This weekend I will be hosting two information sessions for Project 2 Pillars to raise interest in and support for 2 Pillars Church.  The first will be Friday night (October 2nd) in downtown Omaha.  The second will be Saturday night (October 3rd) in downtown Lincoln.  If you have received an invitation to one of these events, please RSVP to let me know if you will be there.  RSVP contact information was in the info I sent out to you.

If you have not received an invitation and would like to attend, please contact us via the “Contact Project 2 Pillars” link under Pages.  These information sessions are primarily for folks I have not yet connected with and, as mentioned above, are primarily for the purpose of raising interest in and support for 2 Pillars Church.

I received news over the weekend that Mars Hill Church in Seattle will be supporting Project 2 Pillars.  Mars Hill Church is lead by Pastor Mark Driscoll whom started the Acts 29 Network of which we are a part.  As Mars Hill has grown to what it is today, it has not lost its central focus on church planting — committing over $710k total to multiple church planters all over the world this coming year (via).

The partnership will consist of a relationship with one of the specific campus of Mars Hill (I have not yet been told which one).  They will provide some financial support while we advance the gospel in Lincoln and report back to them how it is all going.  In addition to financial support, a loose-knit coaching relationship will develop between myself and the supporting campus pastor.

Please join me in welcoming Mars Hill to the growing list of supporters of Project 2 Pillars.

Please join me in

• Church Plant Fundraising: An Introduction
• Church Plant Fundraising: How Much and When [Preparation]
• Church Plant Fundraising: Who [Preparation]
• Church Plant Fundraising: Contacts How/When [Preparation]
• Church Plant Fundraising: Logistics [Preparation]
• Church Plant Fundraising: Architecting [Plan]
• Church Plant Fundraising: Final Thoughts

This post concludes the series on fundraising even though I’m sure I’ve got a lot to learn and will continue to learn as things proceed ahead.  I’ll shortly post one more summary post of all of the posts from this series.

But first, some final thoughts on fundraising:

Be Organized
I’ve hit on this throughout in talking about preparation and planning, but this is more general than that.  Be organized in how you manage your supplies (contacts, letters, envelopes, postage, fundraising booklets, thank-you cards, etc), be organized when you “do” fundraising (set aside a dedicated block of time to make phone calls, create your initiating letters, write thank-yous, etc), and be organized in how you handle monthly supporters.

Work Hard
In case you still think this is easy, expect to put 2-3 hours per week in to it, minimum and then add in all of the time for meetings on top of that.  This time is spent managing contacts, creating booklets, making phone calls, writing initiating letters, hand-writing thank-yous, meeting, following up, going to the post office, printing booklets, trips to Kinko’s, printing and stuffing envelopes for monthly givers, keeping track of giving vs. commitments, tracking your status, etc.  Fundraising is work so expect it to be work and if you’re not organized, expect it to take twice as much time.

Expect it to Cost
You’re going to have some upfront costs that you need to account for.  Before funds start rolling in, you’re likely going to have to put forth some cash of your own for fundraising booklets, envelopes, postage, etc.  A good color booklet, folded and stapled costs some money.  Factor this in.  Go get a quote from a printer.  Budget yourself at least a few hundred bucks on the front end to get things rolling.

Be Persistent
In case you’re not with reality, what you’re doing is a heck of a lot more important to you than it is to the people you’re asking to support you.  Practically that means that the information you give them gets tossed in a pile with the rest of their bills and is soon forgotten about; conversations you have fade quickly from memory.  Follow-up calls are essential.  Many times, it’s going to be difficult to get a hold of a person and when you do, they’ll need some more time to think and pray about supporting you.  Stick with it, be persistent and stay on top of it.

Don’t Take It Personally
Some people aren’t going to support you.  Some will have good reasons and want to share them with you.  Some won’t have good reasons and won’t want to share them with you.  No one is obligated to give you a reason for anything.  The people that God plans to use for this purpose will be used for this purpose.

Be Upfront and Straight-Forward
Don’t beat around the bush when you talk with people.  God has called you to a mission and if you are fully convinced of the calling, get out there and ask people straight-away to support you.  Don’t coward around the hard question when you meet with them, don’t tip-toe around the straight-forward when you follow-up.  Show them respect and let them know with confidence that God has called you on this mission and that you are fulfilling that calling, in part, by doing the hard work of raising support for that mission.

