Por Marv Knox
Candid conversations about money helped turn the outlook at First Baptist Church in Elkin, N.C., from challenge to opportunity, from concern to optimism.
The longtime Cooperative Baptist Fellowship congregation has participated in Cultivating Generous Congregations, a program sponsored by CBF Foundation and the Lake Institute on Faith and Giving, and also received guidance from CBF North Carolina.
Cultivating Generous Congregations “dives deep to help churches understand what stewardship should look like,” CBF Foundation President Shauw Chin Capps said.
That dive has produced dividends for First Baptist in Elkin, Pastor Mark Reece added. 
“Our church’s mission has been strong historically. We’ve been a CBF church since its beginning, and we’re respected in the community,” Reece said. “But our church hadn’t talked a lot about money. Maybe that’s because we hadn’t needed to.”
That wasn’t the case when Reece arrived in the summer of 2018.
“We had been through a long interim, and worship attendance and finances both were down,” he explained. “We were several months behind in our giving to the budget, and we faced significant deficits.
“When a new pastor arrives, churches gain energy and things improve. Still, going into 2020, I would describe the church as ‘making it,’ but the forecast was not good.”
Even after receiving an unexpected and extravagant gift that year from Bettie and Gilmer Hinson that established a church endowment, Reece and church leadership decided they needed to look inward rather than look away.
“We conducted a study about where revenue was coming from,” he said. “A report that looked at generational giving units showed the majority of contributions came from members who were retiree-aged and beyond.”
The congregation resisted the temptation to see the unexpected endowment as “a pot of money” to spend down on immediate needs. Instead, it created a new church policy, which restricts annual allocations from the endowment so that the principal would not erode. 
The church also realized it should be a responsible steward of the endowment gift. “We wanted to maintain our witness in the downtown community,” Reece said. So, the congregation spent interest earnings on improving its “historic, beautiful” building—a tangible presence in downtown Elkin.
Along the way, First Baptist reached out to CBF Foundation and participated in the Cultivating Generous Congregations cohort that met virtually the first quarter of 2024. The church’s cohort team included the chair of the finance committee, the pastor, the treasurer and the past chair of a stewardship committee.
Meeting with church-finance experts alongside teams from other CBF congregations proved beneficial for First Baptist, Reece said. He cited several “big takeaways” from the Cultivating Generous Congregations process.
“First, we learned we are not alone in our struggles,” he noted. “Really good churches across CBF are facing similar challenges. It’s not just us. This gave us courage to talk more openly about our financial situation and financial strategies.”
For example, they added planned stewardship promotion to the church’s calendar, “so it doesn’t become an afterthought.”
“Second, we recognized the value of financial transparency—to take data and make it public,” he said. “It’s one thing to know something is happening and another to walk in front of 100 people and say, ‘This is happening.’”
Financial transparency caused the congregation to include members from throughout the church in conversations about financial stewardship and budget challenges.
“Third, participating in the cohort gave us courage to invite others into our conversation,” Reece said. Bradley Boberg, who helps CBF churches facilitate financial studies, offered concrete suggestions regarding finances. Jim Hylton, CBF North Carolina’s business administration coordinator, “helped us rethink our personnel budget, staffing structure and compensation packages.”
Their support provided ways of thinking and talking about church finances that Reece couldn’t implement independently, he said. 
“And fourth, we discovered how to look at funding resources we hadn’t leveraged and how to utilize them to support our budget,” he reported.
This included allocating rental income generated by the church’s preschool, the church parsonage, revenue from sales tax refunds and most recently rental income from a Hispanic Pentecostal congregation that is now worshiping in the church’s chapel.
“The big word is ‘strategy’—how we are looking at resources and what we are doing with them,” Reece stressed. “Our church is composed of really good, thoughtful people. But we needed to look at our financial resources with another set of eyes, and that’s what CBF Foundation has done for us.”
First Baptist in Elkin reflects the experiences of other congregations that participate in Cultivating Generous Congregations and use the congregational financial health assessment tool, CBF Foundation’s Capps said.
“These two programs are great ways for churches to get an overview of what’s going on with their finances,” she said. “We’ve found that finance committees and stewardship committees often struggle to know where to start regarding how to help their congregations become more financially healthy.
