July 5, 2024 • 38 mins
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
--
Tithely provides the tools you need to engage with your church online, stay connected, increase generosity, and simplify the lives of your staff.
With tools like text and email messaging, custom church apps and websites, church management software, digital giving, and so much more… it’s no wonder over 37,000 churches in 50 countries trust Tithely to help run their church.
Learn more at https://tithely.com
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
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 (00:13):
Not much, just enjoying being with everybody
out here.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Hanging out on the podcast, so it's good to have
you.
I'm excited to talk aboutfundraising.
I'm excited to talk about, like, fundraising, you know.
Obviously Tithely was kind ofstarted because we wanted to
help churches, you know, befunded and help them do better
in the digital age and usingtechnology for raising money and
(00:38):
fundraising and all that.
So, yeah, this is a cool kindof intersection of what you do
and what Tylee does and all that.
But why?
Speaker 1 (00:54):
don't you start off by just telling folks a little
bit about yourself and how yougot into, you know, connected
with the church and ministry,and all into your business today
?
Sure, Well, my name is JeremyMalik and I actually grew up as
a church planter's son, whichmeant we moved around and we'd
start a new church every coupleof years and then.
So we lived in about five orsix different States when I was
growing up and then when I wentto college, I went to a
Christian college in the Midwestand actually never thought I
would go into ministry.
So I got my business degree andthat sort of thing and through
(01:19):
that process I went into bankingand I was a commercial lender
and ended up running a largesection of a mortgage company in
the Midwest for 11 years.
And in 2007, God put a call onmy 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 churchestoday and it went so well.
I started having churches callafterwards and saying, hey,
(01:40):
could you come help us out?
Could you come help us out?
Could you come help us out?
And by 2015, we launched ChurchCoach Ministries full time and
have been doing it ever sinceand just love it.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Yeah, that's pretty cool.
So what was it like to grow upas a church planter's son?
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Well, I actually really liked it and enjoyed it
because I was easily adaptableinto new areas.
So I have different pockets offriends from different places
where we've lived and I've stillat least kept one or two
friends from all these yearsgrowing up in different areas.
So for that part I've reallyenjoyed it.
It's helped me like dive intonew areas and not have any issue
(02:20):
with doing that.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Right, right, yeah, with doing that, right right,
yeah.
Yeah, having to every few yearsgo new school, new friends, new
activities or sports teams orwhatever you were into, I mean
that can be, that can be toughon a kid, absolutely.
It sounds like you kind ofdeveloped, uh, the skill set to
do that pretty well.
(02:42):
Yeah, yeah, I've enjoyed it.
So, yeah, what, what states youin?
Where'd you end up traveling?
Speaker 1 (02:47):
So we were in uh, indiana on three different
occasions.
We started at church in um PalmHarbor, Florida, and then we
were in Southern California.
I graduated from Newberry parkhigh 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 (03:08):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, very cool, very cool.
And when you, when you wentinto full-time ministry, what?
What role were you in?
What were you doing at thechurch?
Speaker 1 (03:15):
So my first role in ministry was as an executive
pastor, okay, and I reallyenjoyed that and I got to bring
in a lot of things I learnedfrom the business world and
apply them to the church world,and so that was really exciting
to do.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and when you're in that role was
sort of the finances and thekind of fundraising side of the
church, like there's regulargiving that is happening.
But then there are sometimeschurches do fundraising
campaigns to raise money for aproject or a building or a
school they want to build or tofund missions.
(03:52):
There's all kinds of reasonsthat they might do extra
fundraising campaigns.
Were you responsible for thoseprograms at your church?
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Yeah, so at the church that I was at, they had
actually had already previouslyhired an outside campaign
consultant company and it wasn'tgoing very well.
So the elders got together andthey 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 donethis before, but let's give it
a shot.
And so I think that was one ofthe advantages of looking
(04:21):
outside of the box and myexperiences in the business
world and designing a type ofcampaign that you won't see out
there typically, and so in thatit gave a freshness and a
different look at it, and so Iactually think that experience
helped me through it, right,yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
I mean, how'd the campaign go?
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Campaign went really well.
What we were doing is we wereconverting a boat showroom into
a church, and so I had theopportunity to do the design of
the interior of that and I hadan architectural background.
And then I had the opportunityto raise funds for it.
And one of the cool thingsabout this was it was a $500,000
(05:03):
tenant improvement job and weended up raising enough funds to
do the job.
But because of some techniquesI learned in the business world,
I have a philosophy that justbecause you raise the money
doesn't mean you have to spendit, and we actually did the
entire remodel of that projectfor $84,000 in cash.
(05:24):
We had all of the materials forthe project actually donated.
A funny story is I like to workout at LA Fitness at the time in
Southern California is wherethis church was, and they were
putting in 51 LA Fitnesses inSouthern California at the time,
and I was working out one dayand I loved their carpet.
It was this black specs carpet.
I thought, man, this is greatcarpet, and so I just asked who
(05:47):
would I talk to about thiscarpet?
And the manager gave me thephone number for the general
manager and I said do you haveany extra carpet in the back and
they took me to the back andthey had two rolls.
I quickly did the math If everyone of these things had two
rolls of carpet, well, they hadplenty of carpet for our church
plant.
And so I ended up taking thegeneral manager out to lunch
(06:11):
Imagine he likes to eat and Ijust asked him directly would
you donate the carpet to ourchurch plant?
We need about 28,000 squarefeet of carpet.
He made three calls across thedesk for me and they actually
delivered the carpet to ourchurch and then we installed it
ourselves.
And so, just so those kinds ofthings are what we do with
churches that are totallyoutside the box.
But but God provides.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
So oh, that's awesome , that's so cool, man.
Well, all right, so fastforward now.
Church Coach Ministries.
You've been doing this since2015,.
You said Correct, correct, Imean, tell us, yeah, I mean, I
guess, go a little deeper, likewhy did you start it and what
specifically, you know, do youguys do for churches?
Speaker 1 (06:53):
So I had spent time being an executive pastor in
local churches on a coupledifferent occasions and I
remember going through a periodof 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 gettingall these phone calls from other
churches to do campaigns forthem and so, uh, god, just
really put on my heart, jeremy,you could help one church, but
(07:15):
I'd rather you help many.
And so from that word from theLord is when we birthed Church
Coach Ministries and it's beenan amazing ride ever since and
we've been able to work withchurches in four different
categories.
I'll just share quickly.
We do build out design work andwe do it very simplistically in
the sense of we redesign theinside of the facility through
the eyes of the guest and whatthey will experience really for
(07:38):
the next 100, 200 people we'regoing to reach for Christ.
We focus on relationshipconnecting areas and we focus on
ministry flow of the facility.
And so in doing this, I go intoa lot of churches where they
have $60,000, $80,000 worth ofblueprints sitting in a corner
that they've never even touched,and so what we do is we come
(07:59):
give them a concept, autocaddrawings, 3d renderings at an
extremely affordable cost.
That way they can get an ideaif they want to move forward
without breaking the bank, andso that's kind of our philosophy
there.
And then we do an assimilationtraining with churches and
that's a four-month longtraining that we do.
That we really help churchesconnect with the community
(08:21):
through it.
And so we do a lot of missionalpieces where we get people in
the congregation to thinkmissionally without them even
realizing they're doing it, soit becomes second nature.
And then we do a stewardshiptraining with churches and then,
finally, we do the visioncampaigns which we're going to
dive into.
So those are our four areas.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, very cool.
Have you always done all four?
Did you kind of launch?
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Yep, no, we've always done all four of that.
For some reason, god gave me aunique skill set and that has
been our four and we have notwaived or moved off of it.
That has been our focus.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
Yeah, yeah.
You keep saying we did, youstart it with somebody.
