EP133: Steve Pike & New Streams of Funding for Your Church

Okay, so I've been doing a little traveling here, coming out of the COVID season. I've been double shot, thank you very much, Moderna, gone through the waiting period, and so as a result I've been traveling. A couple weeks ago I was at Austin for an Exponential Ventures event looking at twenty innovative churches and organizations that are out doing incredible things in digital church and disciple making and team building. Beautiful, beautiful stuff. Bible vocational love churches, love organizations that are thinking different and that are innovating even in the midst of this COVID season.

But let me go back another trip. Earlier I flew out to Colorado where I had the chance to sit down with Stadia, spend some time with the planter development team. Craig Whitney is VP of planter development, been on this podcast many times, and just really enjoyed actually getting to see some of these people face to face because honestly I don't think I had met maybe half the people that were there with the planter development team because it's been COVID season and I onboarded with Stadia so quickly right before COVID hit.

One of the things Craig Whitney did was he gave me this book: "Next Wave: Discovering the 21st Century Church" by Steve Pike. And it was an incredible, phenomenal book. Honestly, like when I'm flipping through this book and reading it, a lot of the thoughts that I've had over the past couple years, I'm actually seeing what's in my head on the pages of this book. So much so I was like, "Hey Craig, I got to talk to the Steve guy. I want to sit down, I want to dialog with him, I want to learn more." And so I had a chance to. Here with this podcast episode we're going to talk about the book. Throughout here there's links in the show notes to grab the book. I would encourage you church planters, maybe churches, existing established churches that are maybe looking, trying to think different in this new season, check this out. Listen to what's going on here within the podcast and click on that link and go buy that book.

Ultimately, the focus of this today's podcast—literally, and I think I said in the interview, we could go each chapter. I think there's twelve, thirteen chapters. We could spend a podcast or two just talking about each chapter. Like there's a lot of depth and a lot of innovation, a lot of new ways of thinking, looking at his book. But what I really wanted to focus on with this interview comes down to how we are funding, how we are paying for the ministry of the church.

I personally have noticed there's been a surge of bivocational, co-vocational type people that are interested in planting, at least digital churches. And I'm seeing in other spaces as well. So what does it mean to be bivocational? Is that an effective way? Are there other ways to pay for ministry, to support the ministry that's happening? Does it all have to be in tithes and offerings? When the economy is crashing and up to like sometimes thirty, forty percent of tithes, some churches I know are literally down thirty, forty percent. The economy is hard in some areas, not to mention areas like urban centers where the economy is always hard.

And this is really the background of what Steve Pike is bringing to the conversation. He's founder of the Urban Island Project, which often does ministry, always does ministry within those urban centers, and talks in the podcast about how a bivocational church can work in the urban centers. The church can work anywhere. And so what does it mean? What does it look like to do funding in these urban centers where the tithes and offerings are not going to be flowing? How do we survive? How do we thrive in those areas? And how can we help the community along the way?

So we're bringing in Steve Pike, author of "Next Wave: Discovering the 21st Century Church," and also founder of the Urban Islands Project, and myself, Jeff, with the Church Digital and Stadia Church Planting, in a conversation that I'm calling "New Funding Streams for Your Church."

Okay, everybody, here you go. I love this book, talking about the "Next Wave: Discovering the 21st Century Church." I was given this by Craig Whitney, VP of planter development at Stadia, and man, I just, I opened up the, he literally, uh, Steve, this is the copy that you gave Craig Whitney. Like he just was like, "Hey Jeff, take this." It was such a good conversation. I was so pulled into it. I think Craig actually felt bad, but he was like, "Yeah dude, I want the book. You're gonna give it to me like right now." Uh, because the table of contents, honestly Steve, like it's you're in my head here. Like this is the stuff that I've been thinking for months, for years, you know? Look at just rediscovering the church, reimagining disciple making, discipleship from a program to a lifestyle, reinventing funding, rethinking team building from title positions to disciples on mission, redeeming architecture, reclaiming the ecosystem from isolating to complementing, refreshing metrics. It's like, "Oh, this is so good. This is so needy, needed. This is so necessary." It's probably a better word in this time. Like this is beautiful stuff. I just, I want to ask, like even just to kick it off, where did this come from? What were the experiences in your life that maybe brought you to this point of writing this book?

Yeah, great question. Well, I, seven years ago, I was leading church planting for a large national denomination in the U.S., and so I had this vantage point that I could see kind of what was going on from the forty-thousand-foot level. And I started to become distressed about the fact that the church was not going to the hard places, especially cities. And it went from being distressed to being a sense of calling. And I blew up my perfectly good job at the national office with, you know, pay and benefits, and said, "I'm gonna go do, I don't even know what I'm gonna do, but I have to go figure this out." So I plunged into a city and started gathering church people that felt called to the city together and said, "You know what, I don't know how to do this, but you probably don't either, but you're called. Let's figure it out together." And that was the birth of Urban Islands Project.

Fifty projects later in seventeen-plus cities, I started realizing there are things, there are things we're discovering because doing, being the church in the city has forced us to not do some things that are kind of common to what I call conventional church planting, twentieth-century church planning. And I realized one of the problems is we're in the twenty-first century. It's being invented in the cities. So if you can learn how to be the church in the city, you can kind of learn how to be the church everywhere, because the culture is formed here and exported from here. So that was the seed bed for this. And so I kind of coalesced all of that, everything we've learned from all the people we've worked with. So this is not just me. It's all these people that we've been on a journey together, and we're still, I mean, this is the startup phase. But we just said, "You know what, there's what we found was everybody had to kind of have a shift from sort of a twentieth-century way of processing things and doing things to something that's more appropriate for the twenty-first century." And that's where all this came from. So it's twelve shifts. There's probably more, but those are the ones I figured out so far.

