Passionate Steward - 10th Anniversary Edition

Recovering Christian Stewardship from Secular Fundraising 11
reflection of how each of these Churches and ecclesial communities
embraces the idea of governance, and not a disregard for
appropriate development.)
In theory, these stewardship officers are hired generally to
support all of the stewardship efforts within their juridical or
geographic region. In reality, however, by the time most stewardship
officers perform the work required for the appeals or foundations they
administer, attend national and regional Church functions, support
planned giving initiatives, meet with their fellow staff members and
attend to their own professional and spiritual development, there is
virtually no time left to spend with congregations.
Even when stewardship officers, bishops, clergy and other lay
leaders have thorough training and knowledge in appropriate
Christian stewardship, the ease of implementing a “cookie-cutter”
secular method or approach to fundraising becomes increasingly
appealing in the face of time, staffing and other resource
constraints. These dynamics only exacerbate the propensity of
secular fundraising methods and practices to supplant real Christian
stewardship. And when internal time and resource constraints do
not allow for stewardship officers to work with all of their parishes
and organizations, there is a tendency to “augment” the
diocesan/presbytery staff by hiring outside consultants, almost all of
whom conduct a mix of secular and religious fundraising. Given the
relative inability of dioceses/presbyteries to serve their
congregations internally, secular fundraisers who, at best, run
“church departments,” become surrogate stewardship officers, held
out to be experts, despite in most cases a fundamental lack of
theological or religious development. 3
3 It is common practice amongst fundraising firms to promise Churches the
“expertise and supervision of senior staff” while employing young, inexperienced
and/or untrained staff to conduct the campaign as “on-site” counsel. The founder of
a firm that has in the past conducted the majority of large church fundraising campaigns
in Canada once said to me, “I always send a new fundraiser to learn their
work in the Church. If they mess up there, the Church will always forgive them, while
a hospital or a school will cancel their contract.”