Stepping up in giving....

The UK government gives us 25p for every £1 that a signed-up taxpayer gives to King’s. That’s a lot of money – for every £100,000 given, that’s another £25,000! Think how far that can go in Kingdom work...At King’s we provide an information sheet that gives all the details anyone will need to enable them to give and put it into place on a regular basis. This includes details of how to Gift Aid giving.


I have also taught that in the life of the church moments will come when we go for a building project and then our giving needs to change! For a certain period of time, we give 10%, then another 10% and live off 80% of our income. In this our leaders lead from the front – we do not ask the church to do anything that we aren’t doing ourselves. This is not without some choices and some prioritising – and for me it has involved re-working my whole financial life-plan. Many of you will have one of those in one form or another – mine is a spreadsheet that covers 25 years! This is because I realise that the decisions I make now will impact the future and influence what I have available when I am 70 years old.

Some people are worried about what’s happening next week, let alone in 25 years’ time but we know we do need to think further ahead, both individually – and as a church. Others think, ‘I can’t argue with the Biblical principles of giving’ but the key thing is the next step. People may be convinced by them, may agree with the need for grace-filled giving, but feel it is a high bar and so just throw in the towel at that point and give up thinking about it at all. I would encourage a first step, to put God first and say, ‘I’m going to give regularly and systematically. I’m going to Gift Aid what I’m committed to giving so that King’s gets the tax too. I’m going to make that next step.’

Content taken from a King's Stewardship seminar 

Looking after responders

The next thing we would do is to invite those who are responding to first of all raise their hand and then to come forward. Then I would say ‘We’re going to sing the song through once more and if there is anyone else that would like to respond, would you come forward and join those already at the front.’


At that point we’ve got a ‘follow up’ team in place. This would primarily be our Alpha team who are used to leading people to Christ. They come forward and talk with those who have responded - we generally take the responders out of the meeting because we find it is difficult to talk to them properly once the post-meeting hubbub begins. Ideally we have a room set aside where people can talk quietly and be prayed for. Your facility and the rooms available will shape how you do that, as will the numbers involved.

I’ve also seen Lex do the following, and I’ve done this once or twice - when people have come forward he will keep them at the front of the auditorium for a few minutes and he will invite yet more people to respond. He goes again - it’s fantastic. What I love about it is that he is very personal, very pastoral. He looks at each person and gets the church to clap them as they come forward; he speaks to them as if no one else is there. Then he often leads them all in a prayer, he’s very warm and he says ‘Is there anyone else that would like to come and join these people?’ and do you know what, nearly every time he does that there are others that come to faith because they come forward as well and everyone claps again!

It’s amazing to see that gift of the evangelist operate - when Lex first came to King’s we saw a lot of response from people. The second time he came we saw a good number respond but I believe that one of the reasons we didn’t see so many is because in the meantime he had equipped us at King’s to do this ourselves. We had learned from him and grew in confidence and experience. It will be the same for you!

to be continued...

The pressure of waiting...

Lex Loizides has shown us a way to do gospel appeals at the end of a meeting and I stick to his model most of the time. After the preaching we sing a song and we have often used the song he uses “Lord I come to You…” Then while people are still standing we ask for those who want to respond to raise their hand.

At this point I am praying, ‘Lord please be with me,’ because I feel under pressure - wanting people to respond. I will then probably say something encouraging like ‘That’s fantastic’, and I’d count them as they put their hands up. ‘That’s one. Thank you. Two...’ Sometimes it’s great and there are four, five… seven. I tell them that God’s here - at that point expressing the love, mercy and compassion of God is important.

We sing the song through once, the band might just carry on playing and I would come back in and say ‘I’m now going to give an opportunity for anyone here to respond to Jesus… ‘. I find it emotionally demanding to do this. I can do all the other stuff in church leadership, lead the meeting, handle the occasional dodgy prophecy and things like that - but there’s a spiritual battle when you stand up and invite a response to the gospel. You have to stand there and you have to make that appeal to people. I’ve found that at times I’ve had to make myself stay there!

We must remember the battle going on in your own heart, and a huge battle going on in the hearts and minds of those who are thinking about responding. I remember the day I got saved, I spent about 20 minutes having a discussion with myself and God whether I was going to count the cost of doing this and make my response. Do you remember that moment? We don’t doubt the battle for souls.

I’ve watched evangelists. They dwell in the moment. They don’t lose courage. They press on. I’m a pastor at heart - I’m concerned that there isn’t some manipulation and emotional pressure here. You know that can happen. Have you ever been in meetings like that? Evangelists don’t seem to worry about it; they’re interested in the lost and their eternal destinies at that moment. I’ve seen Lex wait for a long time and then watched as someone in the church I know responds, their parents weeping in their places - all because he waited. So wait. It’s a faith moment.

How to use an evangelist effectively..

At King’s we don’t do a gospel appeal every week - perhaps on average 1 in 4 Sundays there will be a gospel application and we would make an appeal. On occasions we might invite an evangelist to speak; churches that can’t afford to employ a full-time evangelist (and not many of us can afford that luxury!) can bring one in from elsewhere for a particular day. Many of us on the King’s team have a little bit of the evangelist in our make-up, but we don’t have an evangelist like we have an Ephesians 4 teacher. Such gifts are great but they don’t carry the church on a day-to-day basis.