Yeah, so we have a team.
We have a team of people mywife, Nicole works with us.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
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 Northright.
People at the right time and,interestingly enough, most
(09:26):
people that are on our teamalmost all of them have actually
gone through a vision campaignat 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 (09:38):
Yeah, I love that.
When you started it was it justyou.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Yep, I was a one-armed paper hand.
You were like oh that's awesome.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
So vision campaigns, or maybe known as capital
campaigns to some, tell us moreLike what is a vision campaign,
because some people may not know.
So let's start with what is avision campaign.
Why do churches even run thesethings?
Give us kind of the nuts andbolts.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
So for us, we have a simple philosophy.
Our philosophy is we serve arich God and oftentimes, because
of our human thought processesand everything, we actually make
God poor.
We put God in a box or we setan expectation upon Christ, and
what we want to do is we want totake that box we so often put
around Christ and we just wantto shatter it.
(10:27):
And in doing so, we want totake people in the congregation
through an intentional prayerjourney.
And here's what's so differentis our purpose is actually the
heart transformation of theindividual within the
congregation.
So we want people in thecongregation to actually
experience four different things, and the four things are we
want to give them opportunity topray.
That's obvious.
The second one is we wantpeople in the congregation to
actually experience fourdifferent things, and the four
(10:47):
things are we want to give themopportunity to pray.
That's obvious.
The second one is we want togive them an opportunity to
process with the Lord.
And what I mean by this is whenI was at the first church I was
at, I would lead the men'sministry and I'd meet with two
or three men at a time and Iwould always ask the question to
the men.
You know what does the voice ofthe Lord sound like to you, and
(11:10):
you know how many men couldanswer that question.
It wasn't very many.
And so what we would do is wewould study the Old Testament
and all the different ways thatthe Lord spoke to people, and we
would journal those down.
And then I would have themjournal their own life and write
down key decision moments anddifferent impact times in their
life, and they would start todraw parallels.
Well, what we want to do is wewant to create this environment
where they can actually hear theLord's voice and identify it
(11:30):
for themselves for some peoplefor the very first time.
And then, in this process, wewant to give them the ability to
ask questions, becauseoftentimes unasked or unanswered
questions become blockades orhindrances to people's obedience
.
And then the final step reallyis is we want to give them the
opportunity to commit to thevision of the church.
And this is what's so important, because committing to the
(11:52):
vision of the church is aunifying 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'sanything wrong with that but
when they go through thisprocess, they come out of it
unified.
So that's really the differencebetween a capital campaign and
a vision campaign.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Yeah, yeah, I love that.
I mean I love that you knowyou're helping people kind of
connect with you, know hearingGod in their own personal lives
comes in a lot of Old Testamentstudy and prayer.
That approach to you, knowworking with their people and
(12:39):
even even you helping them as aleadership, have this kind of
defined thing with somestructure and some but but
prayer and Bible being a corepart of it.
Over a period of time.
Are you doing this over many,many months?
Speaker 1 (12:49):
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, dependingon the project size and the
scope.
And so one thing to kind ofanswer that thought that you had
but the lead pastor of a churchreally enjoys this process
because we make it easy for themin the sense that we're
(13:09):
decentralizing the leadershipaspect to a campaign and then we
give the lead pastor one job,and one job only, and that is
casting vision, and most leadpastors love to cast vision, and
so we actually help implementthat vision as far as funding it
financially goes through thisprocess.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Yeah, Take us maybe a step down, practically speaking
.
So you're leading peoplethrough this kind of journey,
spiritual journey.
What is the?
The end goal in some sense isfinancial, though right it is,
you know, we're trying to raisesome amount of money for some
(13:51):
kind of project and so, when itcomes down to, okay, you've got
like the spiritual journey thateveryone's going on together,
the unifying journey.
How do you go about, you know?
Or what are people coming toyou for?
Like, what kinds of projectsare people coming to you for?
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Well, we're doing everything from debt reduction
of a mortgage payment to fullscale new builds and everything
in between.
So really we do go to all scope.
And one of the things that'sreally unique about our approach
is a church doesn't have tohave a decision made exactly
what they want to do to theirfacility to move forward in
(14:32):
doing this, because no matterwhat they choose, they're going
to need the finances to moveforward anyway.
So when somebody is committingto the vision of the church,
they're not necessarilycommitting to an exact project,
but the vision of the overallchurch.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
Got it, so it doesn't have to be.
Oh, we're putting a new roof onSure.
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 10year journey, maybe, right,
absolutely, absolutely, um, what?
What about the practicalfundraising steps along the way?
(15:08):
How do you, you know, give?
Speaker 1 (15:10):
us that so.
So one of the things that we doI'm going to give you two
different pieces of that One ofthe things we do in this process
is we do our two sessionstewardship course as part of
the prayer journey process, andwhat's interesting about that is
God took me through atransformational process in my
own life as it pertained to thesubject of dishonest gain, and
(15:30):
so I actually went away when Iwas kind of going in between
being a commercial lender andgoing into the mortgage world,
and I went away and visited myroommate at college and Saturday
night rolled around and it waslike hey, do you want to go to
church with me?
And I was thinking, I mean, thelast place I kind of want to go
is church.
I'm trying to get away.
Of course God always comes andgets you.
And so, anyway, at that pointin time I went and it was a very
(15:53):
unique sermon topic and thetopic was on dishonest gain, and
I was riveted on the edge of myseat and I walked out of there
committing to be a generousgiver from that point forward.
And then, also in that process,God dealt with dishonest gain
in my own life and I would takeclients out golfing for the bank
and I could never fill up thefoursome, so I'd add in a buddy
(16:15):
or two and I would expense mybuddy to the bank and God's like
that's done and I'm like cool.
And so, anyway, I developed thistwo session course, and what it
has to do with is what does itmean to be obedient to Christ,
not only with our finances butwith our lives?
And then the second session, wecome back and we talk about
what types of abundant blessingsdoes Christ have for our lives
if we're obedient to him?
(16:36):
And so, anyway, what thisprocess does is this puts the
individual that goes through thecourse, the person within the
congregation, into a spot wherethe light will come on and they
really have a choice to make AmI going to be obedient to Christ
with my life or am I not?
And we are seeing tremendousheart transformation take place
(16:58):
through this.
So I say all that to get tothis point.
To answer your question is, aswe go through the practical
steps of this, yes, when thecongregation commits to the
vision of the church, they'regoing to be making a pledge to
the church over probably a three, four or five year period,
depending on the size of theproject.
And then what happens is,through the power of prayer, we
(17:19):
are walking through the doorsthat the Lord opens and a lot of
times the Lord opens up doorsthat we walk through.
That allows us to connect withthe community and actually raise
funds outside the church walls.
And I'll just share one storyto bring this to an example for
you guys.
But we had a church that waspaying off the church debt and
(17:40):
it wasn't a very large church, achurch of about 90 people, and
they owed about $655,000 in debt.
And we had gone through thisprayer journey and I was
standing out in front of thechurch with the pastor one day
and I noticed they had a skatepark in front of the church and
I'd seen that for a while.
But this time I noticed acouple of broken off business
signs in there and I just askedthe pastor what's that about?
(18:01):
He said, well, if a ramp breaksdown, we'll call one of these
businesses, They'll chip in acouple of hundred bucks and
they'll fix the ramps and offthe kids go.
And I said is there any change?
You have a list of years.
But he did some research and hedeveloped quite a list and I
said here's what we're going todo.
We're going to invite them allto the church for a dinner as a
(18:22):
thank you and we have one ruleNobody from the church can
attend, because we wanted tofill it up with community people
.
They can serve at the event butnot attend.
And while they ate their dinner, we actually had local artists
paint paintings live on stageand we auctioned those paintings
off that night.
