Promoting regular giving

The first thing to consider when you're planning to promote regular giving is the church's mission; specifically, what is your mission and how are you going to communicate it people? To find out why this is important have a look at our page why do people give?

On this page you'll find information, guidance, and resources on how to structure a regular giving campaign and frame your messaging and teaching around the subject of giving. You might also want to look at our page on the Parish Giving Scheme, which can be a great way to generate a discussion about regular giving, as well as helping you safeguard your income into the future.

In general it's good practice to talk about generosity and financial giving during at least one service per year. We also suggest every 2-3 years holding a longer "regular giving campaign" lasting 3-5 weeks.


Teaching and Asking for Generous Giving

Below you can find four diocesan resources to help you hone your messaging before you begin to ask people for financial support.

  1. There are guidance papers on planning a regular giving campaign and on writing a letter asking for giving. The latter also gives suggestions on how you might motivate different people to want to support their local church.
  2. The second is a series of examples to help you plan and write a sermon on generosity and giving within the context of the Christian faith. You can also find a series of sermon notes based on the lectionary for harvest time on the national church's giving pages.
  3. The third is a case study with St James' Church in Downley, looking at how they turned around their levels of giving using the model of generosity to become a Giving Church.

 

Planning a Giving Campaign Writing a Giving Appeal Letter 

Planning a Giving Sermon St James, Downley Case Study


Regular Giving Campaign Templates

The Generosity Week

With a focus on generosity and gratitude, the National Church's flagship programme runs over two Sundays with service content packs and example liturgies. This approach takes the form of a traditional request and response regular giving campaign - where you ask your congregation to review their giving in week one and ask them to respond and confirm their gifts in week two - with the benefit of a strong grounding in the bible and in personal faith.

To support this focus on biblical, personal faith the programme includes an eight-day morning prayer series to run between the two services, a week of podcasts, and two small/home group sessions. Click here to access the materials.

Other national church programmes:

  1. A Parish Funding Programme (a generic programme)
  2. A Simple Giving Programme (this is more targeted at small and/or rural churches)
  3. Give10 (a programme to introduce tithing)

Programmes from other dioceses:

There are also some popular frameworks which originated in other dioceses and which are free to access. Both of the below focus on responding to God’s generosity and have extensive online resources:

  1. Giving in Grace
  2. Giving is God’s Way

Living Generously

The Diocese of Oxford has produced seven reflections on the theme of living generously, based on the story of Mary anointing Jesus’ feet. You can download them in pdf format here, or to request printed copies free of charge, please email generosity@oxford.anglican.org.


Giving Checklist

The Giving Checklist enables churches to review how effective they are at encouraging giving within the church, during the service, on their website and on social media. We recommend that reviews are undertaken by the PCC, or by a relevant sub-group, such as the stewardship committee.

For help or advice on any aspect of regular giving please contact the Generous Giving adviser for the diocese, Joshua Townson, on 01865 208 757.

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