Yeah, I love those shifts. And honestly, like the majority of them I could do like a podcast episode just on that. Like you and I could become best buds here on the podcast doing nothing but talking about chapter by chapter through the book. Like it's really rich. We'll put the link in the show notes, check it out. I'd love for you to process some of this, and audience, process some of this as well. But what I really wanted to kind of hone in on, and the thing that I think really fits for us today, is the, what was the exact phrasing? Was the, oh, I closed the book, but it's the funding, rethinking funding. Um, with that, and so we do here with the Church Digital, we talk a lot about online ministry, digital ministry, but specifically with digital-only church planting. It's an interesting stat. I've probably talked with a hundred people over the past year towards planting a digital-only expression of a church, and easily seventy-five percent of them, seventy-five out of one hundred, are wanting to do it bivocational, co-vocational. Like it's there. Just to quote, actually, I was speaking to an IT director of a Fortune 500 company who lives up in Canada, and his exact words were, "Jeff, why would I want to quit my job and run a church? I just want to run a church while I'm doing my job. Can you help me do that?" And so it just, there's this wave of people that I've seen even walk away from full-time ministry to do more of a co-vocational and maybe a bivocational approach.

And I know you talked about the Kobo and the Bible in the book, but you even took a different approach, looking at it more towards like funding the institution in my mind. I was wrestling with funding the individual, but you took it a step further and said, "You know, hey, there's different streams that your organizations need to work through towards to get towards funding." You want to talk some about that?

Absolutely, yeah. I kind of agree. I mean, the twelve shifts are kind of like twelve kids. It's really not fair to say this is my favorite kid, but I think this one is the most transformational and most practically transformational. It's such a huge inhibitor because I hear people talking about church planting and expanding the church, and the first question out of their mouth is, "You know, is it normal? You know, how much do we need to raise to start a church? Is it half a million? Is it this or that?" And you know, so there's already this orientation toward a church being something that requires a lot of upfront, it's almost similar to starting a business. You got to come up with a bunch of startup capital. There's a bunch of initial startup costs. It's very complicated. And honestly, it's very inhibiting to the rapid expansion of the church because if everything you start is big and complicated and expensive, you're just not going to start as many. They might be great. I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing to do, but it really stops you from going to a lot of places.

And my thing, I felt like I was called to crack the code of, was how to get into urban centers. But it's the same problem for somebody who's thinking about a digital church if they're thinking about it through traditional lens. And the traditional lens, in fact, I, the subtitle of the chapter is "From Self-Sustain to Sustainable." And so self-sustaining, excuse me, self-sustaining is kind of a very common missiological description of what people consider to be a viable church. They say, and it's even called, it's been called the three-self church: self-governing, self-propagating, self-sustaining. And so people have, you know, grown up with, I grew up with the idea that the only churches that really were valid were the ones that were self-sustaining, and everything else was just missions or whatever. And if they had any outside support, it wasn't, they weren't quite real churches. And so to be a real church, you got to be self-sustaining.

Well, that gets to be a real problem when you're in a situation where that particular revenue stream, as I call it, of tithes, that's the idea. The revenue, the way that a church is appropriately supported is through the tithes of the people that are benefiting from that church. And so that creates a big problem when you're going into a place where you don't have a lot of people that have a background in a traditional church setting, like the internet, maybe, people that are...

That you're reaching through digital churches, you know, they may—their background may not—they may not have no background in a traditional church or a little background or very negative background. Last thing you want is to give their money to a church. And so the distance between your first point of contact with them and them actually becoming part of funding your ability to serve them through the church is a pretty long trip. And a lot of churches, I would say an increasing number of churches, are not making—they're not making the transition from the startup idea to self-sustaining because they can't get the critical mass of tithe givers assembled to pay for what they're doing.

And so that was, you know, I realized, okay, we either can't go to difficult places or we have to figure out that maybe God has other ways of funding the church that aren't just tithes and offerings. Is the tithe and offering idea really sacrosanct? Is that really something that we have to do?

If you do a little study of church history, I mean, even just reading the Book of Acts, those guys were, you know, Paul was making tents. Aquila and Priscilla—a lot of the people in the early New Testament church were doing things that supported themselves and allowed the community of believers to function. That had nothing to do with tithes and offerings. Tithes and offerings are part of it.

So out of this, you know, I started studying all the different ways that churches were being funded and came up with five categories of funding that we actually recommend somebody doing anything that is going to be called a church, whether it's an online church or an urban church or a rural church. You've got to create—you've got to figure out how is this church going to be sustainable, including the person. I think you start with the person. That's like put your face mask on before you put it on your kid, or else you're gonna pass out. Your kid's not gonna have a face mask on.

So the idea is you do need to take care of the catalyst. You've got to make sure the catalyst can be in the community, can be available to the community. But then, you know, depending on the expression of the church, there may be some other costs. And I would say to you, even with the digital church where maybe the actual operational costs are relatively low, the church that develops a lot of revenue streams can actually be involved in mission to a greater degree. Where they can start to be generous towards other missions opportunities or do tangible things within the real world that, again, they're harvesting revenue that is God-provided and then putting that out there to help move forward the work of the kingdom.