We literally paid off all ofthe church debt in one night
(18:43):
outside the church walls moneyfrom this process.
But that wasn't the best partof the story.
The best part of the story wasthree months later they were
running over 300 people becausea lot of these people brought
their families and called thistheir church home.
So that's what we do from acommunity aspect when we walk
through these doors that Godopens, yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
I mean, that's pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
The skate park for the one right there.
Yeah, who would have thought,right, right.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
I mean that's crazy.
And I think an interestingpoint to pull out is that was a
a pretty small church that did afundraising campaign, right
Like in your way, right Likevision 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,
(19:35):
churches of thousands.
This is like even churches ofhundreds can do this kind of
stuff.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
Yep, absolutely, and what what I find is is when,
when God gives the lead pastor avision, our Lord has the
finances to provide for thatvision.
Our responsibility simply is isgetting in alignment with what
Christ is doing and follow thepower of the Holy Spirit in this
process, and so that's what wedo, and we've seen a lot of
(20:00):
small churches raise anexorbitant amount of money that
you wouldn't think would bepossible, because the Lord has
provided in additional ways thatwe did not see when we all
first sat down and startedhaving those conversations.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
Right, right, right.
What other ways are you guyskind of bringing in the external
community Like I don't know?
Give me a few more like chartsor things that you've seen or
done along the way, where you'vebrought in outside businesses
to help raise money.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Yeah, so I'll give you.
I'll give you one.
We did.
We happened to have theopportunity to do a project for
a church in Watts, los Angeles,and through this process, one
thing churches need to know outthere is when they're praying
and fasting.
We're praying and fastingbecause a lot of times God will
speak to us, and then I'll callup the lead pastor and say, hey,
(20:49):
I feel like God's saying this.
What are you hearing?
Does this resonate with you?
And so this is one of thosecases where we had nine months
and we needed to raise literallyalmost a million dollars for
this church to be able topurchase a facility that was
otherwise going to be sold outfrom underneath them.
And so we live.
What we did is we had a concert,a benefit concert held at
(21:09):
another large church in SouthernCalifornia, hosted it for us,
and it was about a month and ahalf before the concert.
And this was before thepandemic and all of this and
before a lot of churches weredoing this.
But God woke me up in themiddle of the night and he just
put on my heart to live streamthe concert.
Well, I called the artist and Isaid, hey, you know, I feel
like we're supposed to livestream this.
He was like no way, man, hegoes.
(21:31):
If you live stream my band,it's going to sound terrible
that we're not doing that.
And I told him.
I said well, I feel like theLord's telling me we have to do
this.
Like, how are we going to dothis?
And he said well, I'll tell youwhat he said.
I'll play a nine song setbefore the regular concert, just
myself and a guitar.
You can live stream that, andthen I'll do the full concert.
Well, we've raised about halfof the money after that concert
(21:52):
night we had we got.
We got down to about 30 daysleft and every dollar came in to
purchase that facility becausewe were obedient to live
streaming and people continuedto give after the effect.
So that gives you an idea.
Every campaign is totallydifferent, but that would give
you another outside of the boxkind of concept.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
Right, right right, yeah, very, very cool.
Okay, take me another step.
Yeah, very, very cool.
Okay, take, take me anotherstep.
Like you know what, what?
What are the steps in the inthe process?
Speaker 1 (22:25):
of like kind of rate, like the nuts and bolts of
raising the money.
Well, really it.
It really hinges on prayer, andas we go through the prayer
process, what starts to happenis we see hearts transform.
Literally, we see hearttransform.
And so what happens is, in alot of cases and I'll share one
with you we had a church thathad 209 giving units in the
(22:48):
church and of those 209 givingunits, 13 of them gave 80% of
the funds.
This is pretty typical inAmerica, where a few support a
majority of the church RightWell, through the heart
transformation process, theirmonthly giving, after four
months they had so much hearttransformation.
After four months their monthlygiving tripled, literally
(23:10):
tripled.
Now that church did not grownumerically, but what happened
is heart transformation tookplace and they went from 13
giving units providing 80% ofthe funds to 134 giving units
supplying 80% of the funds.
And so we see this happen a lotwith the churches we work with,
where it's a residual impact,because the heart
(23:33):
transformations have taken place.
Not only are they raising thefunds for their project, but
they're seeing lifetransformation and generosity
take over within the individual,and that has much larger impact
on the church than even thecampaign does, and so that's one
of those residual impacts whenwe get down and we really look
(23:54):
at what's the difference and howare 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 hearttransformation that takes place
and all of a sudden, the churchis sitting there where, hey, we
now have more money for ministryas opposed to just raising
(24:15):
funds for the project, right,yeah, for that particular thing,
what kind of analysis?
Speaker 2 (24:19):
you kind of mentioned giving, units and that kind of
thing.
So it sounds like you're doingsome kind of analysis of the
church and the membership andweekly giving, yearly giving.
You're trying to understandfrom the financial side of the
church how things are going andwhat it looks like and then
maybe that leads to some insightinto what's possible and we
(24:45):
know anything's possible withGod and prayer and all that.
But you probably do some sortof like okay, it looks like you
could do this and that could bereasonable.
Now, where, where is God goingto show up in the whole thing?
But walk us through thatanalysis, Like, how do you help
churches look at their you knowthe church and the finances to
(25:07):
kind of understand how to thinkabout this?
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Yeah, here's been our experience.
Our experience is, when we dothose deep dive analysis kind of
kind of pieces, what we'refinding is typically a
consulting company would say youknow, whatever your annual
budget is, you should be able toraise one and a half times to
(25:29):
two times that number.
That is a typical analysis.
That's done.
What we're seeing happen inchurches that are engaged into
the process, we are seeingsometimes three, four, five, six
times an annual budget beingable to be raised.
So we go into it with the mind'seye of here's what's typically
(25:54):
possible, but we don't close thedoor on that.
So for example I'll just giveyou an example we're not going
to put the thermometer on thewall where we color it in as the
money comes in, because againwe feel like that's a box or an
expectation we're putting uponthings.
We want to see what the Lordcould show up Right, and so in a
(26:30):
lot of ways it renders thatfeasibility study, if we want to
call it that irrelevant.
It renders that feasibilitystudy, if we want to call it
that irrelevant, and so we gointo it with our eyes wide open,
but we also leave room for theHoly Spirit to work, if that
helps.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
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 (26:53):
the church.
So typically, to be honest, weusually have this conversation
with the church and you knowthey will just basically share
with us.
Here's what our average weeklygiving is, here's what our
budget is, here's where we arestaff wise as opposed to
building wise, and in the coststructure of things, and just
(27:13):
being able to look at that givesus a really good idea of you
know where's the health of thechurch, what needs to really be
focused on, because we might runinto that first example I
shared with you where 13 givingunits were giving the majority
of the funds.
If we run into that situation,we know that the stewardship
component that we offer withinthe campaign has to be a focus
(27:34):
point, because that's wherewe're going to gain true heart
transformation.
You know we might run intoanother church that doesn't have
quite that issue and it's amore balanced approach.
Now, that's rare, but, but itcould 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.
(27:55):
Right, right, yeah, yeah, Ilove that what?
Speaker 2 (27:58):
maybe we can kind of move into this the topic of like
money in churches andleadership.
Talking about money, I mean,sometimes in our experience it's
not.
It's actually quite often thatyou know like pastors talking
about money is uncomfortable.
They don't most don't reallywant to do it.
(28:18):
They weren't trained in how todo it.
Um, you know there's lots ofreasons, right.
So, like, what's been yourexperience when it comes to like
my experience is, you know, mydad was a pastor.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
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 ofthe hardest subjects that a
pastor has to face and talkabout.
