Modern Church Leader
Hear pastors share what's working in their churches. Welcome to Modern Church Leader, a show for church leaders to learn business strategies, leadership skills, church tech tips, and generosity. Tune in for powerful interviews to help you grow your church to be more effective, efficient, and powerful for the kingdom of God. For more information, visit https://www.mclconference.com/
Modern Church Leader
Effective Church Fundraising w/ Jeremy Malick
Unlock the secrets to effective church fundraising with Jeremy Malick, the founder of Church Coach Ministries. Discover how Jeremy's unique blend of business and ministry experience has transformed church fundraising campaigns, turning financial challenges into stories of success for the Kingdom.
Learn more about Church Coach Ministries at https://www.churchcoachministries.org
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Hey guys, Frank here coming to you with another episode of Modern Church Leader, joined today by Jeremy Malek. Jeremy, what's going on, man?
Speaker 1:Not much, just enjoying being with everybody out here.
Speaker 2:Hanging out on the podcast, so it's good to have you. I'm excited to talk about fundraising. I'm excited to talk about, like, fundraising, you know. Obviously Tithely was kind of started because we wanted to help churches, you know, be funded and help them do better in the digital age and using technology for raising money and fundraising and all that. So, yeah, this is a cool kind of intersection of what you do and what Tylee does and all that. But why?
Speaker 1:don't you start off by just telling folks a little bit about yourself and how you got into, you know, connected with the church and ministry, and all into your business today? Sure, Well, my name is Jeremy Malik and I actually grew up as a church planter's son, which meant we moved around and we'd start a new church every couple of years and then. So we lived in about five or six different States when I was growing up and then when I went to college, I went to a Christian college in the Midwest and actually never thought I would go into ministry. So I got my business degree and that sort of thing and through that process I went into banking and I was a commercial lender and ended up running a large section of a mortgage company in the Midwest for 11 years.
Speaker 1:And in 2007, God put a call on my life to go into ministry and so at the first church I was at, I got to do the four different skill sets we do at churches today and it went so well. I started having churches call afterwards and saying, hey, could you come help us out? Could you come help us out? Could you come help us out? And by 2015, we launched Church Coach Ministries full time and have been doing it ever since and just love it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's pretty cool. So what was it like to grow up as a church planter's son?
Speaker 1:Well, I actually really liked it and enjoyed it because I was easily adaptable into new areas. So I have different pockets of friends from different places where we've lived and I've still at least kept one or two friends from all these years growing up in different areas. So for that part I've really enjoyed it. It's helped me like dive into new areas and not have any issue with doing that.
Speaker 2:Right, right, yeah, with doing that, right right, yeah. Yeah, having to every few years go new school, new friends, new activities or sports teams or whatever you were into, I mean that can be, that can be tough on a kid, absolutely. It sounds like you kind of developed, uh, the skill set to do that pretty well. Yeah, yeah, I've enjoyed it. So, yeah, what, what states you in? Where'd you end up traveling?
Speaker 1:So we were in uh, indiana on three different occasions. We started at church in um Palm Harbor, Florida, and then we were in Southern California. I graduated from Newberry park high school, which is in thousand Oaks area, california, and then we were in Colorado and Colorado Springs as well. So a lot of different spots.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, very cool, very cool. And when you, when you went into full-time ministry, what? What role were you in? What were you doing at the church?
Speaker 1:So my first role in ministry was as an executive pastor, okay, and I really enjoyed that and I got to bring in a lot of things I learned from the business world and apply them to the church world, and so that was really exciting to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, and when you're in that role was sort of the finances and the kind of fundraising side of the church, like there's regular giving that is happening. But then there are sometimes churches do fundraising campaigns to raise money for a project or a building or a school they want to build or to fund missions. There's all kinds of reasons that they might do extra fundraising campaigns. Were you responsible for those programs at your church?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so at the church that I was at, they had actually had already previously hired an outside campaign consultant company and it wasn't going very well. So the elders got together and they actually voted for me to take it over, and I was like, well, I've been at the church three months and I've never done this before, but let's give it a shot. And so I think that was one of the advantages of looking outside of the box and my experiences in the business world and designing a type of campaign that you won't see out there typically, and so in that it gave a freshness and a different look at it, and so I actually think that experience helped me through it, right, yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 2:I mean, how'd the campaign go?
