Planned Giving: the Key to Generosity

Planned giving is a catch all phrase used to describe any form of regular giving to the church in support of its ministry and mission. The mechanism for this giving might be weekly envelopes, standing orders or a dedicated charity account such as Sovereign Accounts from the Christian charitable company Stewardship or the Charities Aid Foundation. Such planned giving, where appropriate, should be made tax efficient through a Gift Aid scheme. Each mechanism has its own particular value to individuals but planned giving as a principle is effective for and applicable to all Christians.

However, planned giving is much more than a mechanism for our gift. We need to be quite clear at the outset that planned giving is the key to generous and committed giving. As long as our giving is reactive, a last minute search for something to put on the plate as we leave for church, generosity will never become the joyful habit it can be. Until we make conscious financial decisions to plan our giving then we will never be able to embed discipleship into this most personal and often sensitive area of of our lives. As Billy Graham once noted, “If a person gets his attitude toward money straight, it will help straighten out almost every other area in his life.”

Planned giving is one side of the coin; generosity is the other. If I plan to give each week a gift that inadequately represents what has been entrusted to me by God, inadequately reflects the financial need of the church and inadequately reflects all that God has done for me in Christ, then my planned giving is largely empty of meaning. But, and here is the key, the kind of generosity which we are called to in Christ will never be achieved if we do not take the biblical invitation to planned giving seriously.

The key to growing generous givers is planned giving and planned giving is an affair of both the heart and the mind. It is the concrete, practical decision to make a priority of giving to God as an act of gratitude, worship and of being caught up in the flow of God's giving and grace. To explore further see The Value of Planned Giving.

The topic of planned giving may also be an introduction to the concept of tithing. To explore this subject further, see the the page Tithing: Underlying Principles.