by David Washburn, BGAV Treasurer

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There’s a moment in almost every church budget meeting where the conversation turns from mission to math. We start talking about line items and shortfalls, and somewhere in the shuffle of numbers, we lose the story. But every dollar that passes through the offering plate carries a story –one of trust, of gratitude, of someone deciding that what they hold in their hand matters less than what God is doing in the world.

If we want to cultivate generous givers, we have to start there: not with a budget crisis, but with a story worth telling.

I’ve sat across the table from church leaders wrestling with declining giving, aging congregations, and buildings that cost more to maintain than they once did to build. The temptation is always to solve generosity with strategy—a new pledge card, a slicker campaign, a well-timed sermon series in November. Strategy has its place. But strategy without formation is just fundraising with better branding.

Generosity is discipled, not merely requested. It grows in people the same way faith grows in people—through repetition, through witness, through seeing it modeled by someone they trust. When a pastor is transparent about the church’s finances, when a deacon shares why she started tithing during the hardest financial year of her life, when a teenager gives his summer job money to a mission trip he’ll never even take—those are the moments that shape a congregation’s relationship with money. Not the pledge drive. The story.

This is why intentionality matters so much. Intentional givers aren’t people who happen to have extra. They’re people who have decided, ahead of time, that generosity is part of who they are becoming in Christ. That decision rarely happens by accident. It happens because someone taught them, walked with them, or gave them language for what they were already feeling: that holding things loosely is its own kind of freedom.

Churches that cultivate this kind of giving culture tend to do a few things well. They tell the truth about money, including the hard truths. They celebrate generosity without shaming scarcity. And they connect every gift back to a mission bigger than the budget.

Every dollar has a story. Our job, as pastors, as leaders, as fellow givers, is to help our people find theirs.

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Rev. David Washburn is BGAV’s treasurer.

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