Handling Finances as a Christian: Budgeting 101

Why budget?

Scripture tells us that our money and possessions are not ours, but God’s. We are simply managers and stewards of what is His. As part of our church family, we want you to be equipped to be a good steward of the finances that God has entrusted to you. Below are a few ways to get started.

Have a written budget

Scripture calls Christians to plan to do good (Proverbs 14:22). This includes planning how to steward our finances and resources. Budgeting can often be seen as an intimidating process. However, in planning a budget, it can actually be a joyful and exciting process to plan for how you are going to invest in the lives of people and advance God’s kingdom through finances. 

Make cuts to your budget

As a starting place, Proverbs 3:9 says to “Honor the Lord with your wealth and with the firstfruits of your produce; then your barns will be filled with plenty and your vats will be bursting with wine.” In Matthew 6:33, Jesus tells his disciples, “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” Scripture calls us to entrust ourselves to God with our first fruits, not the leftovers. In doing so, God actually promises all that we could ever need or want (Proverbs 11:24). Therefore, as we begin our budgeting process, we should always begin with tithing a tenth of our income towards the local church and investing in God’s kingdom where we are. This does not mean that we do not financially support other local organizations or missionaries serving overseas. Rather, our tithing to our local church is a baseline for all giving to grow from.

From here, we plan to provide for the needs of ourselves and our family. This will include things such as food, clothing, water, homes and utilities. Crazy as it might sound, this might not include having cable, the latest video game console, the designer pair of jeans or a nicer car. Make cuts in your budgets for things you can go without. 

Review your budget regularly with people you trust that can speak into your life

Our hearts often deceive us and what we may believe to be a need may actually be our heart craving to fill itself and find identity in something new rather than in Christ (Jeremiah 17:9). One way to fight for contentment is to open up our lives, including our budgets, to those around us. Proverbs 15:22 says, “Without counsel plans fail, but with many advisers they succeed.” On a personal level, this will look like allowing your Lifegroup and other trusted friends to have input into your life and your finances. 

Here’s how we practically implement these steps at Midtown. Twice a year, we go through our budgeting process. During this process, we plan for the coming months in expectation of what we are going to receive in donations and how we are going to steward the resources God has entrusted to us.

• For our spring budget process, an email is sent out to all of our ministry teams on November 1 to begin submitting budgets for the spring (January to July).
• During November, our ministry teams meet together, pray through and come up with a plan for how much money to spend for their area of ministry. The budget for their ministry area is submitted for review along with a description of how the funds will be used and why it should not be cut. 
• By December 10, the lead pastors of our various churches meet to review the requested budgets and make any necessary cuts that are needed.
• By December 15, we meet with our financial advising team, which is made up of a few missionary members within our church family. During this meeting, we do a comprehensive, big picture financial review. We review and receive feedback from this team on our current approved budget and current financial state of our church.
• Finally, we post the approved budget on midtownmoney.com for all of our staff to use and adhere to. In addition, should an expense come up during our budget cycle that was unexpected and not budgeted for, our ministry leaders submit an overspend request to be reviewed by the lead pastors of each church.

Our desire is for our church family to view and handle financial resources correctly through the lens of the gospel. For additional teaching on budgeting and using wealth well, you can listen to the sermons below:

http://midtowndowntown.com/sermons/proverbs-wisdom-and-wealth
http://midtowndowntown.com/series/sermon-series/treasure-hunting

Kidtown Family Challenge #1: Journaling

This past week we launched our “Personal Liturgy” series and talked about how we all have an order to our lives and the things we do are doing things to us. The habits we are practicing every day are shaping us into the people that we will become. 

Over the next five months, we are all together trying to create a personal liturgy that helps us become the kind of people that God has designed us to be. The Kidtown Team has been working hard to develop content for their own personal liturgy series called, “The Things You Do, Do Things To You.” The goal of this series is to help kids understand, value, and practice growing in their relationship with God. 

Each week, Kidtown will provide biblical instruction concerning healthy habits and corresponding tools to help kids practice these habits at home. For the first four weeks, Kidtown will be teaching the value of journaling. During Week 1 (January 21st), children decorated their own 3 ring binders at Kidtown to take home and use throughout the series. (If your child missed Week 1, please let a Kidtown volunteer know so that you can receive a binder!) 