My observation would be that too many leaders bring in a specialist for their second or third staff appointment and do that too early. If you’re a smaller church then you really want a generalist as your second appointment because the main thing that needs to happen is to release the senior leader into other areas. I’ve seen this happen time and time again - an evangelist is taken on and when the pastor wants the evangelist to carry some further areas of responsibility the evangelist says, ‘No. I just want to preach the gospel and speak to unbelievers...’
However, each church could get an evangelist in on occasions. Our observation of gifted evangelists that have come to our church is they spend more time on the appeal than most of us do because the rest of us are generally teachers and are less comfortable with dwelling on the appeal. Lex Loizides has shown us a way to do this…

Appealing to people...

We tell lots of stories at King’s. Honestly, I would say that if you see someone saved tomorrow, tell everyone two or three times. People, particularly British people, always look on and say little! If you see someone come to faith here and there, you grow a bit and your people need to hear such stories. We tell the success stories; we’re not unreal, we don’t make them up, but we do tell the stories when they happen - I do that regularly. ‘We had 25 people at Alpha and on Holy Spirit day 5 people responded and became Christians’...

We want to stir faith in our people and of course we pray a lot as a church about people becoming Christians. So growth is on our agenda. Even more precisely - salvation growth is on our agenda. So we teach it, we model it as leaders; we set goals, tell success stories and pray about it in our prayer meetings.

I want to make some comments on gospel appeals and how we do them at King’s. At the end of a Sunday meeting quite regularly I would do a two minute gospel appeal. I might not be leading the meeting or preaching but at the end of the worship or if we’ve broken bread together, we might just feel it is right to go for a gospel appeal - literally a two minute thing. It is ‘God is here. God loves you. We’ve just celebrated His death and resurrection. We don’t know if you’re a Christian. We just want to give you an opportunity to respond to Christ here and now. So why don’t we all close our eyes. Is there anyone here that wants to become a Christian? Could you put your hand up now…?’

Sometimes when we do it that way we get no response but you’d be surprised how many times someone in our context will respond. If there is no response in the first meeting, there are always the subsequent meetings. That’s all we do. You don’t need to include the whole doctrine of salvation in there, with the creation and the fall and things like that! In that sense you don’t lose the whole meeting to the gospel moment because there are other things to include such as teaching for the church and worship. We would say to our preaching team ‘you need to present Christ every time you preach and everything you bring should go through the Cross or reflect the Cross somehow as you preach’. If you just preach and Jesus doesn’t appear in the material then we are ‘off message’.

Building trust, setting goals

I would stress that a key component in leadership is trust. If you don’t have the trust of your fellow leaders and of the people you lead then you’ll know about it because every time you initiate something, you will recognise there’s an underlying issue with resistance and lack of trust. To gain trust also involves giving people confidence in your leadership and the decisions that you make, so I present our vision goals to them in faith. ‘We’re going to see 10 people saved this year’ - and we saw 3 saved in the following week. I’ve seen too many leaders present faith goals which are against the past trend of their achievement and everyone in the church who hears them says ’yeah, yeah, yeah’ publicly but in their hearts they say ’no, no, no’.

So we set yearly goals and then as we gained some momentum we then began to set 5 year goals to give us a longer framework within which to work. Our set of 5 year goals set in January 2007 included reaching people - to grow from an average of 750 to 1,100 attending at King’s on Sunday and we are currently seeing around 1400 now (2012). Children are included in our attendance figures because their numbers impact us every week. In order to make space for the adults in the auditorium we provide kids’ work for the entire duration of our meetings. With multiple meetings this has an on-going impact on our room space elsewhere in the building – it’s essential to provide facilities for our kids’ work. It would be true to say that currently our huge facility problem is faced predominantly by our children so I count the children in to keep their needs in high profile - that’s been one of our big issues. One of the other areas impacted would be adequate office space for our staff and volunteers.

So we set goals - goals built from trends that we have seen, that are measurable, not just taken out of hope – goals based on past evidence. If your church hasn’t grown for 10 years you need to create some momentum moments to encourage growth. So don’t say, ‘Steve Tibbert says set goals!’ and then set goals that are so far ‘out there’ that in a year’s time you realise that you’re going to have to really move on them because you‘re already 30 behind. You‘re setting yourself up for failure and failure is never an encouraging thing!

Changing your church culture

If you’re going to change the culture of your church, that change has to come first through the teaching given. As a result I have taught a great deal about being a missionary church. Dave Devenish was very helpful to me and to the church on this. When looking at being a missionary church rather than just a pastoral church, he argued that good pastoral care is actually there to care for people who are getting saved and to equip them to reach the next group of people, so you need to teach it that way. For example, a great way to begin to change the culture of your church would be to equip people to witness. I’m talking about a huge cultural shift here.

It’s foundational that you begin to look at everything in church life through a different filter - and you also have to model it yourself as a leader. This is personally demanding; one year I invited 18 people to our Christmas Carol Service. I invited 18. I think in the end 10 of them came and one went on the Alpha course.

And we have set ‘smart’ goals for our growth. When I first started at King’s I made yearly goals because what was needed was to gain trust from a church that had struggled. I set such goals so that we could have measurable amounts of progress that everyone could see and recognise. Initially I set goals at such an attainable level that we had almost achieved them by the time the ink dried on the paper - even though I was giving us a year to reach them!