Pray, Trust, Grow
Fundraising involves a lot of the same skills that it takes to build a core team.  You’ve got to network with people, cast vision, and convince them of the mission that God has called you to.  If church planting and fundraising don’t drive you to your knees, nothing will.  What you’re embarking on requires a ton of trust and that trust comes through prayer.  Approach this time as a huge time of growth and expect it to be challenging, expect it to be hard, but expect to come out the other end closer to God.

Summary So Far
Alright, if you’ve been following along in this series on fundraising, you’ve thought through how much you need to raise and your timeline, you’ve thought through who you’ll be fundraising amongst, you’ve processed through how exactly you’ll be contacting folks and when, and you’ve thought through most of the logistical questions associated with fundraising.

Preparation vs. Plan
I’ve been calling everything up to this point “preparation.”  You’re now ready to craft your specific plan.  What differentiates the prep from the plan is that your plan is executable.  Preparation knocks out all of the things you have to do in order to execute your plan and thus it is important to spend ample time processing through it all.  When you’re ready to plan, it’s time to think more poignantly through architecting exactly what you’re going to be doing as the fundraisor.

The goal of a well-architected plan is to let the plan guide your work.  With a good plan in place, you should never have to ask yourself, “what should I be doing.”  A good plan will continuously answer that question for you.  In architecting your plan, ask yourself these questions:

1. How will I initiate contact?
2. When will we meet?
3. What information will I convey to them?
4. How can they respond?
5. How will I follow-up?
6. What happens when they respond or commit?

What follows is the process that I’m using right now.  This is primarily focused at the level of personal contact with people.  At this stage in our fundraising process, I’m focusing nearly 100% on people that I can meet face to face.  There will come a time and place for doing some additional mail-only fundraising, but the plan that shakes out of that will basically be a similar subset of what I lay out here.  Also, please note that this has evolved since I’ve started and I’m sure it will continue to evolve.  Something that I recently added per the recommendation of a friend was the initiation letter – prior to that I was simply cold-calling folks.  Even though the cold-calls were somewhat effective for me, I like the initiation letter better especially as I begin to make contact with people whom I haven’t been in regular contact with for some time.

The Initiation Letter
The first thing I do in order to establish contact with someone is to send them a short letter.  This is basically a heads up.  In the letter, I share briefly a little about what is going on in my family’s life and share briefly about what God is calling us to (some of the people I contact won’t know).  I then make it clear that I’m assembling a prayer and financial support team and let them know that I’ll be calling them in the next week or so to try to arrange a time when we can meet and talk more about them becoming a part of that team.

Right now, I send out about four of these per week.

The First Call
Roughly one week after I’ve mailed someone an initiation letter, I then call them to schedule a meeting with them the following week. (I also send out four more initiation letters to four new people so that these things are all overlapping and creating a pipeline of weeks in which I’ll be meeting with folks).   The first call has proven to be one of the harder things to do – largely because it’s just flat out hard to get a hold of people sometimes.  Be persistent here.  Keep track of when you tried to call someone and jot a note to yourself of the day and time that you did actually get a hold of them for a higher likelihood of success if you have to contact them again in the future.

I usually try to keep the phone call brief and save most of what I have to say for the meeting itself.  One thing to note regarding the scheduling of the meeting: accommodate them.  One reality you have to get used to as a fundraisor is to be flexible and realize that in some way, you’re a bit of an intrusion into their “normal” life.  Typically, I’ll try to provide multiple times of the day that work for me (breakfast, lunch, coffee after work, dinner, after dinner, etc) and let them identify which works best for them and then lock down a day, time, and place.

The Meeting
I always try to get to where we’re meeting 5-10 minutes before we’re actually supposed to meet.  This shows that you respect their time, that this is important to you, and that you’ve got your act together.  In the meeting I try to share about my calling, a little about the importance of church planting, answer the “why Lincoln” question, and share our timeline.  I’ve found that it is pretty clean to transition from the timeline, to fundraising, to the status of fundraising, and then to asking them to prayerfully consider supporting us.

I then give them one of our fundraising booklets which includes a commitment card and a self-addressed envelope.  I explain that I’d love for them to go home, pray about it, and then respond via the card indicating a commitment to support us in prayer and/or finances.

