Vision and Funding: You Can't Have One Without the Other
Gary Long, Senior Pastor, Willow Meadows Baptist Church, Houston, TX
The theme song to Married with Children taught us that love and marriage go together like the horse and carriage. But there’s nothing in church life like a capital campaign, a financial crisis, or an anxious finance committee to remind a pastor that vision and funding go together in the same way. Vision and funding are inextricably linked.
I could give you some nice bullet points and a philosophical explanation to prove the point, but I’d rather tell you a story. It’s a story about my church. It’s also a story about Any Church.
In the 1960’s WillowMeadowsBaptistChurch was known as one of the fastest growing congregations in the Southern Baptist Convention. From humble beginnings in 1957, the church membership grew until it peaked in 1977 at nearly 3,000 and more than 1,600 people in attendance for worship and bible study on Sunday mornings. The spiritual vitality of the congregation in 2002 sagged to match the plummeting membership of 1,100 and worship attendance of 225.
Sensing God was not finished with this church, I agreed to be the fifth pastor. I studied the history of the church – both the “formal” history and the “informal” versions. I amassed enough information to conclude that, contrary to opinion in the pew, the cause of decline in our church was not entirely attributable to:
- The oil bust that crushed Houston’s economy in the early 1980’s
- The change in demographics of the surrounding neighborhood
- The “white-flight” to the suburbs during the dark years of Houston’s IndependentSchool District
- The low-rent apartments near by,
- The lack of leadership from former pastors or among the laity.
The problem was as simple and as complicated as the theory behind Bob Dale’s To Dream Again. The congregation had lost their dream. The life-cycle of their founding vision had run its course and the people lacked vision. The bottom line is that a once-great and effective congregation had turned inward on itself in an attempt to preserve the institution that occupied 4300 West Bellfort, zip code 77035.
Over the last four years Willow Meadows has engaged in an intentional and intense look at what the future might hold. It has been a joyous and painful discernment process led by a spiritually focused group – versus administrative – called a Vision Community. The group spent more than a year simply being community to one another, spending time together in silence, studying the scriptures for what definitions of “church” we could find, and identifying what our community needed the church to be.
What we discovered through that process was not that faith in Jesus was irrelevant to the needs of the people in our community, but that our programs and methodology had become irrelevant. What followed, and continues at this very moment, is nothing less that a miracle of God. A vision emerged to become other-directed, covenantal, and to work at transformation in Southwest Houston.
The fact that our building needed some updates was obvious, but the real need for renovation was that our building’s design did not match the function we needed to reach our vision. What’s more, we lacked the funding to conduct the renovation. Our leaders knew that we’d have to conduct a fundraising campaign, but our history at capital campaigns was not great.
Our leadership team selected a fund-raising consultant who taught us that success in our campaign would require that every family in our congregation connect at a heart level with the reasons for the renovation. This was a tall task in a congregation that was divided about the vision, divided about the future, and divided about the need for renovation.
Through some nerve-racking months, our team came up with some innovative ways to help paint a picture of God’s vision for us, and to tie it to the renovation project. There are four major areas we attacked, and judging by the results, these were very effective:
- Prayer – The prayer emphasis included written prayer guides with a floor plan of the proposed renovation. Each major area of renovation had a specific prayer with language that was imaginative and future oriented.
- Preaching – I view the role of pastor as that of lens when it comes to vision. My job is to discern with other leaders what God is directing us to do, and also to bring that vision into focus for as many people as possible. The pulpit is the place this happens best. Sermons at Willow Meadows almost always refer to the vision of the church, and during our time before the fund raising campaign, sermons every Sunday were aimed at connecting our vision to the campaign itself.
- Publicity – Our team made effective use of photos, architect’s renderings, videos, and images to communicate the vision of the church and how that vision connected to the fundraising needs.
- Networking – Each person in our Vision Community became a conduit of information and influence. They were recognized repeatedly in worship so the congregation knew the vision belonged to many people, not only the pastor. The Vision Community, and later our Capital Campaign Committee served as ambassadors to the rest of the congregation to get the story out broadly and deeply. This networking team also dealt with issues of negativity and resistance.
The renovations are now complete and it is a satisfying feeling for this pastor. But the most satisfying feeling came on a Sunday night when our church hosted our “mother church,” South Main Baptist Church, for a 50th anniversary celebration. I was walking down the hall past the new ministry center called Jacob’s Well. It was one of the contested features of the renovation.
In the room were two guests from South Main and one Willow Meadows member. This particular member had been an early nay-sayer to the campaign, vowing to me personally to oppose the campaign to the end. I stepped into the next room so I could listen to their conversation. Eavesdropping is wrong, I know it. But, hey, I’m a human. I’m glad I listened in because what I heard brought me to tears.
“Yes, this is the new ministry center. I don’t know how it’s going to work, but they say it’s going to connect all the gifts and talents of our church members to the needs of the hurting people in our neighborhood.”
He had caught the vision, and his money had followed thereafter.