Lauren Hunter

We all know and realize that most pastors and ministry staff operate on tight church and personal budgets. It's just the reality of being in ministry. Expensive degrees and copious years of schooling to do not promise a luxurious salary. However, if you get creative (or have a spouse who works at a more high-paying position) this doesn't have to be a deterrent to being in ministry. At Christmastime, however, often we feel the penny-pinch both in our church finances and in our personal finances.

Giving is a big deal, especially this time of year when churches often find themselves in the red, instead of the black. Once Thanksgiving and Giving Tuesday have passed, the race is on to encourage generosity and elicit donations from congregations. While trusting God to help close the year in the black is, of course, the goal, most pastors and church staff find themselves "sweating it" if even just a little. The annual State of the Plate survey is quite timely and offers insight into people's giving patterns.

Backing up your personal as well as church office computers is something you don't want to sideline. While your church may utilize cloud-based, also known as web-based, church management software, you're sure to have lots of other files and valuable church information that resides on your church computer hard drive.

Giving Tuesday - the first Tuesday after Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday - has turned into a phenomenon that delightfully transforms our focus, if only for one day, from shopping and consumerism to giving and generosity. According to WikiPedia, "Giving Tuesday was started in 2012 by the 92nd Street Y and the United Nations Foundation as a response to commercialization and consumerism in the post-Thanksgiving season.

With Thanksgiving just around the corner, what better time than now to take time as a church staff to thank your volunteers? Having just come off Pastor Appreciation Month where congregations have (hopefully) been encouraged to thank their pastors, turning now to approach the myriad of volunteers in your church and community and showering them with appreciation seems, well, just natural.

As is custom on Thanksgiving Day, giving thanks for all we have can be easy or hard depending on what's going on in our lives. If things are tough, it's often hard to give God our thanks; when things are going well, sometimes we forget to thank God too. We praise God first because he loved us and sent his only son to die for us on the cross (John 3:16),--everything else should be gravy.

Heading into the giving season, churches are looking for tools, techniques, and ways to achieve their donation goals and end the year in the black. Leadership Network sat down with the number crunchers at MortarStone, which has analyzed more than $1.5 billion in personal church giving, and asked them to calculate various benchmarks. What they found provided very interesting results.

Canva is a wonderful online graphic design tool for church communicators (and everyone else who's ever had to design a flyer or graphic). I've used Canva to design graphics for this site, presentations, social media headers, Facebook images, and much more. It's an incredibly easy tool to use that can help with a plethora of design needs.