Creating Money Ministries
with Congregations
and Church Structures

Prologue

Ministry of Money was born twenty-six years ago out of Church of the Saviour's sense of mission--every human being is created with  his or her own special call. For more than a quarter century our special mission has been to journey with people of faith who are struggling with "how much is enough" for them to keep and "how much is enough" to share with a broken world. More importantly, our work is to encourage others to become free of their attachments to money and things and to live out joyfully God 's call for their lives and resources

We have utilized four main means for accompanying persons in this faith struggle. First, we lead "money and faith retreats" around the United States as a way of giving North Americans a safe place to talk about money. Second, we travel with people to very poor countries around the world to put them in places and with people who become their teachers about the really important things---things more important than money and possessions. Third, we publish a quarterly newsletter that has served for more than twenty years as a source of support and information for people seeking to understand their own addiction to money and things. Fourth, staff serves as sounding boards and guides for persons who struggle at various points in their lives around issues of money and faith.

Fifteen years ago another expression of our ministry was born to respond to the special needs of women around issues of money and faith. It was called "Women's Perspective:" In February 2001 Women 's Perspective requested of the board of Ministry of Money that they be allowed to become a separate non-profit organization. Their request was granted and this has then moved Ministry of Money into a new discerning of its own work in the field of money and faith.

For nearly twenty-five years the founder of Ministry of Money served as its director. In the spring of 1998 this founder-director asked the board to find a replacement for him. In April 1999 the board hired a new director. Simultaneously, the board began to recognize its own need to assume a different kind of leadership for the organization. It began a process to name, claim and proclaim the core values and corporate call for Ministry of Money. This has entailed working with several consultants and holding two discernment and planning retreats. This work has resulted in an expansion of the board and recognizing the need to take on a whole new dimension in our money and faith call.

For the past two years, increasingly Ministry of Money has received requests from large congregations, clusters of churches, consulting groups for churches, and denominational structures to work with them on the issues surrounding congregational stewardship. These requests have come from what has been known in the last fifty years as "Mainline" denominations. Ministry of Money has for its entire history connected mostly with these same mainline denominations. However, for its entire history it has only connected at very superficial levels with denominational structures. Our work in the past has been to "only" respond to requests that come from small groups of individuals who usually happen to be members of mainline churches. Seldom have we sought groups to work with and never have we actively worked with larger structures within the church.

It is no secret that "Mainline" denominations have been on the decline for the last 20 years both from a membership point of view and from a budgetary point of view. Pastors and their congregations suffer the same frustrations year after year. They are forced to pay higher and higher expenses to keep their churches going with fewer members and often reduced income coming into the church. They see "Independent" churches growing tremendously every year and their own congregations suffering from lack of Spirit, enthusiasm and commitment.

We at Ministry of Money, both board and staff, believe we are being called to grow into an expanded version of our original ministry. We believe we are called to help renew the mainline Church. This is an awesome and compelling call. We are a small organization and will probably remain so. However, as so often is the case, we believe we are being called to be a kind of "leaven in the loaf." It is abundantly clear that mainline congregations suffer in large measure due to the fact that many churches seem to have lost the real meaning of being called to faith in Christ. These same churches attempt year after year to find this year's "Magic Bullet" that they can use to coerce their members to give at higher and higher levels to the church. Almost always, this kind of process fails. The heart of stewardship and people's individual call to real stewardship is almost never addressed within these congregations.

In the last six months alone Ministry of Money has been approached by the following churches, groups of churches or denominations to assist whole groups of churches to begin their approach to stewardship from a different place: I) The five conferences of the United Church of Canada; 2) 74 congregations of the Presbytery of the Twin Cities; 3) The six "Parish Resource Centers" across the United States--each of which has relationships with more than 250 local congregations; 4) The retired directors organization for the National YMCA; 5) Intervarsity Christian Fellowship for black students; 6) Mercer Island Presbyterian Church; 7) The Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina; 8) The Virginia Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church.

Quite obviously, working with anyone of these groups of churches could be an overwhelming task for a small organization like Ministry of Money. Yet, we believe this is what God is calling us to. We must find new and effective ways to respond to how God is directing our ministry .

Currently, our staff includes only one full-time person, Mark Lancaster, as director. The staff also includes the following part-time persons: Jan Docktor-director of program; Harriet Taylor-associate director; Vilma Montalvan-bookkeeper; Rosemary Diehl-administrative assistant; Jean Bollinger-technical person; Wiley Beveridge and Dana Cunningham as musicians and Bob Hadley-l/2 volunteer staff for program and board member. In addition to these staffpersons, we do have 8-10 persons who volunteer their time to lead pilgrimages and an additional 15-20 who co-lead retreats.

Just to accomplish the current tasks we have before us, our current staff cannot keep up with the workload. To take on this new call from God will require additional staff and program support to make it work. It will also require much additional support from our volunteer base to be able to respond to even a fraction of the requests that are currently under consideration.

After much prayer and deliberation, it is clear that we must seek funding to undertake our new call. We believe that with a slight increase in staff we can initiate the first stages of this call by utilizing both current and new staff to create a unique kind of volunteer. It has been our practice for decades to nurture, train and then ask volunteers to serve as unpaid staff for all of our retreats and pilgrimages. This has proven tremendously valuable for both our ministry and for the volunteers. We believe that this same utilization of volunteers will prove even more important for the new work we are being called to with denominational structures. Repeatedly during both retreats and pilgrimages our participants comment on how important it had been for them to hear the stories about money and faith that our volunteer staff share with those present.

We believe we have a unique opportunity to build on our past and current use of volunteers for the development of our new ministry to clusters of churches and denominational structures. It would be our hope to train and work with Discipleship-Mentors who would form a distinctive national network in mainline congregations. These volunteer-mentors would assist our staff in the formation of "money and faith groups" in congregations who both develop their own local retreat programs and ongoing groups to sustain support for those struggling with money as a faith issue. We believe that this could be a vital link in the currently difficult task of revitalizing mainline Protestant congregations.

We are also hopeful that this new work with Discipleship-Mentors will provide the opportunity for their unique work in the area of philanthropy. Our hope always is that as persons participate in our retreats and pilgrimages they will begin to look at the sharing of their resources with others around the world differently. However, we always find that another donor is the best person to encourage this kind of generosity in their fellows. In an ultimate way, then, our volunteer-mentors could be the best guides for others in their congregations and denominations in the area of philanthropy or stewardship, as we would name it.

We believe that it would take at least three years to initiate this new volunteer recruitment and training program and would thus find it necessary to seek funding over that initial three-year period. From a variety of sources we are seeking $500,000 that would include $185,000 for year one, $165,000 for year two and $150,000 for year three. Funding would include the hiring of at least one full-time staff person and perhaps increasing the hours of two of our current staff. The remainder of the funding would be for programmatic expenditures like curriculum development and having staff spend time with congregations as they discern the way in which God is calling them to be faithful stewards. By the end of 2003 we would hope to know whether or not this new initiative could be self-sustaining. It would be our desire to work with the church structures to create an evaluation process to determine level of success toward identifying at least twenty-five Discipleship-Mentors, creating appropriate training modules for them, establishing "Study Circle" groups in fifty congregations and determining future curriculum needs for these for groups and congregations.

Ministry of Money may be contacted at minmon@erols.com.