The Booklet and Commitment Card
One of the things that God has continually used in our fundraising process is a fundraising booklet.  This is a booklet that I put together with some advice of others and includes basically a very brief view of our mission and vision, a bit about Lincoln and the need for a gospel-centered, missionally-focused church there in the city, a little about me and my background, as well as our timeline and fundraising information.  I spent some time and money on this to make it good and really use it to put in people’s hands so they have something they can take home and look through that contains most of the stuff that I try to hit on in the meeting itself.  You can take a look at our fundraising booklet by clicking on the 2PC Fundraising Booklet link under “Publications”. (Note: it looks a little funny when you open it because it’s all set up to print out double-sided and then be folded and stapled).

Along with the booklet, I include a commitment card and a self-addressed envelope that comes back to me.  The commitment card is a way for them to indicate how they would like to commit to Project 2 Pillars.  Here’s the 2PC Commitment Card that we’re currently using.

Finally, I let them know that they can respond and commit by returning the card and if I don’t hear from them in a few weeks, I let them know that I’ll follow up.  I then go home and write them a thank-you for meeting with me and get it mailed out to them as soon as I can reminding them that I’ll be following up if I don’t hear from them.

Following Up
Once you’ve met with someone, chances are that you’ll have to follow-up.  I’ve had a few folks that have gone ahead and filled out a Commitment Card and send it back but by in large, it’s taken a follow-up call to get someone to actually commit.  After I meet with someone, I give them two to three weeks to respond on their own and if I don’t hear from them, I follow-up with a phone call to see if they have any questions for me and then specifically ask if they’ve made a decision to support us (in either prayer or financial support).  Many times, I’ll find that despite the fact that this is the most important thing going on in my life right now, it shakes its way down their list of things to think about (that’s reality).  What that means is that they may need some more time to think and pray about it.  If that is the case, I ask them if it would be okay if I call back in a couple more weeks to see where they’re at with that.  If they’re willing to make a commitment over the phone, I typically ask them to go ahead and fill out the commitment card and send it in as well.

At this point, it’s worth mentioning that some people are going to say yes and some people are going to say no.  That’s part of it.  Some people have legitimate reasons and they want to give them to you and some people don’t.  The fact is that as a church planter, God has called you to ask.  The people that he intends to support you will and the people that he does not intend to support you will say no.  Don’t take it personal.  God is good and he will provide everything that you need in this (not to be confused with everything you want).

One other thing before moving on: be diligent about following up.  If you say you’ll follow up in two weeks, follow up in two weeks.  Be organized and stay on top of it.

When They Commit
Once someone makes a commitment, be ready to handle it.  This goes back to having everything in place from the preparation work.  When I receive a commitment from someone, the first thing I do is add them to our monthly email list.  This is a list that I use to send out happenings, funding status, and specific ways for folks to pray for us.  Whether they’re supporting via prayer, finances, or both, they get added to this list.

The second thing I do if they’ve committed to financial support is send them a Support Packet.  The purpose of this packet is to give people a wider view of the financial side of this project by:

1. Providing information regarding how they can continue to support Project 2 Pillars.
2. Explaining the overall funding picture for Project 2 Pillars.
3. Explaining how their money is being used.
4. Providing our plan to becoming self-sustaining.
5. Providing our philosophy of being a church that plants churches that plants churches that plant churches…and how their support of Project 2 Pillars multiplies in an exponential manner in the Kingdom of God.
6. Explaining how financial accountability is being achieved.

If you’re a church planter and are interested in seeing a copy of this Support Packet, contact me via the “Contact Project 2 Pillars” link and I’ll send a copy over.

The Support Packet also includes giving instructions and a first-time giving envelope.  If they’re going to be monthly supporters, they are informed that they’ll receive a letter each month acknowledging their previous month’s contribution along with a giving envelope for the following month.

The last thing you’ve got to do is come up with a system for tracking everything.  As I mentioned before, I have the luxury of one of our partnering churches handling a lot of this for us and then sending reports to me.  I then feed those into a spreadsheet (of course) to keep track of everything.  I also feed it back into my original spreadsheet which laid out the projected fundraising per month.  Explaining how all of that works would be a little tedious, but make sure you spend some time thinking through how you’ll keep track of everything and stay on top of it.

Concluding Thoughts
Tired yet?  I am.  Fundraising is a hard process.  I’ll spend one more post on concluding thoughts – look for it soon.

Feel free to print one off and give it to a friend!