And you're right, they're notnecessarily trained in that area
to be able to do that, and Ithink one thing that's unfairly
(28:54):
placed upon our lead pastors inthe country, or the world for
that matter, is that justbecause they're a lead pastor,
we expect them to be an expertin every category, everything.
They're supposed to run thebuild project.
They're supposed to be thecontractors.
They're supposed to run thebuild project.
They're supposed to be thecontractors, they're supposed to
be all of it.
And the truth of the matter isthey're called by the Lord to
(29:16):
oversee and lead people andreach people for Christ, and
that's their calling, and so itdoesn't surprise me that this
area is a struggle for a lot ofpastors, and so one thing that
we do when we go and we trainthe stewardship side of things,
one of my rules is is whoeverteaches this in the church, it
(29:38):
can't be the pastor and it can'tbe somebody who's on staff with
the church.
Because what we want to do is wewant to train somebody who
locks arms with the peoplewithin the church, that is,
somebody who ministers from amarketplace ministry standpoint
within that church.
They have a business career heor she does, or whatever the
(29:58):
case may be.
We want to train that person upbecause when they hear this
information from that person,their ears open up in a whole
different way.
It's almost like the pastorcould stand up week after week
and whatever topic it is, theycould speak upon it and and
certain things will seep into anindividual.
But they will always hear it ina different way than if
somebody who's they consider acolleague at their level.
(30:21):
So right, right, right speaksthe same thing.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
Now we're getting into the nuts and bolts, and now
you're giving yeah, now we'regetting like okay, so you're,
you're doing the thing and allthe pieces.
We've talked about prayer andbringing people along and
there's tons of transformation.
But you're, like I'm getting akey leader in the church, a lay
leader, somebody who's not onstaff, who, uh, somehow has a
(30:44):
you know, a good standingreputation in the church, has
been a business leader of somesort maybe, or done well in
their career and and isobviously aligned with the
vision and excited about wherethe church is going.
But you want them on stage, youwant them in front of the
congregation.
Uh, I'm sure some of the staffis also doing it too, somehow.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
But like sure they're involved to some level, but
they're not the mouthpiece ofthat particular topic.
Got it so?
Speaker 2 (31:12):
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 (31:19):
Yeah, so everybody we choose through this we do
through prayer, and we take acouple of days and pray and fast
on and what we find is is theLord tends to really bring that
person's name to the leadpastor'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 beable to train that individual,
(31:40):
it's usually like man, thisperson's perfect for this, you
know, and a lot of times we'relooking for somebody in their
own personal life that has anobedience story, and it doesn't
have to be with finances, it canbe with a life decision they
made, but some sort of testimonyaround obedience that they can
share.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
Yeah, so I love that.
I love that.
Yeah, maybe kind of in theclosing segment here.
How do you, how do you helpchurches celebrate?
Get to the end of this oryou're close or you know there's
some portion where you know youwant the church to kind of
experience the journey of it butthen also achieving the goal.
(32:18):
Maybe it doesn't always happen,but as that's happening, you
know what's your experience beenor how do you help churches
kind of with that, the endstages and celebrating and all
of that.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Well, we always encourage them to bring the
entire congregation together ina celebrational moment the
church in Watts that I sharedwith you.
When that goal was reached,everybody in the church got in
the quad and they all hadballoons and we did a
celebration and sent them upinto the air.
Celebration and send them upinto the air, but but collective
.
And I think it's important inthese celebration times, even in
(32:51):
the prayer times, to involvethe youth of our church.
A lot of times we think, okay,the parents, the older people,
even if they're singles orwhatever but but these are the
ones that we're communicatingwith.
I actually want to include, allthe way down through the prayer
component, the kids within thechurch too, so that they have an
understanding.
Hey, my parents are goingthrough this.
It gives them what is themeaning of fasting and praying.
(33:14):
A lot of times, people don'tlearn that discipline until
they're adults, and so these arekinds of things we want to
involve the entire family.
So when we celebrate, we alsowant to involve the entire
family.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
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 everyyear and there's kind of two
different moments Uh, oneearlier in the year, one a bit
later in the year for, like youknow, foreign missions, and then
local missions.
And uh, so this past weekend ortwo weekends ago, we kind of
(33:50):
took up the you know that thatthat offering, um, or like a
wrapped up, that offering hadbeen going on for a few months
and uh, so, like you know, as afamily, we're, we're giving in.
My kids, you know there'sthey're telling stories from
stage and they're kind of youknow like there's some people
from overseas talking about thechurches they've planted and
(34:10):
there's this, you know it's abig service around all these
things, um, super cool.
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, comehere.
And so we're all in a huddlearound 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 giveweekly and you know the the
(34:32):
particular campaign we're tryingto give like this much.
You know a multiple of like ourregular weekly giving kind of
thing.
And um, so you know we'rechatting as a family and I'm
like, okay, here's what thatlooks like.
And so you know we pull out ourphone my church obviously uses
Tithely, so pull out the phoneand bring up the giving form and
then, like you know, one kidtypes in the amount another kid
(34:53):
gets to hit the submit button.
And then also we were like, kindof as a ceremonial kind of
thing, everyone was writing downhow much they were giving and
then like walking it kind ofupfront and putting it in like a
box right.
They were giving and then likewalking it kind of up front and
putting it in like a box RightMore.
That was more of just like afun way of everybody being
engaged.
But we're giving digitally, soyou weren't really like putting
(35:15):
checks in or anything like that.
So then I have three kids, sothe third kid wrote it down and
brought it up and put it in thebox Kind of.
So I love like our kids arecurious, like our kids are
interested.
Our kids, my kids, perked upwhen it was like, oh, we're
raising money and what are wedoing as a family?
Right, like they asked, and Iwas like that's super cool and
(35:37):
it was a great moment to kind oflike share our faith you know,
mine and my wife's viagenerosity, but do it with the
kids kind of in the moment.
Absolutely.
I love that, absolutely, thatgenerosity, but do it with the
kids kind of in the moment.
I love that yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
That's a great.
That's a great story, man, thatwas cool.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
And it was very unplanned and not like I'm super
dad in any way, that just kindof 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 howdo folks find you and we?
(36:15):
You know what's the website andhow do people know more?
Speaker 1 (36:18):
about you.
Yeah, just come tochurchcoachministriesorg.
Love to have you visit.
There's a spot.
You could drop us an email.
You can contact me directly ifyou want it, jeremy at
churchcoachministriesorg.
So I'd love to have aconversation with you and then
we offer different levels ofcampaigns too.
So we have campaigns designedthat are a 21-day prayer and
(36:39):
fasting approach, that areall-inclusive, include coaching,
and you can raise a sum ofprobably $300,000 or less in a
90-day period if you need to getsomething done quickly.
And then we have our morefull-blown campaigns, and so I
(37:03):
just wanted to share that, nomatter what church size you are,
we can help you through thatprocess, and we can talk about
the different processes andapplications that we can take a
look at for your church.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
Yeah, I love that Everyone go check out Church
Coach Ministries.
Jeremy's a good dude.
And Jeremy, you're speaking atour conference Modern Church.
I am Out in October, so give usa preview.
What are you?
Speaker 1 (37:23):
obviously it's something around vision
campaigns, or uh, so yeah, soI'm going to do a presentation
on um funding, funding ministry,um, through vision and through
discipleship, and so we'll takea deep dive into some of the
stuff we talked about today andsome new things uh, we'll talk
(37:44):
about there as well.
So join us there, and we'llalso, uh, have a booth there and
the whole bit.
You can come visit us.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
Oh man, it's going to be awesome.
Grateful you guys are coming.
Um, Jeremy, this has beenawesome.
Thanks for coming on the showtoday.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
Yeah, thank you very much and thanks for your time
and thank everybody out there.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
Yeah, absolutely.
