Following Dave Ramsey’s  “Life.  Money.  Hope.”  I’m pumped – but cautious.    Ramsey is beautifully relatable while being fully biblical and helpful.  We are making the video series available to life Groups – watch them everyone!  The Bible says wisdom is sweet to your soul like honey is sweet to the taste.  That’s the way this stuff came across.  It was correcting me but filling me with vision and hope. I not only wanted to correct my financial mistakes, I felt like I really could do it.

November 8, 2008 my title and responsibility changed to “Lead Pastor”. 
That basically meant leadership for the entire church became my focus (with accountability to Pastor Steve and the Senior Leadership Team).  It wasn’t long before it hit me hard that financial health was a critical part of church health.    As I prayed about it, I knew pretty quickly that the Lord was challenging me to FIRST, get my own financial life healthy and only then begin to speak to the congregation about their financial health or the church’s as a whole.  Don’t misunderstand, our financial future is not in my hands (heaven forbid).  We have a fantastic group of Trustees,  a great Senior Leadership team , and a  competent staff,  all of whom bear responsibility and mutual accountability to make sure we stay God honoring in our finances.  But, whenever you are asked to lead anything – the first law of leadership is to accept responsibility for what you’re leading; to take its health and direction personally and do what you can to make sure it is everything it ought to be.  I believe that. . . deeply.   Church finances fell into that category.  My first obligation was to look at my personal situation.  Biblical leadership demands authenticity.  You cannot lead where you have not gone. Ugh.

All I can say is Praise God for Dave Ramsey! He took stuff that was, to me, a boring, irritating necessary evil and gave me new vision.  My wife and I were encouraged that things weren’t as bad as we thought in our home.  Truthfully, we had just gotten sloppy.  We’ve committed to changing that. Now we have a plan.   Ramsey challenged us to write down a financial mission statement and a primary financial goal.  This is ours:

Our family financial mission statement is now: 

To develop our family finances so we can be authentic, wise and godly examples for the church family to follow.

Our key financial goal:

To be able to save and invest enough money to freely travel, actively participate and learn in worldwide missions while helping others do the same

My passion in church finances is to make GET WISDOM our mantra,  passion and pursuit.  Then make God honoring personal financial health our church family goal. As we do that we will see people’s lives freed up, their relationships deepen and their decisions become more kingdom driven.

All of this I am excited about.  But – my prayer, in my weakness is, “Lord PLEASE give me the grace to not let this be a fad or flash in the pan idea.  Give me patience and discipline to do what’s right over the long haul.”