Journaling Tips and Tricks: 

Time: Designate a time and space for your child to journal. It may be helpful for your family to choose the same time each day. You could designate it as “journaling time” for your entire family or if your child needs your guidance, it may be best to set aside a time for them that is separate from yours. 

Place: Designate a special place where your child can be creative. Have supplies on hand like crayons, colored pencils, stickers and glue. 

Attitude:  Let your child see you get excited about journaling. Encourage focus and creativity but don’t enforce too many rules concerning what your child journals. This should be enjoyable. Celebrate the scribbles! 

Preschool Tips- Children in preschool need lots of space on their pages to draw, color, and write. 

Elementary Tips- Elementary students need wide ruled paper and a section for drawing. Depending on your child’s age and creativity, he or she may put more effort into drawing than writing.  Older children may prefer simply writing about their day or how they are feeling instead of drawing.  

Each week, Kidtown will provide daily journaling prompts located on their homelinks. (All homelinks are also available online here!) These prompts will challenge students to direct their thoughts towards God during their journaling time. 

We love that our entire church family will have challenges each week to go along with the series. The Kidtown challenges will be similar to the adult “Personal Liturgy” challenges (which can be found here) but will be customized for kids. You know your child best. If any of the recommended tips and tricks are not helpful, feel free to use your own strategies.  We hope that these resources will serve as a great launching pad for new family rhythms and habits that will lead us into the life we were made for. 

Sermon Recap | The Life You Were Made For (And the Things That Ruin It)

The word ‘liturgy’ describes the rituals or practices of the people of God as they gather to worship. But what we often don’t realize is that we all have a personal liturgy. 

You have an order to your life and the things you do are doing things to you. 

The habits you practice every day are forming you into a certain type of person. The small decisions you make in an ordinary day of your life have enormous impact on the quality of your life. The things you do do things to you. Your habits and practices shape who you become. 

According to Jeremiah 17:5-8, two types of life are possible for us and the things we do in the ordinary rhythms of our daily existence will largely determine which type of spiritual life we are experiencing.

The Blessed Life: Humans were designed to get resources and nutrients from God. There is a life available to us when we walk with God in such a way that we are never moved from the life and nutrients that make us thrive. 

• Jesus is the model of the Blessed Life. He depended on the Father perfectly. He existed with a settled disposition of fullness and joy that was not lacking in anything. Jesus stayed connected to His Father in a such a way that when the very worst circumstances came for Him—when the heat and drought came—He did not wither. 
• Jesus invites us to this Blessed Life. Jesus invites us into what He had (John 7:37-39). Jesus came to put the blessed life inside of us so that the river of God’s spirit could live in our hearts and we could experience a vibrant spiritual life that feels like a tree planted by water. 

The Cursed Life: The cursed life is characterized by the desert. As a society, we lack purpose, hope, and joy. We have intentionally cultivated life in the desert without even realizing it. 

• 5 Enemies Contributing to the Cursed Life (that particularly tend to attack Americans’ lives):
  • Apathy: not caring about things God created you to care about
  • Distraction: being unable to focus on God and others because your attention is taken by less important things
  • Self-Reliance: living your day-to-day life depending primarily on your own strength and resources
  • Cynicism: a posture of skepticism that leads you to doubt God’s presence and activity in your life
  • Self-Absorption: being preoccupied with your thoughts, feelings, desires, and concerns above all else.

These five spiritual enemies will be focus points in our series for us to fight against together. If it is true that we have unknowingly cultivated these things into our lives, then we have to start working against them. We have to fight them. 

For the next five months, we are all together trying to create a personal liturgy that puts these enemies to death and helps us become the kind of people God designed us to be. 

Each of the five sections in our series will help us to intentionally fight against one of the five spiritual enemies. Each section will have a daily challenge that we will all do together in order to practice becoming people who are transformed by God. Research says that it takes about 21 days to start a new habit so we are praying that a lot of these challenges that we do together become habits we do over the long haul that lead us into the life we were made for. 

To help us keep up with these daily challenges, we created an app for the series. The app is called “Personal Liturgy” and for the next 120 days, it is going to have a specific and daily challenge for us to complete. 