So I think we've been leaving money on the table by saying that the only way to support anything is through tithes and offerings.

Yeah, and even getting to this place of you can't go to the hard places because economically the hard places may not even be able to fund that. So I know tithes and offerings is the primary one. Maybe that's a 2020 idea, you know? Even like, maybe self-sustaining—it just needs to look different.

I'm just curious, before you even get to the five, as you're like, what are some examples in urban centers? You're doing this mostly, and you talked about how, you know, if you can do it in the hard place, if you can do it in urban, that you can do it anywhere. So like, what are some examples or stories of how churches are coming out of or churches are succeeding in some of these urban centers?

Absolutely. Before I answer that question, I want to just give you—there was just another thing that underscores why this is such an important conversation. I was reading an article about three years ago now. It was in The Atlantic, which is, uh, mostly online, I think they still print some, but anyway, it's a very interesting publication. And they actually did an article about why the church wasn't going to underserved communities. And they interviewed this guy who's a co-vocational planter. And anyway, here's the thing—this secular magazine, basically their conclusion after they got some sociologists to study this and stuff, they said that what they realized was keeping the church from going to underserved places was that the funding model disincentivized people from going to the hard places because the funding model was based on an ROI model. It's a business model. And when you actually do an ROI analysis on a low-income place, it just—the math doesn't work. And especially in urban areas, you have lower income and higher costs.

And so there's actually, ironically, and of course people always say, "Well, we're starting this church to reach lost people," and yet their funding mechanism actually incentivizes them from hanging out with lost people. They're incentivized to hang out with people who have money and know how to give. And so if they have the choice between the Christian businessman who knows how to tithe and the atheist who is a long way from giving, they're going to hang out with the Christian businessman, which actually diverts them from the whole point, you know?

So that's a real problem. So let me give you a couple of examples that will give a hint about some of the streams. One of—I got a call from a guy one day who had heard about us, and he was wrestling with this question of how he funded his church. His name is Jose Perez. And he says, "My name is Jose Perez. God has called me to plant a church in downtown Minneapolis, but I cannot figure out the ROI."

Now, most church planters don't use that language. People that have a business background, they do. So I said, "Jose, tell me your story, because I bet the answer is in your story."

He said, "I grew up in the nation of Venezuela. I became a professional dancer. I started a dance studio, ended up owning a chain of dance studios across the nation of Venezuela."

I said, "Jose, do people in Minneapolis need to know how to dance?"

He said, "Yes."

I said, "Do you know how to start a dance studio?"

He said, "Yes."

And then he went, "Oh!" And I said, "Yeah."

Because, you know, six months later he started One Reason Dance Studio. Six months after that, One Reason Church. And what he realized, and I realized, was that his ability to think about how the church could be sustainable had been hampered by his mission or his ecclesiology—the idea that all of the funding had to come from tithes and offerings. And he couldn't get—he couldn't make the math work in his head, which he was a smart guy. He actually tried to make the math work.

And so instead, he figured out, "Wait a minute, I've got this other skill set. I've got this other opportunity. I can generate another revenue stream that makes the church sustainable." And, oh yeah, by the way, it was a great way to connect with people in the neighborhood.

Now, the problem is, I don't know about you, but I'm not going to be able to start a dance church. I'm going to be in jail for false advertising if I try to start a dance church. So it's obvious that's one example of a model. And the mistake people would make was, "Okay, well, I can't do that."

But I have another friend who started a coffee shop church. I have another friend who started an after-school program that was funded through grants that were not able to be given toward the church. It was, by definition, or by the foundations that he was seeking money from, were restricted from giving to religious organizations. And so he couldn't start a church using their money, but he could start an after-school program. Which—but a bank gave them a place to meet and actually some money for staff. And so they were able to start a church in partnership with the after-school program. People funded the after-school program. He made sure it was world-class and great, that satisfied what they were looking for. But then the church used the building and the staff when they weren't using it.

So those are just some small hints of how this works.

That's beautiful. Um, Jose—it's interesting, like there was intentionality in Minneapolis with the dance. Like there was—it was One Reason, One Reason. It kind of matched up where it was both the dance studio and it was the church. So it was like they were two sides of the same coin. That's beautiful.

As my dog jumps into the podcasting—oh, there you go. I love it.

Yeah, no, that's all right. What's your dog's name?

Uh, my dog is Ray, and she very much is lonely, so she's letting me know that. Yes, it's very sweet. We're totally gonna leave this in.

That's good. I've got two watch dogs here that are about fifteen pounds, and they're sleeping right now, I think. So anyway, yeah, no, you know, actually the win for the One Reason example is that, you know, the dance studio provided the space. And you know what? You do with the dancing—well, you need a big open space. But you can fill that up on Sunday with chairs if you want to have a traditional gather church. And so yeah, for him it was just that they're not only do they meet in the same place, but yeah, they sort of—yeah, the One Reason—there's one reason for this dance dude: to teach you how to dance. There's one reason for this church: to teach you how to dance with Jesus, you know?

Hey, so I mean, we teased and we talked a little bit about these different stream options. So let's go and talk it through. Like, what are we looking at here with these streams? Obviously, there's the tithes and offerings. I think everybody in any church knows what that's about. And whether it's done during digital or writing the check or, you know, it was funny—we've done podcasts recently talking about Bitcoin and how to even use some of the new currency and accepting that. And so like, there's a lot of intentionality in churches, and sometimes it's effective in the new economy, sometimes it's not.