1. After you meet with someone, how are you going to follow-up?
2. How are you going to keep track of who you’ve met with, what transpired from that meeting (a commitment to give, a commitment to pray, a commitment to consider giving, or a respectful decline), who you still need to meet with, etc?
3. Where will people send their money when they give?
4. How will you communicate regularly with your supporters?
5. How will you keep tabs on someone falling behind their monthly commitment?
6. Can you pull off electronic giving?
7. How will you log and keep track of what supporters have given?
8. How will you handle providing tax receipts to supporters?
9. Do you need 501c3 status?

All of these questions need to be answered before you push the button.  To some extent you’re pushing a 500 pound boulder up a hill and are nearing the crest.  Once you get to the crest and nudge it over the edge, you’ve got to be ready to run with this baby as it barrels down the other side.

Here’s how we’ve gone about addressing the questions above.

Get Hooked Up with a Mother Church
If you don’t have a sending church, you have a disadvantage.  We don’t have a sending church per se, but we do have strategic partners.  My advice is to find a church near the area you’ll be planting that can help you with some of the logistics of fundraising.  If they’re an existing church, you can likely fundraise under them and take advantage of their 501c3 status (#9 above), their giving record-keeping system and tax receipt tracking (#7 and #8) and possibly even their system for pulling off electronic giving (#6).  One of our strategic partners is located in Omaha which is an hour from Lincoln.  Per their generosity, we’ve been able to fundraise under them which means that when people give, they write out the check to the strategic partner (designate it to us via the memo line) and send it to them (#3).  The ministry assistant at our partner church then handles the receiving of all of the giving, the logging of the contributions, and simply generates a report for me to review.  That report is then used to keep tabs on who is giving and when (#5).  Having a partnering church to help in this way has saved me a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of headaches, and has been a huge blessing.

Have a Good System of Your Own
Assuming that you’ve got a good list of contacts, add some columns to that spreadsheet for keeping track of status.  Personally, I tried to add categories of status so that I could easily sort by status to see who I’ve contacted, who I’ve met with, who I need to follow up with, etc (#2).

Following-Up and Communicating
Assuming that you will be meeting face-to-face with most of your contacts, you’ll need to be sure to follow-up with them (#1).  Roughly half of all of the commitments that we’ve received have taken place via the follow-up call.  For me, I used my categorized status list to keep track of when I met with someone so that I could easily flag myself to follow-up with them 2-3 weeks after we met.  Open and regular communication is key here too.  You don’t want to meet with someone, get their commitment, and sail off into the sunset to plant your church.  What you’re doing is assembling a team of prayer and financial supporters.  If you get their commitment and turn and run the other direction, you’re using God’s people rather than allowing them to be a part of what He’s doing through you.

In the next post, I’ll lay out how I architected my overall process for fundraising from initial contact to closure.  Included in that, I’ll describe how I regularly communicate with supporters (#4).

Processing Your Contacts
What you likely have right now is a long list of everyone you know.  If you’re good, you’re still adding to it and if you’re good, it’s a long list.  In order to start making the task of contacting all of these people reasonable, you need to process your contacts.  One way to do this is to add some categories.  If you’re a good little nerd like me, your list is in Excel.  If you’re an extra special little nerd, you’ve already got a column for last name and a separate column for first name so that you can sort your contacts alphabetically.

The problem with sorting them alphabetically is that it doesn’t really help you.  What is helpful at this point is to categorize all of your contacts in two ways.  First is a sub-group type.  For each contact in your list, assign that person to a “sub-group type” (like Family, friends, co-workers, current church, past church #1, past church #2, college friends, etc).  By creating a category column in your contact spreadsheet, you can quickly sort all of your contacts by a grouping that makes sense to you.

The second category to add is “contact type.”  Here is where you begin to think about how you will contact this person.  As a general rule, it is always best to meet someone in person.  It shows that you respect them, that you respect their time, and that they’re important enough to get some of your time and attention.  As you look across your list, however, you’ll realize that meeting every single person is impossible and and in some case infeasible.  By categorizing your contacts into contact types, you’ll be able to start discerning how you’ll make contact with a set grouping of people.  Some examples of contact types are as follows:

• Local and personal – these are people that live in your area that you can easily meet with.
• Local and non-personal – these are people that live in your area but for some reason, it doesn’t make sense to meet with.
• Distant and personal – these are people that live distantly, but regardless of the distance between you, it still makes sense to meet with them.
• Distant and non-personal – these are people that live distantly and it doesn’t make sense to meet with.
• Local Church/Organization – local churches or organizations that you will want to meet with.
• Distant Church/Organization – churches not close by that you will want to be in contact with.

