If we truly get the gospel into us, we’ll find that we want to be generous for Jesus’ mission.

How do we make people more generous with their time and their money?

It is a question many Pastors grapple with. Volunteering in churches has been declining for decades as culture has shifted and life has become both individualised and frenetically busy. Financial giving hasn’t had the same drop off as best I can tell—though we talk about it so little I’m not sure if we’d know—but Christians in the UK have something of a reputation for being tight-fisted (according to some American friends, at least) and the cost of living has risen so sharply in the last couple of decades that people struggle to see how they could manage to give money to God.

Of course, churches still need to do some things even when their volunteer base is small. Churches definitely still need money to balance the budget. We can’t just shrug our shoulders at the world and assume we just have to make do with it as it is.

How do you motivate people to give their time and their money?

The same way you do anything else: with the gospel.

What I mean is that the old adage ‘what you win them with is what you win them to’ is true in regards to all the things you really want people to do as well. If we get people who are already drowning to volunteer to do the thing that’s likely to break them through a combination of emotional manipulation and arm-twisting then we are guilty of heinous sin.

I don’t think anyone thinks that what they’re doing. I don’t think it is how anyone starts out. There is a risk though that when we start to motivate people by essentially asking them to step up because it needs doing, we start on a long road that ends up in manipulation as the only tactic we have.

What am I suggesting we do instead?

Two things. First, clarity. We describe the problem accurately, perhaps we even describe other ways we are attempting to do something about the problem, we invite people to participate, we’re clear about what we will do if they don’t. That last point—clarity about what we’ll do if they don’t give their money or time—can sound like emotional manipulation; it could well be that in some people’s hands.

Read More