So maybe let's explore some of that. Like, what works and what doesn't work in that?

Absolutely, absolutely. So, yeah, so yeah, we'll just go through them one at a time. And I will say, yeah, definitely tithing is one of the funding streams. I'm not saying we shouldn't invite people to tithe. In fact, here's the cool thing: once you detach the survival of your church from the tithe, then the tithe actually—you're able to appeal to people for the biblical reason of why we tithe.

The biblical reason why we tithe is to protect our hearts from materialism. It's, you know, the Scripture warns us that storing up treasure for yourself on earth is not where you want to put it. You want to put it in heaven. And so the reason, you know, the reason tithing has always kind of been part of the deal with somebody following God—I mean, all the way back in the Old Testament, that's kind of where the whole idea came from—but it's always been about protecting us. It's always been an action. It's a discipleship action. It's a stewardship action. It's not about paying bills. That's what we've made it about.

I've literally heard pastors say, "Hey, folks, you know, you need to be faithful and tithe as an offering so we can pay our mortgage, pay our bills, pay our staff," whatever. And that's a horrible connection to me because that's actually not the purpose. We give our tithe to God. I mean, they used to bring their tithe, which was like some kind of animal, and kill it and destroy it. You know, I guess the priest got to eat some of the meat and stuff, but you know, it wasn't—it was about protecting the heart of the giver.

Really a true sacrifice to God. So we give the tithe as an action saying, "I trust you. I'm giving this as a statement of trust." So anyway, just want to emphasize this approach that we're taking actually helps people give more for the right reasons, and it will actually help their heart.

So that's so, yeah, tithing is one stream and that needs to be part of it. Second one is what I call donor-based giving, and that means people from outside the church. So depending on what you're doing, starting a digital church, um, make the case. You know, I mean, you and I were both at this meeting last week in Austin. We heard I don't know how many of those guys you already knew, but I was blown away with the stories and the scope and the scale. You know, they've got a story to tell you. You know, "Hey, your gift of a thousand bucks will help us reach, you know, 200,000 people with the message of the Gospel," or something like that. Wow, okay, that's a great story.

So you know, maybe at the end of the day, somebody's got an online church and they got ten people out of the 20,000 or whatever they're connecting with that's actually giving some tithe. Well, that's going to be hard for them to live on, but they can tell the story to somebody else and say, "Hey, you know, I can do this, but in order for me to do it well, I need to give it more time and attention. In order for me to do that, I need some support," or whatever the case they're trying to make is. Donor-based allows for another revenue stream to come in, but it's a different ask. You know, tithing is a different ask than donor-based. You kind of need to make the case about the mission.

So what I want to emphasize in each one of these categories is I think there's a, you know, you can believe in tithes and offerings but do a poor job of teaching people about tithing, or you can do a really good job. You know, you can have donative income and you can do a poor job of developing that, or you can do a really good job. So all of these, you know, you want to think about developing your competency in maximizing the revenue that flows through these different categories. But each one of them are different. Each one of them require a different approach.

So the second category is donative. The third is that one we've been talking about: co-vocational. And that word, that language, it's sort of become, I, somebody made it up recently, probably in the last three or four years, started saying "covo" instead of "bivo," but I think there's some wisdom in changing that nomenclature because "bi-vocational" sort of, that actually comes from the term "bi-vocation." You know, it's cutting something in half. And, you know, the idea that it's a good idea, especially you're starting a more traditional congregational kind of a church, um, the idea that you can, you know, have a forty-hour-a-week job with an hour commute on each end and then have time margin left over in your life to really give your energy to starting up a faith community is just, it, I haven't seen that prove to be very realistic.

Um, but so that's why, so the idea of splitting yourself in half and, you know, fifty hours a week to one and fifty hours a week another, you got a burned-out person pretty fast. So we suggest the co-vocational. The idea is it's compatible, it's cooperative, it gives you the margin you need. So there's a broad range in there. I do have, I mean, we're working with a couple of investment bankers in New York City. They are able to call their own shots as far as their time. They have six-figure incomes and they're starting a church on the side. So their co-vocational deal looks like, you know, they're making good money in probably thirty hours a week in their vocational jobs, and then they've got another thirty hours a week or so they can give to developing the faith communities that they're leading. So that's kind of that would probably be called "bi-vocational" in the old language, but because of their flexibility and they're not, they do commutes, but they're able to call their own shots on time.

But the other idea about "covo" is just filling in the gaps. You know, like so you've got tithe money coming in, you've got donor money coming in, and you know, you're short two thousand bucks a month in paying all the bills. Depending on your circumstance, there may be something you can do that is a side gig, a side hustle, that will fill in that gap and it's compatible with what you're doing.

So we had, you know, one of the things that's happening now in cities is these scooters, these electric scooters, which are an absolute riot. Have you ever done one yet? Have you ever been on a scooter?

Oh yeah, yeah, they're a lot of fun as long as you don't, you know, die.

Yeah, it's great, right? Right. Yeah, but you know, we're, you know, I'm, I'm, uh, you might be surprised at this, but I'm older than you probably. Um, and, uh, I mean, well, my wife and I are both in our mid-sixties, and you know, most people think we should be in rocking chairs at this point, but we get, uh, we jump on these scooters and you know, go to the restaurants that are a mile away or something like that, and it changes it from a fifteen-minute walk or fifteen or twenty-minute walk to a, you know, five-minute joy ride. Uh, anyway, I digress.