Speaker 1:Campaign went really well. What we were doing is we were converting a boat showroom into a church, and so I had the opportunity to do the design of the interior of that and I had an architectural background. And then I had the opportunity to raise funds for it. And one of the cool things about this was it was a $500,000 tenant improvement job and we ended up raising enough funds to do the job. But because of some techniques I learned in the business world, I have a philosophy that just because you raise the money doesn't mean you have to spend it, and we actually did the entire remodel of that project for $84,000 in cash. We had all of the materials for the project actually donated.
Speaker 1:A funny story is I like to work out at LA Fitness at the time in Southern California is where this church was, and they were putting in 51 LA Fitnesses in Southern California at the time, and I was working out one day and I loved their carpet. It was this black specs carpet. I thought, man, this is great carpet, and so I just asked who would I talk to about this carpet? And the manager gave me the phone number for the general manager and I said do you have any extra carpet in the back and they took me to the back and they had two rolls.
Speaker 1:I quickly did the math If every one of these things had two rolls of carpet, well, they had plenty of carpet for our church plant. And so I ended up taking the general manager out to lunch Imagine he likes to eat and I just asked him directly would you donate the carpet to our church plant? We need about 28,000 square feet of carpet. He made three calls across the desk for me and they actually delivered the carpet to our church and then we installed it ourselves. And so, just so those kinds of things are what we do with churches that are totally outside the box. But but God provides.
Speaker 2:So oh, that's awesome, that's so cool, man. Well, all right, so fast forward now. Church Coach Ministries. You've been doing this since 2015,. You said Correct, correct, I mean, tell us, yeah, I mean, I guess, go a little deeper, like why did you start it and what specifically, you know, do you guys do for churches?
Speaker 1:So I had spent time being an executive pastor in local churches on a couple different occasions and I remember going through a period of time in my life where I was praying and fasting to the Lord, like what do you want me to do next? Next and it was I was getting all these phone calls from other churches to do campaigns for them and so, uh, god, just really put on my heart, jeremy, you could help one church, but I'd rather you help many. And so from that word from the Lord is when we birthed Church Coach Ministries and it's been an amazing ride ever since and we've been able to work with churches in four different categories. I'll just share quickly.
Speaker 1:We do build out design work and we do it very simplistically in the sense of we redesign the inside of the facility through the eyes of the guest and what they will experience really for the next 100, 200 people we're going to reach for Christ.
Speaker 1:We focus on relationship connecting areas and we focus on ministry flow of the facility. And so in doing this, I go into a lot of churches where they have $60,000, $80,000 worth of blueprints sitting in a corner that they've never even touched, and so what we do is we come give them a concept, autocad drawings, 3d renderings at an extremely affordable cost. That way they can get an idea if they want to move forward without breaking the bank, and so that's kind of our philosophy there. And then we do an assimilation training with churches and that's a four-month long training that we do. That we really help churches connect with the community through it. And so we do a lot of missional pieces where we get people in the congregation to think missionally without them even realizing they're doing it, so it becomes second nature. And then we do a stewardship training with churches and then, finally, we do the vision campaigns which we're going to dive into. So those are our four areas.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, very cool. Have you always done all four? Did you kind of launch?
Speaker 1:Yep, no, we've always done all four of that. For some reason, god gave me a unique skill set and that has been our four and we have not waived or moved off of it. That has been our focus.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. You keep saying we did, you start it with somebody. Yeah, so we have a team. We have a team of people my wife, Nicole works with us.
Speaker 1:We have a team of people. My wife, nicole, works with us. We have a gentleman from Waco, texas, that works with us. We have a gentleman from North right. People at the right time and, interestingly enough, most people that are on our team almost all of them have actually gone through a vision campaign at their church and said you know what I love this so much? I want to be part of it. So that's how we built our team.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that. When you started it was it just you.
Speaker 1:Yep, I was a one-armed paper hand. You were like oh that's awesome.
Speaker 2:So vision campaigns, or maybe known as capital campaigns to some, tell us more Like what is a vision campaign, because some people may not know. So let's start with what is a vision campaign. Why do churches even run these things? Give us kind of the nuts and bolts.
