6 books that will change how you think about church funding
WARNING: This is NOT a list of popular leadership books. These books will make you think (and may even frustrate you at times).
Whatever time it takes you read them and whatever cost that comes with acquiring them is well worth it. The impact of the information you’ll read in these books will be felt in the nonprofit (that includes churches) world for many years to come.
Uncharitable by Dan Pallotta (Tufts, 2008)
ROI for Nonprofits by Tom Ralser (John Wiley and Sons, 2007)
Strategic Giving by Peter Frumkin (Chicago, 2006)
Growing Givers Hearts by Thomas H. Jeavons and Rebekah Basinger (Jossey-Bass, 2000)
The Networked Nonprofit by Beth Kanter and Allison Fine (Jossey-Bass, 2010)
In Pursuit of the Almighty’s Dollar by James Hudnut-Beumler (University of North Carolina, 2007)
My E-Book experiment
I have never written an e-book before.
Bill Seaver has been encouraging me to test this platform and see if it would be an effective way to communicate with my readers. His advice has proven to be invaluable to me in the past, so I thought I’d give it a try.
I took some existing content and assembled into a book format. Then, I contracted with a local Web designer who I’ve worked with for years and loaded it on Issuu.com and Box.net. That was Monday afternoon, March 22.
What happened next was nothing short of a miracle.
By the time I got up Tuesday morning at 4 a.m., I already had nearly 100 alerts in my inbox. Thinking someone had hacked my account and sent out a crazy direct message about how much money I made selling tissue paper (or something) on Google, I rushed to open my laptop and see what had happened.
I realized that Ed Stetzer had endorsed the e-book about 12:30 a.m that morning. By 4:10 a.m., more than 200 people had already read or downloaded the e-book. Then, Ron Edmondson published an interview with me later that morning. Those two posts along with a series of Tweets and Facebook updates from countless other church leaders sent off a chain reaction that took this experiment “viral” in every sense of the word.
To date, more than 800 people have read or downloaded the e-book. The number continues to grow daily.
I continue to receive notes that tell me how much it challenged them to think differently and offered a vocabulary and process to what they already intuitively knew as well as notes that said it was the encouragement they were looking for to continue to “press on.”
Kerry Bural from also featured the e-book in the post “Same Old, Same Old” just doesn’t cut it.
I’m grateful to everyone who mentioned the e-book in a Tweet, Facebook update, blog post, e-mail, etc., and I’m indebted to those who took the time to download or read the e-book online. I pray that it was helpful to you in your ministry.
I’m humbled I get to do this for a living.
God is good. All the time.
“Uncharitable” is a must-read for church leaders
I think every pastor and church leader should read Uncharitable by Dan Pollatta.
1. Dan will make you mad. He challenges conventional thinking. It’s one of those books that I love to read because it stretched my thinking. One page excited me. The next page made me want to throw the book away.
2. Dan provides a comprehensive historical context that explains why and how we think about nonprofits, their work, and how we should manage them. It’s important for us to understand the source of our assumptions to understand how perpetuating them inhibits our ability to fulfill our potential to make a measurable difference and create lasting change.
3. Dan argues that nonprofit leaders should value impact and results, not efficient management. There is a lot of talk about efficiency. In other words, we praise leaders who do as much as possible with as little as possible. Instead, Dan says we should place the emphasis on impact and results. For profit companies aren’t rewarded because they produce cheaper products; they are rewarded for creating and marketing products that achieve and exceed sales goals. This principle is even more important when we put it into the nonprofit context because we are tasked with solving social problems, economic inequities, and facilitating spiritual formation.
Dan certainly doesn’t speak directly to churches. He doesn’t use vocabulary that is familiar to most church leaders. Nevertheless, the application is very clear to me. The work we do as churches is far too important to perpetuate the status quo at the expense of providing and executing a plan for change that achieves measurable results.