So the point is, one day these scooter companies just showed up in Denver, and, you know, I'm walking down the street here, it says "Start for one dollar." I'm thinking, "I got to do this," you know? So I scanned my phone and I started in a good, but they had thought ahead like, "Okay, how do we charge these things back up?" Because they're all electric and they don't have like a central place. What they do is they get people to charge them up at night, pick them up, charge them up at their home or their apartment or wherever they want to do, and then put them back on the street and actually pay you to do that.

So one of our church planters here in one of the Denver neighborhoods figured that out. He's got two teenagers in a van. So they went around and picked up as many of those scooters as they could every night around ten, eleven o'clock. So there's not a lot going on at ten or eleven o'clock in the life of your typical church planter, so it wasn't taking away time from his life. Picked them up, brought them back to their house, charged them up overnight. In the morning, they got up at six, drove around, dropped them all off. But boom, but a bang, they're making two grand a month. They filled that gap. They had about it. And so it was completely compatible.

So you know, just, and again, I know that's not available everywhere, but there's usually something. You know, people design websites on the side. They do, they do side hustle stuff. I mean, it's not an unheard-of idea. Um, but uh, that's another, that's another channel is that potential channel.

So then the last two are, uh, probably the ones I would call the most, um, blue ocean strategy kind of deals. I think this is where the most of the money is being left on the table. The first three, most people have heard of. That it's not unusual to them. They may not have thought about combining them, but that's what I want to get to at the end here. But uh, so the last two, the first one would be for-profit partnerships. I'm sorry, not non-profit partnerships is where I want to start. Non-profit partnerships. And this is where every community has other non-profits already doing something. There, almost every community, even in rural communities, uh, there's non-profits that are doing something to serve people. And again, I'm probably, I'm still in a learning curve about what's going on online, but I'm sure there's creative things that are happening um that this may even apply and there might be a way to fund it. Um, but just talking about, you know, the world I know, like going back to my friend that had the non-profit, uh, well, let me back up. There's two channels to each one of these. One is you partner with an existing non-profit. So you go to like a Boys and Girls Club and say, "Hey, you guys are doing a great work. You've got this building, you've got this gym. We would like to use the gym or use a meeting space or something like that once a week at a time when you're not using it. Could we trade off ten hours of volunteer time for using that room, you know, or that gym or something one night a week?"

Most of the time, you're going to be able to find some kind of arrangement that's a win-win for you and for them, and it has all kinds of ancillary benefits because now you're, you know, instead of building a building, all the cost that goes into that, you're actually sharing space with a group that already has connectivity in the community that you're trying to make connections with. All that kind of stuff, it's just there's so many good things that come out of those.

But then sometimes you go into the community and you realize there's a gap. There's something missing. There's something that needs to be happening. It's not happening. And you do the research and you realize, yeah, there's a cry for this. It's, and but it's not the church. It's something else. So that's where my example of the guy started after-school program. He went around in the neighborhood first of all just trying to figure out how they could cut down on crime, and they realized a lot of the stuff was happening between four and six. The parents weren't home from work yet. The kids, you know, the inmates were running the asylum. And so he, they said to him, "Hey, if you guys, if you guys did something with the kids between four and six that would get them off the street, it would cut down on the crime." Sure enough, all of that did. And so what, once he started that after-school program, actually when he started it, that's all he was going to do was just start an after-school program. Some of the kids started coming to faith in Christ through their relationship with him, and then he realized, "Huh, maybe there's a church happening here." And so he already had the building for the meeting to take place, and the kids are already used to coming there, so it was just an easy switch.

And so that's, so the two categories are either start, either work with somebody who's already in existence and either reduce cost or develop some kind of revenue stream that helps you do that, or start something new that opens up a channel of revenue that is not, it would otherwise not be available to the church. That's the non-profit category.

And then the four, the for-profit, is what we talked about with, um, my friend Jose. And, uh, you know, that is the idea that look for compatibility with, um, you know, you basically do a research, you do an asset, you do a market analysis of a community and say, "Okay, uh, this place can support a coffee shop, or this place can support a shared workspace, or this place can support an events center. There's a need for that." You look at, so you do have to, when you do a for-profit thing, you've got to make sure it's a good business idea. You don't just start a business and, you know, make believe that somehow everybody's gonna, you know, if you got twenty-five coffee shops within, you know, three blocks of each other, that's probably not a smart place to start a coffee shop unless you've got some magic coffee that is so good it drives everybody else out of business. I don't know. But so the point is, you do a serious market analysis. So you need the business to be successful to create a real revenue stream. But uh, in Jose's case and the other, the other modification, so you can actually, let me back up and say you can actually activate business people in your team and say, "Hey, why don't you guys look at the..."

Opportunities here and start a business and let's make it part of the ecosystem of supporting the church and you know maybe you give 10 percent of your profits every year to the church but they're starting a business, a good, they're providing a good in service that people in that neighborhood that community actually want or they're helping somebody. You know, some of these underserved communities you've got really sharp people that have just never had an opportunity to make things happen and they can, you know, get into a business startup training thing and actually start a business and they do it in connectivity to the church and that generates some revenue in their direction. Or you can actually do, like again, the benefit of the dance thing was the dance basically—it's oversimplifying it—but basically the dance studio provided the building for the church to meet in and the church provided the revenue for the pastor to pay his salary. So you know, that there's a symbiotic relationship that happens with coffee shop churches. I know churches that their coffee shop all week they're commercial coffee shop, they're making good money, and then on the weekends they're a place where the church meets.

