Passionate Steward - 10th Anniversary Edition

Recovering Christian Stewardship from Secular Fundraising 123
educated about the parish’s financial needs, and taught how to discuss
these needs in a pastorally sensitive manner within the context of the
parish’s overall sense of stewardship. Each of these visitors is then
assigned ten (or fewer) parish households to visit. During these
household visits, the parish visitor answers any questions their fellow
parishioners might have, and solicits an annual financial declaration
(pledge). The strength of the Every Household Visitation approach is
that it seeks to arrange a private meeting between a trained and
educated parish “visitor” in the familiar and comfortable
surroundings of an individual’s own home.
The principal failure in campaigns of this kind is the
reluctance of parish leaders to believe they can recruit enough
volunteers to complete the program, and/or the failure actually to
visit every household. Because of this fear or lack of faith, parishes
often follow the lead of secular fundraisers, and restrict their visits
to those they believe will give the majority of money (thereby
exacerbating the institutional welfare dynamic). This problem is
almost always associated with a parish that uses some system
designed to “segment” or “target” parishioners according to their
perceived wealth, such that “advanced gift prospects,” or “major
gift prospects” are visited first. When this happens, the parish
usually expends all its time, talent and energy on a select and
limited number of households. If the annual financial goal is met
through the visits to this subset of the parish community, volunteers
inevitably lose their motivation to visit the rest of the parish, or feel
no need to do so. As previously noted, this continues the
counterproductive consequence of “investing” the responsibility for
financial stewardship in a small number of parish households.
SOME EVERY HOUSEHOLD VISITATION APPEAL MERITS:
• Engages every individual and household in taking
responsibility for the financial needs of the parish
• Can create standing “teams” of people who can be used for