families have the means to make the big gifts, where the family trusts are, where “friends” of the church are lurking.
So I was astonished to see the news out of Dallas on Thursday that RSI Church Stewardship — the largest professional capital campaign consultants helping congregations raise money — helped the Calvary Chapel in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., raise $105 million to expand a campus that already has about 20,000 weekly worshipers at three locations. It went way over its $80 goal. My church enlisted RSI a couple times, but we were trying only to get less than 1 percent of that amount. The RSI staff showed their stuff to us, and the Florida church must feel the same.
The $105 million is believed to be the largest amount ever raised in pledges by a U.S. church. It eclipsed the the $80 million reached in 2000 at famed Willow Creek Creek in the Chicago suburbs, another RSI client.
RSI boasts that in its 34-year history, it has worked with more than 7,000 churches and raised $8 billion. Until Calvary Chapel’s feat, the previous fund-raising record by a local church was $84.8 million.
RSI has got its process down to an art. It can get congregations to pledge 2 to 3 times more than their annual budgets to special campaigns. In some churches it has got final tallies up to 10 times a budget. And the land flows with milk and money.