So those are the five, the five revenue streams. Yeah, so just to kind of review: ties and offerings, donor-based streams, co-vocational streams, non-profit partnerships, and then four, partner, or for-profit partnerships. Yeah, so five different opportunities for the church to kind of fundraise, to generate funding. It's funny being a guy that's in this season was self-employed for a stretch, or at least before COVID, and didn't have that regular paycheck. Yeah, there were seasons of my life personally where I'd try to generate however many side hustles, revenue streams as possible, and kind of have even just gotten into my own life where it's like, hey, I don't want just one revenue stream, I want multiple in case something happens. And so just for personal economics feels that way within the organizations. You know, all of a sudden now you're bringing in a lot more opportunity for the church once again to get outside of its physical or virtual building and to engage more into the community that's around it.

Here's my question coming off this: typically the lead pastor of a church is probably like the best communicator, someone who can stand up on that stage or in that pulpit in front of tens, hundreds, thousands, however many people, and exude scripture and communicate a message, preach a sermon, whatever the context. Some of what you're describing here is, are we classifying like what a new lead pastor needs to be thinking that way? Is this our church planners? We need to diversify. We need to trust people that do have knowledge. Like, what does this operationally look like? That's just, I mean, hey, yeah, I want three revenue streams and one of them is going to be a for-profit business. That's hefty. That's not just like, you know, taking the, you know, after-school daycare. There's a lot that's involved in that. So talk to me a little bit here, just maybe some of the practicality of this.

Yeah, yeah, well yes. Um, so I want to say one more thing in general that sort of helps me answer your question, and that is one of the ways to think about this is like, I must—the worst mistake anybody could make is say, okay, I'm just going to start a business and that's going to be the sole support of the church. You're back to the same problem you started with, which you only have one revenue stream. And so what I'm recommending to people is they think about this like they do with investing. If they're doing any kind of investing, everybody knows that you want to have a diversified portfolio so that you don't have all your eggs in one basket. And so what this—the yeah, the way that the new lead pastor needs to think about is instead of thinking, okay, what I've got to do is find a bunch of people, take them through Dave Ramsey's course so they know how to tithe and that's the magic bullet that's going to help the church be sustainable, and use their gifts, their communication skills, and all that stuff to just pull revenue now that one thing—instead, like you were just alluding to, and actually this is a much healthier way to lead. Um, and I actually heard a great—I was on a call earlier today and they said, don't lead a team, lead out of a team. Um, and what that means is you're harnessing or you're harvesting or you're empowering or you're activating the wisdom in the team. And if you don't have that wisdom, that's who you're looking for. You know, so, um, going back to, again, I kind of alluded to this to begin with, you know, you want to do the best job of helping people have a healthy, biblically sound theology and practice of tithing. You know, you don't want your church to be weak on tithing. So what do you do? You expose them to whatever Dave Ramsey or whoever else, and you do teaching and stuff like that. So most pastors, that probably is their most—leaders that have been raised in the church, born and raised in church—that's probably their strong point is teaching on ties and offerings. Um, but then yeah, these—so what I would recommend is, hey, what if you actually looked for somebody to lead the charge in all five categories? So somebody who's going to be your specialist on donative giving. Maybe you can be the specialist on tithing, or you get somebody else to even do that. Somebody to think about co-vocational and explore the options there and just be scanning the horizon for the opportunities. And that is, again, the cool thing is some of those co-vocational opportunities actually provide—they can help people in the church find jobs. You know, I've heard about churches that started a business that was like a renovation business as one of their revenue streams. Well, that also ended up providing jobs for people that they were leading to faith in Christ and that kind of stuff. So the economic benefit can start to grow exponentially if you've got somebody sort of taking point. And, like you say, not just simply saying, well, we're gonna have three revenues, we're gonna start a business. Have you ever started a business? No, I never have, but I'm gonna do it. Whoa, slow down, dude. You know, I mean, find somebody that has, at the very least, and talk about it with them. And so I actually had that happen where I had a plan I was working with. He told me, I'm just going to start a coffee shop. I said, if you've ever done that. No. Well, okay, find somebody that has. Just talked to him. He came back and goes, man, I don't think I should try to start a coffee shop. That's not an easy thing to do.

So you know what we're talking about here is not easy, but I will say if you do it, it's better. And if you do it out of a team, it's even better. And so you find somebody who's got, you know, entrepreneurial background, business background, they started businesses before, and either ask them to partner with you and start a new business or coach somebody, find a young leader that is wanting to learn how to start businesses and stuff. And what that also does is, you know, it helps us break down the divide between the sacred and secular and recognize, you know, good business is actually a godly thing. It's not good, but when you provide a good and a service at a price that's reasonable and there's a reasonable process, profit being made, that is a blessing to a community. It's a win-win. People get what they need. It puts food on the table. It puts roofs over people's heads, all that kind of stuff. So the idea that these spheres are separated from each other, it's actually really biblical for the church to be sort of embedded into the entire ecosystem of a community, and this is a fabulous way to do that.