Um, thanks guys for listening.
Uh, jeremy, check them out andwe'll catch you guys next week
on another episode of ModernChurch Leader, see ya.
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 (00:13):
Not much, just enjoying being with everybody
out here.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Hanging out on the podcast, so it's good to have
you.
I'm excited to talk aboutfundraising.
I'm excited to talk about, like, fundraising, you know.
Obviously Tithely was kind ofstarted because we wanted to
help churches, you know, befunded and help them do better
in the digital age and usingtechnology for raising money and
(00:38):
fundraising and all that.
So, yeah, this is a cool kindof intersection of what you do
and what Tylee does and all that.
But why?
Speaker 1 (00:54):
don't you start off by just telling folks a little
bit about yourself and how yougot into, you know, connected
with the church and ministry,and all into your business today
?
Sure, Well, my name is JeremyMalik and I actually grew up as
a church planter's son, whichmeant we moved around and we'd
start a new church every coupleof years and then.
So we lived in about five orsix different States when I was
growing up and then when I wentto college, I went to a
Christian college in the Midwestand actually never thought I
would go into ministry.
So I got my business degree andthat sort of thing and through
(01:19):
that process I went into bankingand I was a commercial lender
and ended up running a largesection of a mortgage company in
the Midwest for 11 years.
And in 2007, God put a call onmy 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 churchestoday and it went so well.
I started having churches callafterwards and saying, hey,
(01:40):
could you come help us out?
Could you come help us out?
Could you come help us out?
And by 2015, we launched ChurchCoach Ministries full time and
have been doing it ever sinceand just love it.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Yeah, that's pretty cool.
So what was it like to grow upas a church planter's son?
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Well, I actually really liked it and enjoyed it
because I was easily adaptableinto new areas.
So I have different pockets offriends from different places
where we've lived and I've stillat least kept one or two
friends from all these yearsgrowing up in different areas.
So for that part I've reallyenjoyed it.
It's helped me like dive intonew areas and not have any issue
(02:20):
with doing that.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Right, right, yeah, with doing that, right right,
yeah.
Yeah, having to every few yearsgo new school, new friends, new
activities or sports teams orwhatever you were into, I mean
that can be, that can be toughon a kid, absolutely.
It sounds like you kind ofdeveloped, uh, the skill set to
do that pretty well.
(02:42):
Yeah, yeah, I've enjoyed it.
So, yeah, what, what states youin?
Where'd you end up traveling?
Speaker 1 (02:47):
So we were in uh, indiana on three different
occasions.
We started at church in um PalmHarbor, Florida, and then we
were in Southern California.
I graduated from Newberry parkhigh 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 (03:08):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, very cool, very cool.
And when you, when you wentinto full-time ministry, what?
What role were you in?
What were you doing at thechurch?
Speaker 1 (03:15):
So my first role in ministry was as an executive
pastor, okay, and I reallyenjoyed that and I got to bring
in a lot of things I learnedfrom the business world and
apply them to the church world,and so that was really exciting
to do.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and when you're in that role was
sort of the finances and thekind of fundraising side of the
church, like there's regulargiving that is happening.
But then there are sometimeschurches do fundraising
campaigns to raise money for aproject or a building or a
school they want to build or tofund missions.
(03:52):
There's all kinds of reasonsthat they might do extra
fundraising campaigns.
Were you responsible for thoseprograms at your church?
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Yeah, so at the church that I was at, they had
actually had already previouslyhired an outside campaign
consultant company and it wasn'tgoing very well.
So the elders got together andthey 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 donethis before, but let's give it
a shot.
And so I think that was one ofthe advantages of looking
(04:21):
outside of the box and myexperiences in the business
world and designing a type ofcampaign that you won't see out
there typically, and so in thatit gave a freshness and a
different look at it, and so Iactually think that experience
helped me through it, right,yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
I mean, how'd the campaign go?
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Campaign went really well.
What we were doing is we wereconverting a boat showroom into
a church, and so I had theopportunity to do the design of
the interior of that and I hadan architectural background.
And then I had the opportunityto raise funds for it.
And one of the cool thingsabout this was it was a $500,000
(05:03):
tenant improvement job and weended up raising enough funds to
do the job.
But because of some techniquesI learned in the business world,
I have a philosophy that justbecause you raise the money
doesn't mean you have to spendit, and we actually did the
entire remodel of that projectfor $84,000 in cash.
(05:24):
We had all of the materials forthe project actually donated.
A funny story is I like to workout at LA Fitness at the time in
Southern California is wherethis church was, and they were
putting in 51 LA Fitnesses inSouthern California at the time,
and I was working out one dayand I loved their carpet.
It was this black specs carpet.
I thought, man, this is greatcarpet, and so I just asked who
(05:47):
would I talk to about thiscarpet?
And the manager gave me thephone number for the general
manager and I said do you haveany extra carpet in the back and
they took me to the back andthey had two rolls.
I quickly did the math If everyone of these things had two
rolls of carpet, well, they hadplenty of carpet for our church
plant.
And so I ended up taking thegeneral manager out to lunch
(06:11):
Imagine he likes to eat and Ijust asked him directly would
you donate the carpet to ourchurch plant?
We need about 28,000 squarefeet of carpet.
He made three calls across thedesk for me and they actually
delivered the carpet to ourchurch and then we installed it
ourselves.
And so, just so those kinds ofthings are what we do with
churches that are totallyoutside the box.
But but God provides.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
So oh, that's awesome , that's so cool, man.
Well, all right, so fastforward now.
Church Coach Ministries.
You've been doing this since2015,.
You said Correct, correct, Imean, tell us, yeah, I mean, I
guess, go a little deeper, likewhy did you start it and what
specifically, you know, do youguys do for churches?
Speaker 1 (06:53):
So I had spent time being an executive pastor in
local churches on a coupledifferent occasions and I
remember going through a periodof 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 gettingall these phone calls from other
churches to do campaigns forthem and so, uh, god, just
really put on my heart, jeremy,you could help one church, but
(07:15):
I'd rather you help many.
And so from that word from theLord is when we birthed Church
Coach Ministries and it's beenan amazing ride ever since and
we've been able to work withchurches in four different
categories.
I'll just share quickly.
We do build out design work andwe do it very simplistically in
the sense of we redesign theinside of the facility through
the eyes of the guest and whatthey will experience really for
(07:38):
the next 100, 200 people we'regoing to reach for Christ.
We focus on relationshipconnecting areas and we focus on
ministry flow of the facility.
And so in doing this, I go intoa lot of churches where they
have $60,000, $80,000 worth ofblueprints sitting in a corner
that they've never even touched,and so what we do is we come
(07:59):
give them a concept, autocaddrawings, 3d renderings at an
extremely affordable cost.
That way they can get an ideaif they want to move forward
without breaking the bank, andso that's kind of our philosophy
there.
And then we do an assimilationtraining with churches and
that's a four-month longtraining that we do.
That we really help churchesconnect with the community
(08:21):
through it.
And so we do a lot of missionalpieces where we get people in
the congregation to thinkmissionally without them even
realizing they're doing it, soit becomes second nature.
And then we do a stewardshiptraining with churches and then,
finally, we do the visioncampaigns which we're going to
dive into.
So those are our four areas.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, very cool.
Have you always done all four?
Did you kind of launch?
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Yep, no, we've always done all four of that.
For some reason, god gave me aunique skill set and that has
been our four and we have notwaived or moved off of it.
That has been our focus.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
Yeah, yeah.
You keep saying we did, youstart it with somebody.
Yeah, so we have a team.
We have a team of people mywife, Nicole works with us.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
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 Northright.
People at the right time and,interestingly enough, most
(09:26):
people that are on our teamalmost all of them have actually
gone through a vision campaignat 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 (09:38):
Yeah, I love that.