Speaker 1:So for us, we have a simple philosophy. Our philosophy is we serve a rich God and oftentimes, because of our human thought processes and everything, we actually make God poor. We put God in a box or we set an expectation upon Christ, and what we want to do is we want to take that box we so often put around Christ and we just want to shatter it. And in doing so, we want to take people in the congregation through an intentional prayer journey. And here's what's so different is our purpose is actually the heart transformation of the individual within the congregation. So we want people in the congregation to actually experience four different things, and the four things are we want to give them opportunity to pray. That's obvious. The second one is we want people in the congregation to actually experience four different things, and the four things are we want to give them opportunity to pray. That's obvious. The second one is we want to give them an opportunity to process with the Lord.
Speaker 1:And what I mean by this is when I was at the first church I was at, I would lead the men's ministry and I'd meet with two or three men at a time and I would always ask the question to the men. You know what does the voice of the Lord sound like to you, and you know how many men could answer that question. It wasn't very many. And so what we would do is we would study the Old Testament and all the different ways that the Lord spoke to people, and we would journal those down. And then I would have them journal their own life and write down key decision moments and different impact times in their life, and they would start to draw parallels.
Speaker 1:Well, what we want to do is we want to create this environment where they can actually hear the Lord's voice and identify it for themselves for some people for the very first time. And then, in this process, we want to give them the ability to ask questions, because oftentimes unasked or unanswered questions become blockades or hindrances to people's obedience. And then the final step really is is we want to give them the opportunity to commit to the vision of the church. And this is what's so important, because committing to the vision of the church is a unifying decision, as opposed to them just doing a one-off okay, I'll pay for a new kitchen or a new playground Not that there's anything wrong with that but when they go through this process, they come out of it unified. So that's really the difference between a capital campaign and a vision campaign.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I love that. I mean I love that you know you're helping people kind of connect with you, know hearing God in their own personal lives comes in a lot of Old Testament study and prayer. That approach to you, know working with their people and even even you helping them as a leadership, have this kind of defined thing with some structure and some but but prayer and Bible being a core part of it. Over a period of time. Are you doing this over many, many months?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so when we journey with the church, we'll journey with them, to be honest, with you, for a year, 18 months, sometimes two years, depending on the project size and the scope. And so one thing to kind of answer that thought that you had but the lead pastor of a church really enjoys this process because we make it easy for them in the sense that we're decentralizing the leadership aspect to a campaign and then we give the lead pastor one job, and one job only, and that is casting vision, and most lead pastors love to cast vision, and so we actually help implement that vision as far as funding it financially goes through this process.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Take us maybe a step down, practically speaking. So you're leading people through this kind of journey, spiritual journey. What is the? The end goal in some sense is financial, though right it is, you know, we're trying to raise some amount of money for some kind of project and so, when it comes down to, okay, you've got like the spiritual journey that everyone's going on together, the unifying journey. How do you go about, you know? Or what are people coming to you for? Like, what kinds of projects are people coming to you for?
Speaker 1:Well, we're doing everything from debt reduction of a mortgage payment to full scale new builds and everything in between. So really we do go to all scope. And one of the things that's really unique about our approach is a church doesn't have to have a decision made exactly what they want to do to their facility to move forward in doing this, because no matter what they choose, they're going to need the finances to move forward anyway. So when somebody is committing to the vision of the church, they're not necessarily committing to an exact project, but the vision of the overall church.
Speaker 2:Got it, so it doesn't have to be. Oh, we're putting a new roof on Sure. It can be much bigger than that. That may be one piece of it, but there could be a bunch of things tied to it. Um, over a long, you know, a 10 year journey, maybe, right, absolutely, absolutely, um, what? What about the practical fundraising steps along the way? How do you, you know, give?
Speaker 1:us that so. So one of the things that we do I'm going to give you two different pieces of that One of the things we do in this process is we do our two session stewardship course as part of the prayer journey process, and what's interesting about that is God took me through a transformational process in my own life as it pertained to the subject of dishonest gain, and so I actually went away when I was kind of going in between being a commercial lender and going into the mortgage world, and I went away and visited my roommate at college and Saturday night rolled around and it was like hey, do you want to go to church with me? And I was thinking, I mean, the last place I kind of want to go is church. I'm trying to get away. Of course God always comes and gets you. And so, anyway, at that point in time I went and it was a very unique sermon topic and the topic was on dishonest gain, and I was riveted on the edge of my seat and I walked out of there committing to be a generous giver from that point forward. And then, also in that process, God dealt with dishonest gain in my own life and I would take clients out golfing for the bank and I could never fill up the foursome, so I'd add in a buddy or two and I would expense my buddy to the bank and God's like that's done and I'm like cool.