So what we do when somebody contacts me now and says, hey, I want to start a church but I can't—I, you know, I can't figure out the ROI, I need help, or they're going to an urban community—the first thing I do is say, okay, I want you to do a study of the community. What are the opportunities? What are the challenges? What are the assets that are there? Talk to some business people. Explore options for starting businesses. Explore options for partnering with for-profit or non-profit organizations. Look at opportunities for co-vocational and create a five-year business plan that harvests revenue out of all five of those revenue streams. See if you can do that. See if you can figure that out. Now, you know what that does at first is it slows them way down because usually when they talk to me, they're already, you know, we're going to be moving next week and we're going to start old services two weeks from now or something like that. Well, you can do that if you want and hopefully it works out, but what I say is slow down, take your time. It might take you six months, even a year, to do a really good business plan of how you're going to be sustainable. And then whatever it is God's called you to is going to be sustainable in that context that you're called into. And we all know it—well, maybe if you don't know, I'll say it out loud: business plans are a plan. Plans will change, but it's way better. So, you know, I've never seen a business plan that everything plays out exactly perfectly the way that the developer of the business plan said it was going to happen. You know, they might say it's going to take us two years to get here and it really takes three, or they could say it's going to take us two years and it only takes one. So things adjust. But going into a community where you have a plan and your plan is diversified increases dramatically—increases the probability that what you're going to do is going to be sustainable and you're going to be able to be there for the long haul and really be a blessing to the people in that community or that sphere of influence that you're trying to serve.

Which, again, I think most of this can easily be transferred over to thinking about sustaining a digital church. And that's what I think—I don't know if we said this already, but I think there's money left on the table that even a digital church can end up with with some ability to be generous that if they don't get intentional about harvesting revenue, they just won't have that opportunity. So the—I love one of the things I love about digital churches is the cost tends to be lower because you're not needing to, you know, pay rent and all that kind of stuff, or the operating costs are way dramatically lowered, which means if you can generate more money, that's more money to be generous with and be on God with his mission.

Yeah, and it's funny that a couple of digital churches—Lux Digital Church right now—um, this one actually Mark Lutz was one of the guys that presented there at the Exponential Ventures thing. Uh, they, one of their donors gave a full year of operating costs up front. Said, hey, year one's covered. And so what they're doing is, hey, any money that comes in over the course of the first year, we're giving it away to mission partners. And so they highlight and be a part of—actually, when Mark was presenting in Austin, he had one of his mission partners preaching at the digital church on Wednesday night because their services are Wednesday night. And so like, it's not, hey, let's keep or even let's stockpile. Mark is very aggressive towards, hey, we're going to give away this money for the kingdom. And how that looks to a bunch of non-Christians, really, like secular people, people who are called to Christ, how they're being...

So generous with money, giving it to worthwhile organizations and not stockpiling it. I mean, that's a huge win for the kingdom right there. And I love, I love what you're talking about here. It's funny, within Stadia we use the term "multi-modal." There's different models of church, and any church out there should do multiple models to fit a physical, digital, micro. Like, we're challenging them to diversify their strategies. And really, I mean, essentially what you've done is the same thing from a funding perspective. Let's diversify the funding of it. And in the heart of digital, when we talk about being multimodal, is find people that are knowledgeable in an area, disciple them to the place that you trust them spiritually, and then release them to go do what they know how to do. And you're not that far away from that, even in this funding perspective. Find people that understand the for-profit, the non-profit, the donor, which is really a whole thing into itself if we're serious about it. On that, trust yourself to find that BIVO or that KOBO. I like HOBO so much better. That KOVO job. And try to, you know, all of a sudden now you're diversifying the funding that's coming in. Economy goes bad one way? Yeah, that may affect one stream, but you got a couple others. So it's not the proverbial end of ministry and you're having to shut down doors because the economy hit a rough spot. You've got protection with this diversification.

I love that. Absolutely. No, I just wanted to ask because we've been talking about church plants, we've been talking about digital churches. Now, I listen, I can tell you, friends, I can tell you churches that ten, twenty percent of their employees are no longer working there. Like, whether they were furloughed, they were let go, there's been a lot of turnover within church markets right now. Now some churches are doing well, some churches are not. And so the reality is that there's a lot of churches out there that could need funding help. I'm willing to bet they're going to struggle to adopt some of these ideas just because, you know, the struggle to teach an old dog new tricks sometimes. Maybe I'm speaking out of turn. What advice would you give to an established church that maybe is thirty percent down in tithes right now because of whatever the reason? When you're talking about diversifying, when you're talking about trying to do something different, how can we apply these principles to existing churches?

Yeah, yeah. Well, one of the assets that a lot of existing churches have that is usually underutilized are the business people, the people that know how to start businesses or run businesses or whatever. And unfortunately, we look to them like you mentioned this one guy who's paid for the whole year. I mean, everybody wants to have that guy in their church, but a lot of times all we do with that guy is ask them for their money. And instead of just asking for their money, what if we said, "Hey, we've got a problem. You know, we're down thirty percent and it doesn't look like that's coming back. We need to diversify. Here's some ideas. You know how to start up. Is it possible? Is it even feasible for us to start a business here? Here's what's happening." Give them, you know, they can share an example of the dance church or something and say, "You know, is there any way we could do something like that?" Now, again, you've got to be prepared for these. I would say maybe the donor could be semi-fast, but everything else is a little bit slower. It takes a while for the revenue to show up. So you have to have a longer developmental thing. But anyway, nevertheless, the point is just like we've been talking about, your answer is probably sitting in the pew being underutilized and being frustrated by that because they're going, "Yeah, I'll give," but they might be able to help you figure out how to activate things you never thought about.

