A few years ago, I was out running one morning with a guy in my church who has helped me a great deal in thinking through the discussion that surrounds generosity. In between strained breaths, he recounted for me some of the things that he thought our church was really good at. I knew that a “But” was on it’s way. And then he said it. “But you know what our church is not so good at?”

Recently, I had the chance to chat with Chris Willard at Leadership Network for his Generosity Strategies & Tactics Podcast. On it, I talk through some of the ways we have engaged in follow up after the end of our big generosity initiative last year. I’m posting the audio below. You can also just search for it on i-tunes and subscribe to the podcast. I think you’ll enjoy all of the episodes and interviews that Chris has done. Enjoy!

My church just came through a pretty significant Generosity Initiative. The big question that many of our staff asked was “Will people actually give what they committed this time?” Because last time we did this, we had a low percentage of people actually follow through. But was it entirely their fault?

I’ve been posting a lot about our generosity initiative over the last few months. In fact, I haven’t really been posting about anything else because this project has been dominating my days and nights. Today I want to talk about stage design for a generosity initiative.

We’ve just come through our Generosity Initiative at Mosaic Church. One of the most important things that we did that I have not posted about yet is the special website. We discussed making it a separate URL but ultimately chose to make it an extension of our normal site, thisismosaic.org . So we went with www.thisismosaic.org/getloud .

I want to point out a few things about the site.

I’ve been writing about the generosity initiative that Mosaic Church is launching later this year. I’ve shared the process we went through in deciding to get some outside help. Then I shared the four basic stages of the plan. And lastly, I shared the way we came to choose the name and subtitle. We landed on calling our generosity initiative GET LOUD-Let’s Actually Change Our World. With the language decided on, we needed to figure out the look of it all.

Gospel centered vision + Spirit led implementation leads to health. Health leads to growth. Growth leads to lack of space. Lack of space leads to a call for more space. Call for more space leads to a need for more financial fuel. The need for more financial fuel leads to  . . . well, that’s where the real confusion sets in. Do you hire a generosity company or go it alone? How much will it cost? Is it really worth it? These are hard questions that every growing church faces.