Speaker 1:And so, anyway, I developed this two session course, and what it has to do with is what does it mean to be obedient to Christ, not only with our finances but with our lives? And then the second session, we come back and we talk about what types of abundant blessings does Christ have for our lives if we're obedient to him? And so, anyway, what this process does is this puts the individual that goes through the course, the person within the congregation, into a spot where the light will come on and they really have a choice to make Am I going to be obedient to Christ with my life or am I not? And we are seeing tremendous heart transformation take place through this. So I say all that to get to this point. To answer your question is, as we go through the practical steps of this, yes, when the congregation commits to the vision of the church, they're going to be making a pledge to the church over probably a three, four or five year period, depending on the size of the project. And then what happens is, through the power of prayer, we are walking through the doors that the Lord opens and a lot of times the Lord opens up doors that we walk through. That allows us to connect with the community and actually raise funds outside the church walls. And I'll just share one story to bring this to an example for you guys.
Speaker 1:But we had a church that was paying off the church debt and it wasn't a very large church, a church of about 90 people, and they owed about $655,000 in debt. And we had gone through this prayer journey and I was standing out in front of the church with the pastor one day and I noticed they had a skate park in front of the church and I'd seen that for a while. But this time I noticed a couple of broken off business signs in there and I just asked the pastor what's that about? He said, well, if a ramp breaks down, we'll call one of these businesses, They'll chip in a couple of hundred bucks and they'll fix the ramps and off the kids go. And I said is there any change? You have a list of years.
Speaker 1:But he did some research and he developed quite a list and I said here's what we're going to do. We're going to invite them all to the church for a dinner as a thank you and we have one rule Nobody from the church can attend, because we wanted to fill it up with community people. They can serve at the event but not attend. And while they ate their dinner, we actually had local artists paint paintings live on stage and we auctioned those paintings off that night. We literally paid off all of the church debt in one night outside the church walls money from this process. But that wasn't the best part of the story. The best part of the story was three months later they were running over 300 people because a lot of these people brought their families and called this their church home. So that's what we do from a community aspect when we walk through these doors that God opens, yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's pretty cool.
Speaker 1:The skate park for the one right there. Yeah, who would have thought, right, right.
Speaker 2:I mean that's crazy. And I think an interesting point to pull out is that was a a pretty small church that did a fundraising campaign, right Like in your way, right Like vision campaign, with all the other elements to it. Um, but it wasn't a big church. So this isn't reserved for big, mega churches or, you know, churches of thousands. This is like even churches of hundreds can do this kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:Yep, absolutely, and what what I find is is when, when God gives the lead pastor a vision, our Lord has the finances to provide for that vision. Our responsibility simply is is getting in alignment with what Christ is doing and follow the power of the Holy Spirit in this process, and so that's what we do, and we've seen a lot of small churches raise an exorbitant amount of money that you wouldn't think would be possible, because the Lord has provided in additional ways that we did not see when we all first sat down and started having those conversations.
Speaker 2:Right, right, right. What other ways are you guys kind of bringing in the external community Like I don't know? Give me a few more like charts or things that you've seen or done along the way, where you've brought in outside businesses to help raise money.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I'll give you. I'll give you one. We did. We happened to have the opportunity to do a project for a church in Watts, los Angeles, and through this process, one thing churches need to know out there is when they're praying and fasting. We're praying and fasting because a lot of times God will speak to us, and then I'll call up the lead pastor and say, hey, I feel like God's saying this. What are you hearing? Does this resonate with you? And so this is one of those cases where we had nine months and we needed to raise literally almost a million dollars for this church to be able to purchase a facility that was otherwise going to be sold out from underneath them. And so we live.
Speaker 1:What we did is we had a concert, a benefit concert held at another large church in Southern California, hosted it for us, and it was about a month and a half before the concert. And this was before the pandemic and all of this and before a lot of churches were doing this. But God woke me up in the middle of the night and he just put on my heart to live stream the concert. Well, I called the artist and I said, hey, you know, I feel like we're supposed to live stream this. He was like no way, man, he goes. If you live stream my band, it's going to sound terrible that we're not doing that.
