Church Capital Campaign: The Biblical Basis

I occasionally run across folks that think that a church capital campaign for a building program is a bad idea. Some have even called it unscriptural, but in in my opinion, its just the opposite. Perhaps people get caught up in the terminology, but a capital campaign is really just a name for designated offering to the church building program.

A capital stewardship campaign is a purposeful giving effort for the purpose of buying land or building a building. While more structured in the process than in Old Testament times, church capital campaigns have as a biblical basis the example of building of the tent of the tabernacle. In Exodus 35, we read that Moses went to the people to take up a special offering for the building of the tent and all that went inside of it. The first principal that we learn is that God called (and continues to call) His people to sacrifice their time, treasures and talents in order to accomplish His work.

Capital campaigns also draw upon the example in the 29th chapter of 1 Chronicles of where we find King David preparing to build the temple. In this example we learn two important principles.

• First is that he prepared in advance. Even thought the Lord had told David that he could not build the temple, God did not say he could not prepare, so we see him taking up an offering for the work.
  
• The second important principal we learn from this text is one of leading by example. In verse 26, we see a "top down" approach to giving as the leaders gave first as a model to the people.

The three capital campaign principals you should take away from this post are; God calls His people to sacrifice for His work; start saving before you need to build; and lastly, giving should be modeled by the leadership of the church. Best wishes to you for your church's capital campaign.

Church Grants - Part I

Many churches today are seeking church grants for a variety of purposes, including construction. According to Bernice Sanders Smoot of Saint Wall Street, there are over 600,000 churches and faith based organizations in the USA and my experience is that most of them are looking for money. With only a very few thousand faith-friendly grant foundations, well I guess you can do the math.

The bottom line is your ministry, in order to get funded by grants, must have three key ingredients and follow the golden rule if are to stand any chance for grant funding. In simple terms, the three key ingredients are: you need to have something worth writing about; you need to write about it well; and, you need to write to the right people.

Once you have these three key ingredients, you then need to follow the golden rule for grants: "He with the gold, rules." This means that you must follow the grant maker guidelines to the the letter, unless you want your proposal to end up in the trash can. Yes, I said the trash can. Over 80% of requests received by foundations are immediately rejected, largely due to not following the rules. and this is true regardless of how deserving of funding your ministry may be. You see, some faith-based foundations receive dozens or hundreds of requests per day. Grant makers don't have the time or the manpower to try to piece together your request - you follow their format and process or your request does not even get considered.

When applying for a church grant, you must be able to demonstrate the value proposition. You do this by quantifying what you have done, what the effects were, and how the money you are requesting will produce more results. Grant makers like to fund success, not just good ideas. This requires many ministries to take the time to measure and quantify their programs so they have something worth writing about. Once you have something that you can document as being worth funding, you then need to make the grant request. You need to submit according to each foundation's guidelines, and you need to write it well; get professional help if necessary. Who you submit to is also very important. Just because a foundation makes faith-friendly grants does not mean that they want to fund everything just because it is faith related. Many grant makers fund only specific types of programs, so you should to apply to those that fund the type of programs and ministries like yours.

If your church is looking for grants for ministry, stay tuned for Part II of this post which will share where to find the vast majority of the funding that goes to houses of faith and ministries. Hint: Its not from grant making foundations or the government. In Q1 of 2008 we also will be announcing where you can get a directory of over 1,000 foundations who openly accept proposals from Christian churches and agencies.


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Avoiding Budget Bloat in Church Construction

Church construction projects (and their budgets) seem only to grow over time, not shrink. Here are three tips to prevent construction budget bloat.

Tip number one is to make sure you have everything in the project budget to begin with. Your project budget should be one that includes everything including site acquisition, site development, architectural design, engineering (including survey, civil and fire), construction interest, fees & permits, consulting fees, contingency and furniture and fixtures. Whatever you forget in the planning stage you will pay for later in the project, usually after you have already used up all of your budget on the things you did remember.

Secondly, make sure the budget is reasonable. Your builder should the church a complete project budget prior to construction. One of the safest contractual arrangements for the church is one that provides a guaranteed not-to-exceed price. In this agreement, the builder is responsible for underbidding, errors, and omissions. This is typically easier to do with a design/build firm, as they are responsible for both the design and construction. If something is left out or underbid, they can blame no one except themselves. Whoever provides the project budget should have some responsibility and liability for that number. For planning purposes, you should figure that your project budget (including everything) will be no less than $100-125 per square foot. Certain states and metro areas will be higher.

Finally, watch the change orders. Change orders will happen. If the changes are required due to code compliance, there is little you can do except grin and bear it (note, the building inspector does not always interpret things the same way the planning department did when they approved your plans). If the change order is because of a design deficiency, you can try to pursue the architect's errors and omissions insurer (best wishes with that) unless it was design/build, in which case you can probably make some or all of the problem the builder's. That all being true, the biggest threat however, to budget creep is often the church! Once the church has had designed just about all it can afford (and sometimes more), sometime during project construction the pastor, a deacon, or building committee member will get a "great idea" and ask the builder if they can do it. Generally the answer is yes, however, is always at a cost. It all adds up, $80,000 here, $12,00 there, and pretty soon a budget that was already tight becomes super-critical.

In summary, know what you can truly afford, design to your budget (and stop there), don't make changes once construction starts, and keep an eye on those change orders. Change orders make up a large portion of many builders profit objectives, so watch out that you don't pay more for them than they really cost.




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