When you started it was it justyou.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Yep, I was a one-armed paper hand.
You were like oh that's awesome.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
So vision campaigns, or maybe known as capital
campaigns to some, tell us moreLike what is a vision campaign,
because some people may not know.
So let's start with what is avision campaign.
Why do churches even run thesethings?
Give us kind of the nuts andbolts.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
So for us, we have a simple philosophy.
Our philosophy is we serve arich God and oftentimes, because
of our human thought processesand everything, we actually make
God poor.
We put God in a box or we setan expectation upon Christ, and
what we want to do is we want totake that box we so often put
around Christ and we just wantto shatter it.
(10:27):
And in doing so, we want totake people in the congregation
through an intentional prayerjourney.
And here's what's so differentis our purpose is actually the
heart transformation of theindividual within the
congregation.
So we want people in thecongregation to actually
experience four different things, and the four things are we
want to give them opportunity topray.
That's obvious.
The second one is we wantpeople in the congregation to
actually experience fourdifferent things, and the four
(10:47):
things are we want to give themopportunity to pray.
That's obvious.
The second one is we want togive them an opportunity to
process with the Lord.
And what I mean by this is whenI was at the first church I was
at, I would lead the men'sministry and I'd meet with two
or three men at a time and Iwould always ask the question to
the men.
You know what does the voice ofthe Lord sound like to you, and
(11:10):
you know how many men couldanswer that question.
It wasn't very many.
And so what we would do is wewould study the Old Testament
and all the different ways thatthe Lord spoke to people, and we
would journal those down.
And then I would have themjournal their own life and write
down key decision moments anddifferent impact times in their
life, and they would start todraw parallels.
Well, what we want to do is wewant to create this environment
where they can actually hear theLord's voice and identify it
(11:30):
for themselves for some peoplefor the very first time.
And then, in this process, wewant to give them the ability to
ask questions, becauseoftentimes unasked or unanswered
questions become blockades orhindrances to people's obedience
.
And then the final step reallyis is we want to give them the
opportunity to commit to thevision of the church.
And this is what's so important, because committing to the
(11:52):
vision of the church is aunifying 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'sanything wrong with that but
when they go through thisprocess, they come out of it
unified.
So that's really the differencebetween a capital campaign and
a vision campaign.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Yeah, yeah, I love that.
I mean I love that you knowyou're helping people kind of
connect with you, know hearingGod in their own personal lives
comes in a lot of Old Testamentstudy and prayer.
That approach to you, knowworking with their people and
(12:39):
even even you helping them as aleadership, have this kind of
defined thing with somestructure and some but but
prayer and Bible being a corepart of it.
Over a period of time.
Are you doing this over many,many months?
Speaker 1 (12:49):
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, dependingon the project size and the
scope.
And so one thing to kind ofanswer that thought that you had
but the lead pastor of a churchreally enjoys this process
because we make it easy for themin the sense that we're
(13:09):
decentralizing the leadershipaspect to a campaign and then we
give the lead pastor one job,and one job only, and that is
casting vision, and most leadpastors love to cast vision, and
so we actually help implementthat vision as far as funding it
financially goes through thisprocess.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Yeah, Take us maybe a step down, practically speaking
.
So you're leading peoplethrough this kind of journey,
spiritual journey.
What is the?
The end goal in some sense isfinancial, though right it is,
you know, we're trying to raisesome amount of money for some
(13:51):
kind of project and so, when itcomes down to, okay, you've got
like the spiritual journey thateveryone's going on together,
the unifying journey.
How do you go about, you know?
Or what are people coming toyou for?
Like, what kinds of projectsare people coming to you for?
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Well, we're doing everything from debt reduction
of a mortgage payment to fullscale new builds and everything
in between.
So really we do go to all scope.
And one of the things that'sreally unique about our approach
is a church doesn't have tohave a decision made exactly
what they want to do to theirfacility to move forward in
(14:32):
doing this, because no matterwhat they choose, they're going
to need the finances to moveforward anyway.
So when somebody is committingto the vision of the church,
they're not necessarilycommitting to an exact project,
but the vision of the overallchurch.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
Got it, so it doesn't have to be.
Oh, we're putting a new roof onSure.
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 10year journey, maybe, right,
absolutely, absolutely, um, what?
What about the practicalfundraising steps along the way?
(15:08):
How do you, you know, give?
Speaker 1 (15:10):
us that so.
So one of the things that we doI'm going to give you two
different pieces of that One ofthe things we do in this process
is we do our two sessionstewardship course as part of
the prayer journey process, andwhat's interesting about that is
God took me through atransformational process in my
own life as it pertained to thesubject of dishonest gain, and
(15:30):
so I actually went away when Iwas kind of going in between
being a commercial lender andgoing into the mortgage world,
and I went away and visited myroommate at college and Saturday
night rolled around and it waslike hey, do you want to go to
church with me?
And I was thinking, I mean, thelast place I kind of want to go
is church.
I'm trying to get away.
Of course God always comes andgets you.
And so, anyway, at that pointin time I went and it was a very
(15:53):
unique sermon topic and thetopic was on dishonest gain, and
I was riveted on the edge of myseat and I walked out of there
committing to be a generousgiver from that point forward.
And then, also in that process,God dealt with dishonest gain
in my own life and I would takeclients out golfing for the bank
and I could never fill up thefoursome, so I'd add in a buddy
(16:15):
or two and I would expense mybuddy to the bank and God's like
that's done and I'm like cool.
And so, anyway, I developed thistwo session course, and what it
has to do with is what does itmean to be obedient to Christ,
not only with our finances butwith our lives?
And then the second session, wecome back and we talk about
what types of abundant blessingsdoes Christ have for our lives
if we're obedient to him?
(16:36):
And so, anyway, what thisprocess does is this puts the
individual that goes through thecourse, the person within the
congregation, into a spot wherethe light will come on and they
really have a choice to make AmI going to be obedient to Christ
with my life or am I not?
And we are seeing tremendousheart transformation take place
(16:58):
through this.
So I say all that to get tothis point.
To answer your question is, aswe go through the practical
steps of this, yes, when thecongregation commits to the
vision of the church, they'regoing to be making a pledge to
the church over probably a three, four or five year period,
depending on the size of theproject.
And then what happens is,through the power of prayer, we
(17:19):
are walking through the doorsthat the Lord opens and a lot of
times the Lord opens up doorsthat we walk through.
That allows us to connect withthe community and actually raise
funds outside the church walls.
And I'll just share one storyto bring this to an example for
you guys.
But we had a church that waspaying off the church debt and
(17:40):
it wasn't a very large church, achurch of about 90 people, and
they owed about $655,000 in debt.
And we had gone through thisprayer journey and I was
standing out in front of thechurch with the pastor one day
and I noticed they had a skatepark in front of the church and
I'd seen that for a while.
But this time I noticed acouple of broken off business
signs in there and I just askedthe pastor what's that about?
(18:01):
He said, well, if a ramp breaksdown, we'll call one of these
businesses, They'll chip in acouple of hundred bucks and
they'll fix the ramps and offthe kids go.
And I said is there any change?
You have a list of years.
But he did some research and hedeveloped quite a list and I
said here's what we're going todo.
We're going to invite them allto the church for a dinner as a
(18:22):
thank you and we have one ruleNobody from the church can
attend, because we wanted tofill it up with community people
.
They can serve at the event butnot attend.
And while they ate their dinner, we actually had local artists
paint paintings live on stageand we auctioned those paintings
off that night.
We literally paid off all ofthe church debt in one night
(18:43):
outside the church walls moneyfrom this process.
But that wasn't the best partof the story.