Speaker 1:And I told him. I said well, I feel like the Lord's telling me we have to do this. Like, how are we going to do this? And he said well, I'll tell you what he said. I'll play a nine song set before the regular concert, just myself and a guitar. You can live stream that, and then I'll do the full concert. Well, we've raised about half of the money after that concert night we had we got. We got down to about 30 days left and every dollar came in to purchase that facility because we were obedient to live streaming and people continued to give after the effect. So that gives you an idea. Every campaign is totally different, but that would give you another outside of the box kind of concept.
Speaker 2:Right, right right, yeah, very, very cool. Okay, take me another step. Yeah, very, very cool. Okay, take, take me another step. Like you know what, what? What are the steps in the in the process?
Speaker 1:of like kind of rate, like the nuts and bolts of raising the money. Well, really it. It really hinges on prayer, and as we go through the prayer process, what starts to happen is we see hearts transform. Literally, we see heart transform. And so what happens is, in a lot of cases and I'll share one with you we had a church that had 209 giving units in the church and of those 209 giving units, 13 of them gave 80% of the funds. This is pretty typical in America, where a few support a majority of the church Right Well, through the heart transformation process, their monthly giving, after four months they had so much heart transformation. After four months their monthly giving tripled, literally tripled.
Speaker 1:Now that church did not grow numerically, but what happened is heart transformation took place and they went from 13 giving units providing 80% of the funds to 134 giving units supplying 80% of the funds. And so we see this happen a lot with the churches we work with, where it's a residual impact, because the heart transformations have taken place. Not only are they raising the funds for their project, but they're seeing life transformation and generosity take over within the individual, and that has much larger impact on the church than even the campaign does, and so that's one of those residual impacts when we get down and we really look at what's the difference and how are we raising these funds. Yeah, there's systematic things, there's pledge cards, there's things like that, of course, right. But there's also that heart transformation that takes place and all of a sudden, the church is sitting there where, hey, we now have more money for ministry as opposed to just raising funds for the project, right, yeah, for that particular thing, what kind of analysis?
Speaker 2:you kind of mentioned giving, units and that kind of thing. So it sounds like you're doing some kind of analysis of the church and the membership and weekly giving, yearly giving. You're trying to understand from the financial side of the church how things are going and what it looks like and then maybe that leads to some insight into what's possible and we know anything's possible with God and prayer and all that. But you probably do some sort of like okay, it looks like you could do this and that could be reasonable. Now, where, where is God going to show up in the whole thing? But walk us through that analysis, Like, how do you help churches look at their you know the church and the finances to kind of understand how to think about this?
Speaker 1:Yeah, here's been our experience. Our experience is, when we do those deep dive analysis kind of kind of pieces, what we're finding is typically a consulting company would say you know, whatever your annual budget is, you should be able to raise one and a half times to two times that number. That is a typical analysis. That's done. What we're seeing happen in churches that are engaged into the process, we are seeing sometimes three, four, five, six times an annual budget being able to be raised.
Speaker 1:So we go into it with the mind's eye of here's what's typically possible, but we don't close the door on that. So for example I'll just give you an example we're not going to put the thermometer on the wall where we color it in as the money comes in, because again we feel like that's a box or an expectation we're putting upon things. We want to see what the Lord could show up Right, and so in a lot of ways it renders that feasibility study, if we want to call it that irrelevant. It renders that feasibility study, if we want to call it that irrelevant, and so we go into it with our eyes wide open, but we also leave room for the Holy Spirit to work, if that helps.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that totally makes sense. How do you do that analysis? What does that look like? What do you look at in?
Speaker 1:the church. So typically, to be honest, we usually have this conversation with the church and you know they will just basically share with us. Here's what our average weekly giving is, here's what our budget is, here's where we are staff wise as opposed to building wise, and in the cost structure of things, and just being able to look at that gives us a really good idea of you know where's the health of the church, what needs to really be focused on, because we might run into that first example I shared with you where 13 giving units were giving the majority of the funds. If we run into that situation, we know that the stewardship component that we offer within the campaign has to be a focus point, because that's where we're going to gain true heart transformation. You know we might run into another church that doesn't have quite that issue and it's a more balanced approach.