The above are just suggestions.  They are, in fact, the categories I used as I processed through my contacts.

In a later post, we’ll explore architecting a plan for contacting each of these contact groups.  Before moving on though, let me just add a few more general thoughts.

1. It is still always best to meet someone in person.
2. If someone is a high potential giver and they live 15 hours away, it may be worth your time and money and effort to buy a plane ticket and go sit down and talk with them.
3. While my friend Bob says that “letters are what 14-year olds send when they want to go to summer camp,” sometimes you’re going to be making contact via mail.  This should be the exception and it should be more than a letter.  We’ll explore that in a later post as well.
4. Be realistic.  Know your schedule and the amount of time you can commit to this.  Don’t sacrifice your family at the expense of raising support.
5. Prioritize your contacts.  This sounds awful, I know, but when the rubber meets the road, you’ve got to know which contacts are most important to contact and why.  I won’t elaborate here, but I will encourage you to prioritize your high potential givers.  High potential being defined as either someone very likely to give or (regardless of their likelihood to give) someone who has the potential to give significantly.  This may be another column in your spreadsheet, or it may be something you do with color-coding.

When To Start
Now.  Chances are if you’ve read through this much information on fundraising, you’re in a spot where you need to start now.  We started about a year out from when we intended to quit my full time job and move to where we’re planting.  As I write this, we’re in the middle of that year and thus in the middle of fundraising.  As you start to think about when to start, remember that getting a couple of strategic partners behind you ought to be your first priority.  After that, start knocking out the people you’ve listed out in your individual/organizational list (see earlier post here).

At this point it is also important to review your time-phased budget (see earlier post here).  One thing I did that has been immeasurably helpful in keeping a status of how we’re doing versus how we need to be doing is to lay in some rows in my time-phased budget for projected (or target or estimated) fundraising income for each month.  The result is a spreadsheet that has both my time-phased budget (an estimate of how much will be spent each month) and my time-phased fundraising estimate (an estimate of how much money will be coming in each month).

This let me toss around some numbers and start looking at how much I needed and when and how that was going to flow into and drive my fundraising.  For example, if you’re planning to quit your job on December 31st and your first big check isn’t going to hit until February 1st, you’ve got a problem.  Obviously all you’re doing at this point is estimating, but what the time-phased estimates allow you to do is fundraise in advance to the amounts needed so that when big expenses hit (like startup costs), you’re covered.

The other thing I’ll encourage you to do while you’re in your spreadsheet is to make additional rows for actuals.  As money starts coming in (and going out), feed the actuals in and compare them to your estimates.  These rows will also then allow you to track your cash flow (amount raised vs. amount spent) over time.

Hold Your Horses

By now you’re either chomping at the bit or throwing in the towel (or calling your old college roomate who seemed to get personal pleasure from spending hours in Microsoft Excel).  If you’ve still got your towel, chomp on it in addition to the bit as there are a few more things to cover before you turn yourself loose.  In the next post, we’ll look at some of the logistics of fundraising and in the one after that, we’ll look at architecting an overall fundraising plan.

For us, I tried to think in three basic categories of support: Strategic Partners, Individuals and Organizations, and finally the Launch Team.

Strategic Partners
Going into planting, my hope for anyone reading this is that you’ve got one or two strategic partners.  What I mean by a strategic partner is a church or an organization or a denomination that will come behind you early-on with some significant, committed, financial support.  What I’m talking about specifically is a church that will say to you, “we will give you $20k in December” or a denomination that will say “we will give you $1000/mo starting in January.”  In other words, they stick their neck out there early-on with definitive, committed support when you’re at $0.

I found this to be essential in getting some momentum behind us moving forward.  For us, coming from a background of no denominational support, we were blessed with early relationships with two churches in the Acts 29 Network: Coram Deo and Summit Community Church.  What sets these two churches apart from others that will be supporting us is a) their early commitments to financial support and b) their commitment to coaching, mentoring, and pastoring me through this process.