The best part of the story wasthree months later they were
running over 300 people becausea lot of these people brought
their families and called thistheir church home.
So that's what we do from acommunity aspect when we walk
through these doors that Godopens, yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
I mean, that's pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
The skate park for the one right there.
Yeah, who would have thought,right, right.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
I mean that's crazy.
And I think an interestingpoint to pull out is that was a
a pretty small church that did afundraising campaign, right
Like in your way, right Likevision 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,
(19:35):
churches of thousands.
This is like even churches ofhundreds can do this kind of
stuff.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
Yep, absolutely, and what what I find is is when,
when God gives the lead pastor avision, our Lord has the
finances to provide for thatvision.
Our responsibility simply is isgetting in alignment with what
Christ is doing and follow thepower of the Holy Spirit in this
process, and so that's what wedo, and we've seen a lot of
(20:00):
small churches raise anexorbitant amount of money that
you wouldn't think would bepossible, because the Lord has
provided in additional ways thatwe did not see when we all
first sat down and startedhaving those conversations.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
Right, right, right.
What other ways are you guyskind of bringing in the external
community Like I don't know?
Give me a few more like chartsor things that you've seen or
done along the way, where you'vebrought in outside businesses
to help raise money.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Yeah, so I'll give you.
I'll give you one.
We did.
We happened to have theopportunity to do a project for
a church in Watts, los Angeles,and through this process, one
thing churches need to know outthere is when they're praying
and fasting.
We're praying and fastingbecause a lot of times God will
speak to us, and then I'll callup the lead pastor and say, hey,
(20:49):
I feel like God's saying this.
What are you hearing?
Does this resonate with you?
And so this is one of thosecases where we had nine months
and we needed to raise literallyalmost a million dollars for
this church to be able topurchase a facility that was
otherwise going to be sold outfrom underneath them.
And so we live.
What we did is we had a concert,a benefit concert held at
(21:09):
another large church in SouthernCalifornia, hosted it for us,
and it was about a month and ahalf before the concert.
And this was before thepandemic and all of this and
before a lot of churches weredoing this.
But God woke me up in themiddle of the night and he just
put on my heart to live streamthe concert.
Well, I called the artist and Isaid, hey, you know, I feel
like we're supposed to livestream this.
He was like no way, man, hegoes.
(21:31):
If you live stream my band,it's going to sound terrible
that we're not doing that.
And I told him.
I said well, I feel like theLord's telling me we have to do
this.
Like, how are we going to dothis?
And he said well, I'll tell youwhat he said.
I'll play a nine song setbefore the regular concert, just
myself and a guitar.
You can live stream that, andthen I'll do the full concert.
Well, we've raised about halfof the money after that concert
(21:52):
night we had we got.
We got down to about 30 daysleft and every dollar came in to
purchase that facility becausewe were obedient to live
streaming and people continuedto give after the effect.
So that gives you an idea.
Every campaign is totallydifferent, but that would give
you another outside of the boxkind of concept.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
Right, right right, yeah, very, very cool.
Okay, take me another step.
Yeah, very, very cool.
Okay, take, take me anotherstep.
Like you know what, what?
What are the steps in the inthe process?
Speaker 1 (22:25):
of like kind of rate, like the nuts and bolts of
raising the money.
Well, really it.
It really hinges on prayer, andas we go through the prayer
process, what starts to happenis we see hearts transform.
Literally, we see hearttransform.
And so what happens is, in alot of cases and I'll share one
with you we had a church thathad 209 giving units in the
(22:48):
church and of those 209 givingunits, 13 of them gave 80% of
the funds.
This is pretty typical inAmerica, where a few support a
majority of the church RightWell, through the heart
transformation process, theirmonthly giving, after four
months they had so much hearttransformation.
After four months their monthlygiving tripled, literally
(23:10):
tripled.
Now that church did not grownumerically, but what happened
is heart transformation tookplace and they went from 13
giving units providing 80% ofthe funds to 134 giving units
supplying 80% of the funds.
And so we see this happen a lotwith the churches we work with,
where it's a residual impact,because the heart
(23:33):
transformations have taken place.
Not only are they raising thefunds for their project, but
they're seeing lifetransformation and generosity
take over within the individual,and that has much larger impact
on the church than even thecampaign does, and so that's one
of those residual impacts whenwe get down and we really look
(23:54):
at what's the difference and howare 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 hearttransformation that takes place
and all of a sudden, the churchis sitting there where, hey, we
now have more money for ministryas opposed to just raising
(24:15):
funds for the project, right,yeah, for that particular thing,
what kind of analysis?
Speaker 2 (24:19):
you kind of mentioned giving, units and that kind of
thing.
So it sounds like you're doingsome kind of analysis of the
church and the membership andweekly giving, yearly giving.
You're trying to understandfrom the financial side of the
church how things are going andwhat it looks like and then
maybe that leads to some insightinto what's possible and we
(24:45):
know anything's possible withGod and prayer and all that.
But you probably do some sortof like okay, it looks like you
could do this and that could bereasonable.
Now, where, where is God goingto show up in the whole thing?
But walk us through thatanalysis, Like, how do you help
churches look at their you knowthe church and the finances to
(25:07):
kind of understand how to thinkabout this?
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Yeah, here's been our experience.
Our experience is, when we dothose deep dive analysis kind of
kind of pieces, what we'refinding is typically a
consulting company would say youknow, whatever your annual
budget is, you should be able toraise one and a half times to
(25:29):
two times that number.
That is a typical analysis.
That's done.
What we're seeing happen inchurches that are engaged into
the process, we are seeingsometimes three, four, five, six
times an annual budget beingable to be raised.
So we go into it with the mind'seye of here's what's typically
(25:54):
possible, but we don't close thedoor on that.
So for example I'll just giveyou an example we're not going
to put the thermometer on thewall where we color it in as the
money comes in, because againwe feel like that's a box or an
expectation we're putting uponthings.
We want to see what the Lordcould show up Right, and so in a
(26:30):
lot of ways it renders thatfeasibility study, if we want to
call it that irrelevant.
It renders that feasibilitystudy, if we want to call it
that irrelevant, and so we gointo it with our eyes wide open,
but we also leave room for theHoly Spirit to work, if that
helps.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
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 (26:53):
the church.
So typically, to be honest, weusually have this conversation
with the church and you knowthey will just basically share
with us.
Here's what our average weeklygiving is, here's what our
budget is, here's where we arestaff wise as opposed to
building wise, and in the coststructure of things, and just
(27:13):
being able to look at that givesus a really good idea of you
know where's the health of thechurch, what needs to really be
focused on, because we might runinto that first example I
shared with you where 13 givingunits were giving the majority
of the funds.
If we run into that situation,we know that the stewardship
component that we offer withinthe campaign has to be a focus
(27:34):
point, because that's wherewe're going to gain true heart
transformation.
You know we might run intoanother church that doesn't have
quite that issue and it's amore balanced approach.
Now, that's rare, but, but itcould 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.
(27:55):
Right, right, yeah, yeah, Ilove that what?
Speaker 2 (27:58):
maybe we can kind of move into this the topic of like
money in churches andleadership.
Talking about money, I mean,sometimes in our experience it's
not.
It's actually quite often thatyou know like pastors talking
about money is uncomfortable.
They don't most don't reallywant to do it.
(28:18):
They weren't trained in how todo it.
Um, you know there's lots ofreasons, right.
So, like, what's been yourexperience when it comes to like
my experience is, you know, mydad was a pastor.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
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 ofthe hardest subjects that a
pastor has to face and talkabout.
And you're right, they're notnecessarily trained in that area
to be able to do that, and Ithink one thing that's unfairly
(28:54):
placed upon our lead pastors inthe country, or the world for
that matter, is that justbecause they're a lead pastor,
we expect them to be an expertin every category, everything.