Speaker 1:Now, that's rare, but, but it could be. And if and when that happens, then, um, you know, maybe the focus switches somewhere else, but but everybody would still go through that same process. Right, right, yeah, yeah, I love that what?
Speaker 2:maybe we can kind of move into this the topic of like money in churches and leadership. Talking about money, I mean, sometimes in our experience it's not. It's actually quite often that you know like pastors talking about money is uncomfortable. They don't most don't really want to do it. They weren't trained in how to do it. Um, you know there's lots of reasons, right. So, like, what's been your experience when it comes to like my experience is, you know, my dad was a pastor.
Speaker 1:I've served as a pastor in the past and I've worked with a lot of pastors, and I know that talking about money is probably one of two of the hardest subjects that a pastor has to face and talk about. And you're right, they're not necessarily trained in that area to be able to do that, and I think one thing that's unfairly placed upon our lead pastors in the country, or the world for that matter, is that just because they're a lead pastor, we expect them to be an expert in every category, everything. They're supposed to run the build project. They're supposed to be the contractors. They're supposed to run the build project. They're supposed to be the contractors, they're supposed to be all of it.
Speaker 1:And the truth of the matter is they're called by the Lord to oversee and lead people and reach people for Christ, and that's their calling, and so it doesn't surprise me that this area is a struggle for a lot of pastors, and so one thing that we do when we go and we train the stewardship side of things, one of my rules is is whoever teaches this in the church, it can't be the pastor and it can't be somebody who's on staff with the church.
Speaker 1:Because what we want to do is we want to train somebody who locks arms with the people within the church, that is, somebody who ministers from a marketplace ministry standpoint within that church. They have a business career he or she does, or whatever the case may be. We want to train that person up because when they hear this information from that person, their ears open up in a whole different way. It's almost like the pastor could stand up week after week and whatever topic it is, they could speak upon it and and certain things will seep into an individual. But they will always hear it in a different way than if somebody who's they consider a colleague at their level. So right, right, right speaks the same thing.
Speaker 2:Now we're getting into the nuts and bolts, and now you're giving yeah, now we're getting like okay, so you're, you're doing the thing and all the pieces.
Speaker 2:We've talked about prayer and bringing people along and there's tons of transformation. But you're, like I'm getting a key leader in the church, a lay leader, somebody who's not on staff, who, uh, somehow has a you know, a good standing reputation in the church, has been a business leader of some sort maybe, or done well in their career and and is obviously aligned with the vision and excited about where the church is going. But you want them on stage, you want them in front of the congregation. Uh, I'm sure some of the staff is also doing it too, somehow.
Speaker 1:But like sure they're involved to some level, but they're not the mouthpiece of that particular topic. Got it so?
Speaker 2:what's it like recruiting that person? Or do most of the churches go? Oh, I know who you're. I got the guy or gal. That is perfect for this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so everybody we choose through this we do through prayer, and we take a couple of days and pray and fast on and what we find is is the Lord tends to really bring that person's name to the lead pastor's heart pretty quickly. Usually it's not a mystery, it's not a deep dig, and then when they get to me for me to be able to train that individual, it's usually like man, this person's perfect for this, you know, and a lot of times we're looking for somebody in their own personal life that has an obedience story, and it doesn't have to be with finances, it can be with a life decision they made, but some sort of testimony around obedience that they can share.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I love that. I love that. Yeah, maybe kind of in the closing segment here. How do you, how do you help churches celebrate? Get to the end of this or you're close or you know there's some portion where you know you want the church to kind of experience the journey of it but then also achieving the goal. Maybe it doesn't always happen, but as that's happening, you know what's your experience been or how do you help churches kind of with that, the end stages and celebrating and all of that.