“It’s easy to be overwhelmed by all the challenges, but we help them see the low-hanging fruits—opportunities that can be implemented right away and begin making a difference in church finances.” 
For some congregations, that might mean taking reserve funds “just sitting there” in bank accounts and transferring them to interest-bearing investments, she said. For others, it might mean identifying sources of revenue—such as those at First Baptist in Elkin—and making them available to meet the operating budget.
Cultivating Generous Congregations cohorts are composed of 10 to 15 churches, bringing a team of three to five lay leaders with their senior pastor. They meet either virtually every other week over eight weeks in the fall, or in-person at a one-day event in the spring.
The program helps CBF churches face “a paradigm shift in religious giving,” Capps said.
“Traditionally—and even CBF leaned heavily on this—people are told they are obligated to support their church. It’s a duty. Churches never had to work hard to support their mission when members were motivated by obligation or duty to give. But that traditional giving paradigm has changed.
“The cohorts equip churches to make their mission the focus of their fundraising. They learn to make a compelling case for why people in the pews should support their church’s mission.”
Cultivating Generous Congregations also helps participating churches hold their paradoxical identities—as both a source of faith formation and a nonprofit “that has to keep its lights on to do its work”—in creative tension, she said.
And the program helps churches develop “a healthy theology of money,” she added. That means getting past the notion that thinking and talking about money are taboo.
It counters another taboo, which insists pastors should not have access to church giving records, she added. “So many churches have this notion pastors should not know who the givers are, and yet they’re held responsible if the giving declines. If they know, they are able to properly steward and manage the organization in a way that is responsible and sustainable.” 
Every church that participates in Cultivating Generous Congregations develops its own implementation plan, which “transcends head knowledge and focuses on what we can implement tomorrow,” Capps said. “The main foundation (of the program) is recognizing generosity is part and parcel of discipleship and how we can as a church do a better job of cultivating generosity.”
“The team from First Baptist Church in Elkin really did their work and have taken steps toward a healthy financial future. There is no magic in these programs. The key to the success of churches navigating the shifting religious giving landscape is faithfully utilizing current data to form their strategies,” she added.
A new sense of urgency has motivated those steps, Reece reported. “There are a lot of really good things going on at First Baptist Church in Elkin. Our members take pride in who they are and what we’re continuing to do long-term. But if we don’t change the stewardship and generosity picture, we might not be here in 20 to 30 years.”
One view of that picture involves doing what needs to be done now, he said, noting the church has renovated its children’s ministry wing, which doubles as a respected preschool, and also built a playground that is “a gift to the community.”
“We received a radically generous endowment gift in 2019, and after significant investments in our building renovation, the endowment balance is 57% higher than the inaugural gift,” he noted. “The economy has been good to us.”
Now the priority is preparing for the future.
“Now that our congregation can see the great witness of the Hinsons’ generosity and impact of our endowment, we intend to work with CBF Foundation to normalize legacy giving for our church,” Reece said. “We are living through a transition period as a nation—seeing the transfer of wealth from one generation to the next—and we want to normalize legacy giving to double or triple our endowment in the next 10 years. Conversations with our key leadership have been positive, and folks are saying, ‘Let’s do this.’ I don’t know how to do that, so that’s why we are talking to CBF Foundation.”
Meanwhile, First Baptist is keeping a balanced perspective. 
“Our church is unique and so much more than a budget,” Reece explained. “We’re the only progressive Baptist church within a 45-minute drive. We’re an ecumenically minded church and do a lot with African-American churches in our community. We have many impactful ministries that set us apart locally, including a four-acre Fellowship Garden and a Sunday school ministry to special-needs adults. We’re also a welcoming-and-affirming congregation in Surry County in the foothills of Appalachia.
“We believe in our mission and want to see it continue many years into the future. I see a window of 10 to 20 years where we should be able to fund our budget without using the endowment. However, that money is going to go away, as the younger generation is not giving at their parents’ level. Our goal is not to use endowment money for the budget unless or until we have to.
“But we’re going to use this window of opportunity so that, if that time comes, we will be prepared.”