“It’s not how much we give but how much love we put into giving.”
-Mother Theresa
One of the most challenging projects any church will face is creating an effective stewardship campaign. A successful stewardship season can help set a progressive tone for the church year, and equally, a lackluster campaign can dictate a staff to reduce programming for the year and even into subsequent years.
While there are many ways to craft a successful campaign, this article focuses specifically on the theme of storytelling as stewardship.
We live in a time where division is easier than connection. We often define ourselves in divisive ways; “I am a Democrat, you are a Republican. I am black, you are white, she is asian. I am a male, you are a female. I am husky, you are skinny. We are gay, you are straight.” Wether your church body wants to believe it or not, we are constantly looking at people as “the other.”
That is why storytelling is such a successful method of stewardship. To quote one of my all time favorite books of the old testament:
“It’s better to have a partner than go it alone.
Share the work, share the wealth.
And if one falls down, the other helps,
But if there’s no one to help, tough!”
-Ecclesiastes 4:9-10 (The Message, a paraphrased bible translation)
For the specific project that I worked on, the first step was identifying stories. There are many ways to do this, but from experience, the most successful way is to find a key volunteer to curate stories from your community. The resulting stories are a treasure trove of resources. They are clay for many different sculptures that can define a stewardship season. A collection of your church’s stories can become ad campaigns, videos campaigns, jumping points for dinner series, and most importantly, a device to encourage your parishioners to feel invested in their Christian home.
Once you have curated stories, visuals become the focal point. For the ASBH campaign, we focused on high quality, editorial style images reminiscent of Humans of New York. There are many techniques that can be implemented that even amateur church photographers can utilize. Creating a strong photographic style is an important part of the process. Always look to your Communications Director and other creative consultants to achieve the strongest visual styles. They truly will succeed where others have not.
Finally, once you have a body of stories and images, it is time for the designers to do the work. Always know your audience. What are the demographics of your church? What regional factors affect design? What are emerging trends on a national level? These specifics can define the success and failure of your campaign.
Ultimately, while all of us find it easy to see how we are different, the church can be a powerful, life-changing way to show where we are the same. Those commonalities help us to fulfill the greatest commandment, for when we know how we are the same, we can find pathways to truly love each other. That is not just powerful as a stewardship campaign, it can change the hearts of your congregation in unparalleled ways.
All the images in this post are copyrighted and are not allowed to be reused without permission in any way. Photography courtesy of Chris James Media.
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