A practical workshop on joyful generosity

What are you grateful for? Do you have difficulty feeling grateful? That seems normal. The lyricist doesn’t tell us to tough it out or march onwards regardless of our pain. He suggests hitting pause…. I wonder if gratitude requires listening for God’s whispers of hope and listening means slowing down. Slow gratitude.

For many charities and churches, it’s time to prepare charitable tax receipts. This blog continues a series on turning the chore of annual receipts into a blessing.

The amount of money donated to charity in Canada continues to rise while the number of donors declines. If giving is represented by koalas and donors are eucalyptus trees, fewer trees are supporting more koalas. It’s not sustainable, and in Canada the median age of donors continues to increase.

Gratitude and fear: Church stewardship resources for trying times

Quietly worshipful and noisily grateful. That's the people's response to Jesus' miracle of raising the widow's son back to life. What does it mean for a church to be quietly worshipful and noisily grateful?

Has your church or charity actually asked its supporters to leave a bequest in their wills to support the good work of the organization?

Let me guess - good intentions but so many things to do! The budget needs money this year, not some year. Special events demand lots of time; reports are complex and time-consuming. There are structural issues. However, people who find asking for gifts in wills to be off-putting remains a big barrier.

If you give a wedding gift, you expect to receive a thank-you note.  It’s common courtesy.  If you don’t give a gift, you generally don’t get a thank-you note.  Obvious, right? However, in church giving often nobody gets a thank-you note.  Nobody gets thanked.  Really.  In many churches, donors get an annual receipt with no thank-you letter. But I’m proposing here that everybody gets a thank-you note. Here’s why: gratitude generally and thank-you letters in particular make a good springboard into generosity.