Locking these guys down and getting numbers and dates out of them will help you get over that first hump of “who is going to support this thing.”  It will also give you something to sit on other than $0 when you start meeting with individuals and other organizations.

Individuals and Organizations
This category is the “everyone you know” category.  If you’re going to raise support for your plant, you’re going to have to dig in and get to work.  When I was soliciting advice in this regard, Bob Thune (planter and pastor of Coram Deo) laid it out like this for me:

It’s always a numbers game. You have to contact 10 people to get 3 appointments to get one solid supporter. This is true whether you’re talking ministry fundraising or whether you’re in sales. Don’t overspiritualize it by assuming that because God is sovereign and you’re raising funds for ministry, it will be way easier than that. Sometimes you can beat the averages, but as a general rule, you need 10 times as many contacts as you need supporters. So if you need to raise $5000 a month and you figure $50 a month is about what an average supporter might give, you need 100 supporters, and 1000 contacts.

I’ll admit that I didn’t believe him when he first expounded this to me.  I’ll also admit that I now believe him.

To get started in this category, just start making a list.  I started mine in Microsoft Excel and as I added names, I tried also to add as much contact information (phone, email, address, etc) as possible.  Add everyone you know.  This will feel odd at first and it will take some time.  Pray over the list.  Pray for God to continually draw up names to add to the list.  When you’re driving in your car and a name pops in your head, jot it down (keeping your eyes on the road of course) and add it to your system later.  When you’re walking the hall at work and you bump into an old colleague that you haven’t seen for a year, jot it down.

If you don’t know all of their contact information, or if you know you cannot contact them right now (say, because they’re your co-workers and they’re not really privy yet to the fact that you’ll be quitting your job in 6 months), add them anyway.  You can always prioritize and add contact info later.  The point right now is to get as long of a list as you can.

Here are some categories to start thinking in:

• Friends
• Family
• Co-workers
• College classmates
• Old college professors
• Everyone from your current church
• People who used to go to your current church but no longer do
• Everyone from your previous church(es)
• Nearby churches (big and small)
• Christian businessmen in your area
• Neighbors (current and past)
• Christian schools and colleges and seminaries in your area

In addition to the above, ask others for additional contacts.  At some point you’ll realize that you don’t know enough people.  The way to keep moving forward is to start asking your contacts (especially the ones who support you) for their contacts.  Ask other church planters who supported them.  Ask them if there is anyone that supported them that no longer is.  Ask them if there is anyone who might be interested in supporting you as an extension for how they supported them.  Ask people in your church for names of strong Christian businessmen.  As them for names of generous friends they have that aren’t a part of your current church.  Ask Christians that you work with that don’t go to your church how you can get in contact with their church.

The point here again is simply to amass as big of a list as you can.  Even if you don’t think that person will support you, put them down.  To date, we have received more support from unlikely sources than likely sources.  God works in mysterious ways.

Launch Team
The final category for support is the launch team.  This is the group of charter members who will dedicate their time, energy, and resources to helping get your church off the ground.  Take a swag at what you think that will look like size-wise and drop an estimated amount based on that.  For example, if you foresee a launch team of 40 givers giving $200/month, tally that across two years and you’re at $192k.  If you got committed folks who aren’t all broke college kids, that’s probably not a bad estimate.  Realize, of course, that some will give more than that and others will give less.  At some point in the launch team formation process, you’ll then need to make clear that part of being a part of a new church plant is to commit to it.  Both with time and resources.

Pulling it Together
Breaking up the “who” into three parts helps you to focus more clearly on where you’re at and where you’re going.  It is key to get the Strategic Partner relationships established as early-on as possible.  It is also important to get down on paper a solid estimate for the launch team.  Add those two together and subtract that number from the total you need to raise to find out how much work you’ve got ahead of you in the Individual/Organizational category.

Next Up:
You know how much you need to raise, you know when you need it by, and you’ve got a massive list of contacts…now what?

The first two things you need to determine as you prepare to fundraise are:

1. How much do you need?
2. When do you need it?

Defining the Finish Line
If you can answer these two questions well, you’re on your way to having a plan that will a) help you to know how you’re doing when you’re in the throws of executing that plan and b) help you to know when you’re done.  If you don’t define when you’ll be done, you’ll never be done.  My vision is to be self-sustaining two years post-launch.  By that I mean that by the end of year two, I want to have year three’s budget in the bank and thus live year-to-year rather than month-to-month.  In this scheme, general tithes and offerings collected in year three pay for year four, those from year four pay for year five, and on and on.  This creates a stable financial picture, allows for clear and concise planning, and allows the most protection against emergencies and unexpected expenses.

