Every spring, my wife and I enjoy planting flowers and vegetables in our garden together. We have an annual ritual where we go to a friend’s local greenhouse to select our bedding plants.
Sometime back in February, I drove by that greenhouse and was surprised to already see a large pallet of bedding soil out front. It occurred to me that our springtime purchase of flowers is made possible because of those who have already readied the beds, planted and watered the seeds and meticulously prepared for the planting season.
Some people gain notoriety for what they didn’t do. For instance, Pythagoras didn’t discover the Pythagorean Theorem. People had been using it for at least a thousand years before he was even born. Pythagoras just named it!
Thanks to the generous estate gift from the Rimmer and Ruth De Vries family, the Abraham Kuyper Christian Leadership Fund has been established at Barnabas Foundation to advance the Reformed world and life view as taught and lived by Abraham Kuyper.
For most churches, giving is framed by the annual budget. No matter the size or kind, any gift made towards the year-end goal gets lumped together. It’s all giving.
But church leaders have to think differently. Any thought of expanding ministry requires a plan to pay for it. This means finding new ways to think and talk about giving.
Barnabas Foundation welcomes Lindsay Canan, J.D., as the newest member of its national team of planning attorneys. Canan will augment the Foundation’s ongoing efforts to help generous Christians develop God-honoring estate plans that support the needs of their families, churches and favorite ministries.
Every financial literacy guru promotes strategies to skip the cycle of living paycheck to paycheck. So, why do churches get to ignore this? Is there a way to save money for church ministry that hasn’t even been dreamed of yet?