Speaker 1:Well, we always encourage them to bring the entire congregation together in a celebrational moment the church in Watts that I shared with you. When that goal was reached, everybody in the church got in the quad and they all had balloons and we did a celebration and sent them up into the air. Celebration and send them up into the air, but but collective. And I think it's important in these celebration times, even in the prayer times, to involve the youth of our church. A lot of times we think, okay, the parents, the older people, even if they're singles or whatever but but these are the ones that we're communicating with. I actually want to include, all the way down through the prayer component, the kids within the church too, so that they have an understanding. Hey, my parents are going through this. It gives them what is the meaning of fasting and praying. A lot of times, people don't learn that discipline until they're adults, and so these are kinds of things we want to involve the entire family. So when we celebrate, we also want to involve the entire family.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that we um this, this, this just kind of happened. So nothing special as a parent, but we do, like, in the church I go to, we do missions every year and there's kind of two different moments Uh, one earlier in the year, one a bit later in the year for, like you know, foreign missions, and then local missions. And uh, so this past weekend or two weekends ago, we kind of took up the you know that that that offering, um, or like a wrapped up, that offering had been going on for a few months and uh, so, like you know, as a family, we're, we're giving in. My kids, you know there's they're telling stories from stage and they're kind of you know like there's some people from overseas talking about the churches they've planted and there's this, you know it's a big service around all these things, um, super cool.
Speaker 2:And so my kids are like, dad, are we giving, you know? And I'm like, well, of course, and like sort of like, how much you know? And so I'm like, okay, come here. And so we're all in a huddle around like we're in church, but we're kind of like I'm like, okay, this is just, this is family talk, right? So here's like how much we give weekly and you know the the particular campaign we're trying to give like this much. You know a multiple of like our regular weekly giving kind of thing. And um, so you know we're chatting as a family and I'm like, okay, here's what that looks like. And so you know we pull out our phone my church obviously uses Tithely, so pull out the phone and bring up the giving form and then, like you know, one kid types in the amount another kid gets to hit the submit button.
Speaker 2:And then also we were like, kind of as a ceremonial kind of thing, everyone was writing down how much they were giving and then like walking it kind of upfront and putting it in like a box right. They were giving and then like walking it kind of up front and putting it in like a box Right More. That was more of just like a fun way of everybody being engaged. But we're giving digitally, so you weren't really like putting checks in or anything like that. So then I have three kids, so the third kid wrote it down and brought it up and put it in the box Kind of.
Speaker 2:So I love like our kids are curious, like our kids are interested. Our kids, my kids, perked up when it was like, oh, we're raising money and what are we doing as a family? Right, like they asked, and I was like that's super cool and it was a great moment to kind of like share our faith you know, mine and my wife's via generosity, but do it with the kids kind of in the moment. Absolutely. I love that, absolutely, that generosity, but do it with the kids kind of in the moment.
Speaker 2:I love that yeah.
Speaker 1:That's a great. That's a great story, man, that was cool.
Speaker 2:And it was very unplanned and not like I'm super dad in any way, that just kind of it was cool and it was like a God moment that I was, you know, super excited about. So love that you guys do that. I mean how, how to like I guess, wrapping up, we could talk all day about fundraising but how do folks find you and we? You know what's the website and how do people know more?
Speaker 1:about you. Yeah, just come to churchcoachministriesorg. Love to have you visit. There's a spot. You could drop us an email. You can contact me directly if you want it, jeremy at churchcoachministriesorg. So I'd love to have a conversation with you and then we offer different levels of campaigns too.
Speaker 1:So we have campaigns designed that are a 21-day prayer and fasting approach, that are all-inclusive, include coaching, and you can raise a sum of probably $300,000 or less in a 90-day period if you need to get something done quickly. And then we have our more full-blown campaigns, and so I just wanted to share that, no matter what church size you are, we can help you through that process, and we can talk about the different processes and applications that we can take a look at for your church.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that Everyone go check out Church Coach Ministries. Jeremy's a good dude. And Jeremy, you're speaking at our conference Modern Church. I am Out in October, so give us a preview. What are you?
Speaker 1:obviously it's something around vision campaigns, or uh, so yeah, so I'm going to do a presentation on um funding, funding ministry, um, through vision and through discipleship, and so we'll take a deep dive into some of the stuff we talked about today and some new things uh, we'll talk about there as well. So join us there, and we'll also, uh, have a booth there and the whole bit. You can come visit us.
Speaker 2:Oh man, it's going to be awesome. Grateful you guys are coming. Um, Jeremy, this has been awesome. Thanks for coming on the show today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you very much and thanks for your time and thank everybody out there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. Um, thanks guys for listening. Uh, jeremy, check them out and we'll catch you guys next week on another episode of Modern Church Leader, see ya.