Our challenge for the first few weeks is simply to journal every single day to fight apathy in our souls. It’s to start a simple habit of opening up the app and honestly answering the questions for each day, and training ourselves to think more deeply about our lives so we can intentionally engage with God. 

To learn more about the “Personal Liturgy” app, check out this short video where one of our pastors, Brandon Clements, walks through how to use the app:

If you don’t have a smartphone or would prefer to receive the challenges via email, you can sign up here: 

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Sermon Recap | In the Image of the God Who Serves

This past weekend over 500 people served across the city with our seven partner organizations. This equates to over 2500 service hours! 

Part of why this is so huge is that the Bible tells us that we are created in God’s image and one aspect of that image that we were created to bear is called, Ezer. 

Ezer means helper—one who comes alongside and gives necessary strength and protection to serve those who lack the strength to protect themselves. 

Over and over throughout scripture, we see God as Ezer for us:

Psalm 30:20: Our soul waits for the Lord; He is our help and our shield.

Psalm 70:5: But I am poor and needy; hasten to me, O God! You are my help and my deliverer; O Lord, do not delay!

Psalm 124:8: Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth.

Psalm 146:5: Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God.

When God gives the Israelites miraculous victory over the Philistines in 1 Samuel 7, Samuel celebrates by erecting a large stone altar that he names Eben-ezer: Stone of help. It’s a reminder that God is our helper. God comes alongside and serves His people. 

God is a God who serves. It’s a fundamental aspect of His character. Every day, every moment, God is holding creation together; He’s providing for, loving, forgiving, encouraging, and pursuing His rebellious, sinful, broken image bearers. 

Colossians 2 says that Jesus is the image of the invisible God. He perfectly reflects who God is. So it’s no surprise that when Jesus shows up He says. “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” (Mark 10:45) 

We were all made in the image of God. We were made to reflect His image. When we serve, we align ourselves with what we were made for. We align ourselves with reality in the universe. We are discovering part of our designed identity. We are reflecting the God who serves: Ezer. 

Sermon Recap | Redefining Greatness

Mark 9:33-35 and Mark 10:35-45.

In both of these passages, Jesus flips the script and redefines greatness for his disciples and for us:

Mark 9:35: “If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all.”
Mark 10:43-45: “But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be servant of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

We all get caught up trying to prove ourselves, compare ourselves, and show ourselves to be better than those around us. A helpful tool is The Princess Test, a questionnaire that helps reveal areas where we functionally believe we should be treated like royalty, instead of like a servant. 

The Princess Test:

• I expect life to be smooth and free from burdensome people or problems.
• I often get angry at people for not treating me right, or not acting a certain way toward me. 
• I often feel resentful. I feel bitter towards those who have what I want. 
• I feel annoyed and slighted when I am asked to do menial tasks. 
• I get frustrated when I don’t receive the thanks or notice from people I think I deserve. 
• I get upset when I don’t get my way in a group decision. 
• I am rarely the first one to offer to help out or serve. 
• I find it hard to recover when I am made fun of or my ego is bruised. 
• I judge people based on their usefulness or what I think they can add to my life. 
• I get mad at God when I don’t think He’s making my life go how it should.

The reality is that we are all enslaved to our own pride and our own desire to be great until we see true greatness crucified on the cross. Only when we come to understand that the greatest servant who ever lived poured out His precious blood as a ransom to pay for us, can we begin to have the real, internal confidence that it takes to serve the people around us. 

A huge part of what Serve the City Weekend is about is training us to walk in the new servant greatness identity that Jesus has given us. We are not just spending a weekend doing nice things to feel better about ourselves; we are hoping to foster an ongoing desire to become the servant of all—to love those who have nothing to offer us—to serve those who are hurting, messy, and broken. Because this is exactly what we needed the Son of Man to do for us when we were hurting, messy and broken, and had nothing to offer Him. 

It’s not too late to sign up for our Serve the City Weekend! In fact, several sites are still in need of volunteers! We’d love for you to sign up with our North Main Block Party (kid-friendly and a great Saturday-only option!), Ezekiel (kid-friendly), or Transitions teams. Get all the information you need here!