They're supposed to run thebuild project.
They're supposed to be thecontractors.
They're supposed to run thebuild project.
They're supposed to be thecontractors, they're supposed to
be all of it.
And the truth of the matter isthey're called by the Lord to
(29:16):
oversee and lead people andreach people for Christ, and
that's their calling, and so itdoesn't surprise me that this
area is a struggle for a lot ofpastors, and so one thing that
we do when we go and we trainthe stewardship side of things,
one of my rules is is whoeverteaches this in the church, it
(29:38):
can't be the pastor and it can'tbe somebody who's on staff with
the church.
Because what we want to do is wewant to train somebody who
locks arms with the peoplewithin the church, that is,
somebody who ministers from amarketplace ministry standpoint
within that church.
They have a business career heor she does, or whatever the
(29:58):
case may be.
We want to train that person upbecause when they hear this
information from that person,their ears open up in a whole
different way.
It's almost like the pastorcould stand up week after week
and whatever topic it is, theycould speak upon it and and
certain things will seep into anindividual.
But they will always hear it ina different way than if
somebody who's they consider acolleague at their level.
(30:21):
So right, right, right speaksthe same thing.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
Now we're getting into the nuts and bolts, and now
you're giving yeah, now we'regetting like okay, so you're,
you're doing the thing and allthe pieces.
We've talked about prayer andbringing people along and
there's tons of transformation.
But you're, like I'm getting akey leader in the church, a lay
leader, somebody who's not onstaff, who, uh, somehow has a
(30:44):
you know, a good standingreputation in the church, has
been a business leader of somesort maybe, or done well in
their career and and isobviously aligned with the
vision and excited about wherethe church is going.
But you want them on stage, youwant them in front of the
congregation.
Uh, I'm sure some of the staffis also doing it too, somehow.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
But like sure they're involved to some level, but
they're not the mouthpiece ofthat particular topic.
Got it so?
Speaker 2 (31:12):
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 (31:19):
Yeah, so everybody we choose through this we do
through prayer, and we take acouple of days and pray and fast
on and what we find is is theLord tends to really bring that
person's name to the leadpastor'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 beable to train that individual,
(31:40):
it's usually like man, thisperson's perfect for this, you
know, and a lot of times we'relooking for somebody in their
own personal life that has anobedience story, and it doesn't
have to be with finances, it canbe with a life decision they
made, but some sort of testimonyaround obedience that they can
share.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
Yeah, so I love that.
I love that.
Yeah, maybe kind of in theclosing segment here.
How do you, how do you helpchurches celebrate?
Get to the end of this oryou're close or you know there's
some portion where you know youwant the church to kind of
experience the journey of it butthen also achieving the goal.
(32:18):
Maybe it doesn't always happen,but as that's happening, you
know what's your experience beenor how do you help churches
kind of with that, the endstages and celebrating and all
of that.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Well, we always encourage them to bring the
entire congregation together ina celebrational moment the
church in Watts that I sharedwith you.
When that goal was reached,everybody in the church got in
the quad and they all hadballoons and we did a
celebration and sent them upinto the air.
Celebration and send them upinto the air, but but collective
.
And I think it's important inthese celebration times, even in
(32:51):
the prayer times, to involvethe youth of our church.
A lot of times we think, okay,the parents, the older people,
even if they're singles orwhatever but but these are the
ones that we're communicatingwith.
I actually want to include, allthe way down through the prayer
component, the kids within thechurch too, so that they have an
understanding.
Hey, my parents are goingthrough this.
It gives them what is themeaning of fasting and praying.
(33:14):
A lot of times, people don'tlearn that discipline until
they're adults, and so these arekinds of things we want to
involve the entire family.
So when we celebrate, we alsowant to involve the entire
family.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
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 everyyear and there's kind of two
different moments Uh, oneearlier in the year, one a bit
later in the year for, like youknow, foreign missions, and then
local missions.
And uh, so this past weekend ortwo weekends ago, we kind of
(33:50):
took up the you know that thatthat offering, um, or like a
wrapped up, that offering hadbeen going on for a few months
and uh, so, like you know, as afamily, we're, we're giving in.
My kids, you know there'sthey're telling stories from
stage and they're kind of youknow like there's some people
from overseas talking about thechurches they've planted and
(34:10):
there's this, you know it's abig service around all these
things, um, super cool.
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, comehere.
And so we're all in a huddlearound 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 giveweekly and you know the the
(34:32):
particular campaign we're tryingto give like this much.
You know a multiple of like ourregular weekly giving kind of
thing.
And um, so you know we'rechatting as a family and I'm
like, okay, here's what thatlooks like.
And so you know we pull out ourphone my church obviously uses
Tithely, so pull out the phoneand bring up the giving form and
then, like you know, one kidtypes in the amount another kid
(34:53):
gets to hit the submit button.
And then also we were like, kindof as a ceremonial kind of
thing, everyone was writing downhow much they were giving and
then like walking it kind ofupfront and putting it in like a
box right.
They were giving and then likewalking it kind of up front and
putting it in like a box RightMore.
That was more of just like afun way of everybody being
engaged.
But we're giving digitally, soyou weren't really like putting
(35:15):
checks in or anything like that.
So then I have three kids, sothe third kid wrote it down and
brought it up and put it in thebox Kind of.
So I love like our kids arecurious, like our kids are
interested.
Our kids, my kids, perked upwhen it was like, oh, we're
raising money and what are wedoing as a family?
Right, like they asked, and Iwas like that's super cool and
(35:37):
it was a great moment to kind oflike share our faith you know,
mine and my wife's viagenerosity, but do it with the
kids kind of in the moment.
Absolutely.
I love that, absolutely, thatgenerosity, but do it with the
kids kind of in the moment.
I love that yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
That's a great.
That's a great story, man, thatwas cool.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
And it was very unplanned and not like I'm super
dad in any way, that just kindof 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 howdo folks find you and we?
(36:15):
You know what's the website andhow do people know more?
Speaker 1 (36:18):
about you.
Yeah, just come tochurchcoachministriesorg.
Love to have you visit.
There's a spot.
You could drop us an email.
You can contact me directly ifyou want it, jeremy at
churchcoachministriesorg.
So I'd love to have aconversation with you and then
we offer different levels ofcampaigns too.
So we have campaigns designedthat are a 21-day prayer and
(36:39):
fasting approach, that areall-inclusive, include coaching,
and you can raise a sum ofprobably $300,000 or less in a
90-day period if you need to getsomething done quickly.
And then we have our morefull-blown campaigns, and so I
(37:03):
just wanted to share that, nomatter what church size you are,
we can help you through thatprocess, and we can talk about
the different processes andapplications that we can take a
look at for your church.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
Yeah, I love that Everyone go check out Church
Coach Ministries.
Jeremy's a good dude.
And Jeremy, you're speaking atour conference Modern Church.
I am Out in October, so give usa preview.
What are you?
Speaker 1 (37:23):
obviously it's something around vision
campaigns, or uh, so yeah, soI'm going to do a presentation
on um funding, funding ministry,um, through vision and through
discipleship, and so we'll takea deep dive into some of the
stuff we talked about today andsome new things uh, we'll talk
(37:44):
about there as well.
So join us there, and we'llalso, uh, have a booth there and
the whole bit.
You can come visit us.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
Oh man, it's going to be awesome.
Grateful you guys are coming.
Um, Jeremy, this has beenawesome.
Thanks for coming on the showtoday.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
Yeah, thank you very much and thanks for your time
and thank everybody out there.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
Yeah, absolutely.
Um, thanks guys for listening.
Uh, jeremy, check them out andwe'll catch you guys next week
on another episode of ModernChurch Leader, see ya.
Popular Podcasts
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.