Now the hard part: answering the two questions from above.  In order to know how much you need, you’re going to have to do some research.  This is also where the gifting of having some vision comes into play.  If you cannot look out over the next two to three years – seeing where you’re at and where you want things to be – you’re going to have a hard time answering these two questions.  This takes prayer, time, reflection, and research.  It’s hard work to do it right and you’ll never get it perfect.  What you have to do at this point is take your best stab at it and know that things will change as time progresses.  The worst mistake you can make at this point is deciding not to systematically think through how much you’re going to need because you know it is going to change.  Instead, remember that it’s a lot easier to tweak things once you have something down on paper than to try to start from scratch when you’re half way in and up to your ears in meetings, phone calls, and follow-ups.

Time-Phased Budget
So you need a time-phased budget.  What this means is you need to sit down and systematically think about expenses.  Do this in a spreadsheet (like Microsoft Excel).  Across the spreadsheet, make a column for each month of the year.  Your first column should be the current month (even if you don’t have any incoming monies or out-going expenses this month – start now, because it’s more difficult to add months back in once you start than to have extra months in from the get-go).  Your last column should the month by which you plan to be self-sustaining, plus one year.  For me, we’re aiming to be self-sustaining by the end of May 2012 so the last month in my spreadsheet is May of 2013.  This will allow you to lay-in estimated costs for that first self-sustaining year and create a realistic budget for that year as well.

Once you’ve got your columns across the width of your spreadsheet for each month, add a row for each expense category.  These will become the categories of your budget so it is important to think through all of the different kinds of expenses you’re going to have over these first few years.  It’s also important to include rows for items that might be an expense in the first year, but not in three years from now (fundraising costs would fall into this category).  Likewise, it’s important to add rows for expenses that you won’t incur in the first couple of years, but may in the third year (salary for a part-time assistant, perhaps).

Expense Categories
Spend some good time here brainstorming.  Ask other church planters for a copy of their budget so you can see what categories they include (noting, of course, that their budget for those categories will likely be different from yours).  As you make your categories, try to group them in ways that make sense so that you don’t end up with two hundred categories.  A good number to shoot for is twenty or less.

As an example, here are the categories I’m using:

• Pastor Net Salary
• Pastor’s Family Insurance (Health, life, etc)
• Pastor Taxes
• Rent (the church’s meeting space)
• Start-up costs (sound equipment, building renovations, chairs, projector, nursery stuff, etc)
• Utilities
• Office/Printing
• Education (remaining seminary tuition)
• Church Taxes and Insurance
• Miscellaneous Expenses
• Hospitality
• Events
• Resources
• Website
• Program Development
• Administrative Assistant
• #2 Pastor Net Salary
• #2 Pastor’s Family Insurance (Health, life, etc)
• #2 Pastor Taxes

There might be items on your list that aren’t on my list and there are probably items on my list that won’t be on yours.  The point is to have a list.

As soon as you do have a list, you’ll quickly realize that you have no idea how to estimate the monthly expense for each category on your list.  Again, this is where the hard work of research comes in.  Talk with other church planters and other guys leading established churches.  Pay special attention to your salary.  At this point, it’s likely that you’re setting it yourself so make sure it is adequate yet not elaborate.  Research your city to find out the average and median salaries for pastors in the area.  For the other categories, call a Realtor, research on the web, etc.  Get other’s opinions and be sure to have others that you trust review your numbers (other church planters, businessmen, etc).  Finally, remember that you’re not going to have it perfect but getting it all down will help you to easily tweak it as needed as time progresses.

Count the Cost
Once you’ve got your categories all fleshed out with estimated monthly expenses for each you can tally your monthly expenses by summing each column.  Go ahead and add a row at the bottom of your categories for these monthly sums.  Then create another cell in your spreadsheet where you total up all of the monthly sums up through the month you intend to be self-sustaining (May 2012 for my case).  This sum is the grand total of what you need to raise.

After you stop hyperventilating from the size of that number, save your spreadsheet and go to bed.  Chances are if you’re a church planter, you’re reading this late at night and need to crash for five hours before tomorrow starts.