Community Engagement
Introduction
Objective: Develop full ownership and responsibility for the financial resourcing and community engagement (both local and non-local) to achieve the vision that God has given them for their geography. This requires a spiritual foundation around stewardship, money and fundraising.
Scripture: Jesus traveled about from one town and village to another, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God. The Twelve were with him, and also some women... These women were helping to support them out of their own means” Luke 8:1-3
Evidence of Senior LEaders demonstrating this objective looks like:
- As a mission leader over a given geography…living and leading Has an active Matthew 9:38 sub-List of adults that are prayed for regularly and invited to help participate in and support the work financially.
- Invests time in building and strengthening relationships with financial partners.
- Demonstrates the capacity to raise major funding.
- Raises money locally and internationally.
- Understands the current financial needs and future needs of their area of responsibility and can communicate those clearly.
- Works well with a committee (also known as Action Teams, Regional teams, and Country Encouragement teams) of adults to plan for and meet the needs of their area of responsibility.
- Sees beyond his or her own geography of responsibility
- Able to have visibility into other geographies funding and celebrate what the Lord’s doing versus acting out of jealousy – key for working with major donors
Teaching Principles - The why
This series of lessons will be led by Natalia (Naty) Pacheco. Naty has been a Young Life kid, a volunteer, full-time staff as a club coordinator, Area Director, was part of the Costa Rican National Directors team, and led a team to start a ministry in Belize. Nine years ago she started focusing on adult community engagement to raise funds for Young Life Costa Rica and training the staff and leaders to do the same in Latin America & The Caribbean. She is currently working to equip leaders around the globe to raise funds as well. She teaches us from deep personal experience leading local fundraising in Costa Rica and teaching others to do the same.
As you go through the following lessons, some material may be familiar if you have gone through stewardship training. The ideas will be reinforced in these lessons as we can always grow in these areas with ourselves and with those we lead. It is good to think of how to develop these skills for yourself but also for your 1st branch.
Community Engagement
As we continue to connect the elements of the Next Kid Framework and dive deeper into each element, we move into community engagement. The vision is that every Young Life area is embraced by a diverse community of engaged adults sharing their time, talents, and resources, to sustain the ministry.
When we invite people to join the vision God has given us, we are inviting them to respond with generosity. Generosity has different shapes. During our next session, we will focus on inviting people to be generous with the resources God has entrusted them with.
Henri Nouwen says that “we will never be able to ask for money if we do not know how we ourselves relate to money”. For this reason, we will spend this first session learning three key facts about stewardship.
Written Content (this could be done individually or as a group)
FACT 1: God Owns Everything
“The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it;” Psalm 24:1
Personal Reflection: Read the following verse and write down the ways in which God Demonstrates His Ownership over everything:
- Genesis 1:1
- Ephesians 1:21-23
- Matthew 6:25-33
- Mark 5:35-41
teaching
Fact 2: People Manage God's Resources
“So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. Then God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it. Reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the animals that scurry along the ground” Genesis 1:26-28
It is important to recognize what this passage is telling us:
Humanity is created in God’s image and likeness.
Humanity is given a clear job description.
What humanity should do with God’s resources is rule, manage, expand, and multiply.
Personal Reflection: Read the passage below and write the characteristics you can deduce from the faithful and the unfaithful steward.
Matthew 25: 14-30
Fact 3
Fact 3: Effective Stewardship is Learned and Led
Good news! We can learn to be better stewards of the resources God has entrusted us with. A step to becoming a faithful steward is to become more self-aware of how your view of money has been shaped, and then to rebuild (in some ways!) those thoughts so that they align more closely with what God says about money and living on the support of others.
Personal Reflection: In Henri Nouwen’s A Spirituality of Fundraising he provides the below questions to reflect on your own relationships with money. Use these questions to do a self-evaluation of your experience and perspective about money. Journal your response to a few that stick out to you.
Family History
- How many of us currently know how much money our father or mother earns or has?
- Do we normally talk with them about their money?
- Is money ever the subject of dinner table conversation?
- Are family conversations about money usually anxious, angry, hopeful, or satisfying?
- Did our parents talk with us about money when we were children? Do they talk with us about it now?
- Did our parents teach us skills on how to handle money?
- Do we discuss financial affairs with our children? Are we comfortable telling them how we earn it and how we use it?
Current Relationship with money
- How do we spend the money we have?
- Are we inclined to save money so we will be prepared for emergencies, or do we spend it because we might not have it later?
- Do we like to give money to our friends, to charities, to churches, to political parties, to educational institutions?
- Where are we giving our money?
- Are we concerned whether our gift is tax deductible? Does that question even occur to us?
- How do we feel if people used the money we gave them in ways other than those for which we gave it?
Value and Identity
- How does having, or not having, money affect our self-esteem, and our sense of value?
- Do we feel good about ourselves when we have a lot of money?
- If we do not have too much money, do we feel bad about ourselves?
- Is a low or even a modest income a source of embarrassment? Or do we think money doesn’t matter at all?
- Do we ever use money to make things happen the way we want them to happen?
- Do we ever use money simply to give others the freedom to do what they want to do?
- How do we feel when people ask us for money?
- Where is our security base? God or manna (possessions, wealth)?
Personal Reflection
As we reshape and build upon healthy notions of money, we will continue to build a Theological and Scriptural Foundation for Fundraising before we even begin to talk about specifics or strategies.
Personal reflection: Choose 4-6 of the passages and read, reflect, and write about what these passages teach about managing money:
Call to Action
Naty wraps up the three Biblical truths of Stewardship and tells a little bit of their personal journey to becoming a better steward of God’s resources.
- Share with your divisional cohort what you sense God is inviting you to do after going through this session.
When you are finished with your call to action, you can head to the second lesson of Community Engagement.