You also might have people that are active in non-profits within the community, and you've never connected the dots. And so figure out a way to find out who in your congregation has influence and connectivity into the non-profit world, who in your congregation has influence and activity in the business world, and you know, what are the possibilities? Here's another really powerful thing that isn't directly it's in another chapter which I talk about. You know, redeeming the architecture. And one of my friends is Sarah Joy Propay, who has a company called Proximity Project. And what she does is help churches with existing property figure out how to optimize that property for ministry and for revenue. And so she was able, her company will come in and look at what you got, look at your community, and say, "Hey, you guys could start a work-share location here or a meeting space. You could, you know, here's some ways you can generate revenue using your building that right now is just not being utilized at all." And so there's an opportunity. It's kind of another revenue opportunity and activating the property. The church has owned some of these churches that are, they've got a building and all they use it for is maybe Sunday morning. Some of them may have a Sunday night thing, maybe a midweek thing, and the rest of the time the building's just sitting there unoccupied. So that's another thing I would do. Put a team together from the congregation and say, "Hey, how do we activate our building?" Reach out to somebody like Joy Propay and the Proximity Project. They can, that's what they do. They actually help churches activate their space and use their space effectively. So those are some suggestions. Sure, there's going to be resistance. That's the other thing. I would not get up in front of the congregation and say, "Hey, we're going to start doing five revenue streams," and they may freak out. But find people within the congregation that you trust, that are mature, that you can have a side conversation with, and let's start exploring this stuff. And just start there. Let's explore the possibility. And then once you know, "Hey, wait, this is, this could really turn into something," then you can appropriately start sharing with the church. And by then, the answers that some of the naysayers will have, you may have good answers. "Oh, yeah, we did a market research. There's a need for thus and so, and we're able to do it, and it has the potential of generating, you know, twenty grand a year or something to fill in the gaps in our budget."

Yeah, I'd love that. We'll include contact info for Sarah and the Proximity Project in the show notes. It's fascinating to me, like talking about just activating the building. I think it was at that Austin venture event, but somebody made the statement like every church building has an incredible kitchen that never gets used. And so like, even that, utilizing it, utilizing that kitchen for some purposes outside and generating that revenue, you've got so much asset and capital kind of invested into that with equipment that you're not utilizing. Chances are, well, yeah. So yeah, that opens up, you know, I one thing I didn't go into but like micro-businesses like giving, you're using, you know, yeah. So you have somebody who's a baker or something in your church, and instead of her having or him having to go, you know, purchase an industrial thing, just say, "Okay, yeah, you can use this, and you know, we'll give us ten percent of your profit." I mean, nothing wrong with that. Now I will say one thing. I do want to say some of this stuff, you definitely want to talk with a lawyer about because you want to structure everything in a way that doesn't put at risk your non-profit status. You want to make sure that you're doing it, you know, you want to be within the law. And most of us, again, that's the problem. Most pastors don't know that much about law. We don't know that much about running businesses. And so reach out to, you know, hire a lawyer, or if you have, that's another opportunity. Activate a lawyer in the church. "Hey, we're thinking about this. Is there anything we need to do? Or how do we structure ourselves so that we're not getting ourselves into a situation where we're going to have a problem, that we self-inflicted problem?"

Yeah, chances are you're going to need to like mark off the square footage of that kitchen and probably have to figure out how to pay. Like, I just, I've known a church that had like this awesome food truck kind of area. It was generating revenue off that, percentage of, you know, micro-business what you're describing. And then a couple years later was like, "Oh, you mean we're supposed to pay taxes on that? Oh, darn, didn't know that." So yeah, there's flip sides to that. It's really good to know that up front.

Yeah, because you know, you can just factor it in. And you know, I certainly would not have the attitude, "Well, we shouldn't have to pay." Yeah, I mean, hey, that's, if you're making profit, that's the way the economy works. And you know, don't be a problem. Don't create a problem.

Well, Steve, this has been a great conversation. I'm having a better understanding of these five principles, these five methods for generating revenue. We'll include all that in the show notes, links to your books and things like this. But as we're landing the plane, just any closing thoughts?

Well, I, my personal opinion is, I don't think this is necessarily prophetic, but I do believe that within ten years, churches that are operating only on tithes and offerings as their only source of revenue to support themselves are going to, they won't be around much longer. I think everybody's going to have to pivot in this direction regardless of where you're at. And so I would encourage people, Mark Demas has written a great book, "The Coming Economic," forget what the title is, but it's Mark Demas, and it's a great book. He talks about a lot of these same ideas, and he's suggesting the same thing, that the way we've been funding the church is going away and we've got to find a different way to fund the church. So I would just urge every leader out there who feels pretty secure and like, "Oh, we're doing fine. You know, everything's great." I don't think that's going to continue. And I would urge you to start looking into this right now so you don't get caught in a situation where it's threatening to the survival of your church.

Yeah, I would agree with you. I think that we're going to see the tax evaluations and the non-profit status and the donor tax exemptions. I think a lot of that's going to be going away in the foreseeable future. And in those moments, I don't know that we fight. I think that we diversify and we find other ways to survive. And so what Steve what you're talking about is I think it's going to be laying the foundation for truly the twenty-first century church, exactly as your book describes, that next wave.

Exactly. As your book describes, that next wave.

Well, hey, this has been a great conversation, Steve. Thanks for jumping on this. And so we've got all your info in the show notes. Feel free to check that out. But for Steve, this is Jeff with the Church Digital and with Stadia, planning thanks for joining here on the podcast. And we'll see you next time on the show. You have a good day.