Adults Have Wallets

Several years ago my wife worked for a pastor in North Atlanta. The church grew incredibly fast: in a few years it went from a couple of hundred people to over a thousand. The growth was because it was the only Baptist church in an area of Atltanta that exploded in population. The church built buildings as fast as it could afford. They created a master-plan and communicated to everyone what the plans were for future expansion of the facilities. But the need for buildings meant that they had to rent some trailers for temporary housing of some Bible study classes.

The pastor and other leaders made the decision to put adults in those mobile home-like classrooms. He took some flak for that decision. Here was his response, "Adults have wallets, chidren don't." If the adults were uncomfortable with their trailer classrooms, then the adults should give more so the church can build more rooms. It worked. Within a dozen years the church had completely finished their master planned campus. It is really nice. I'm sure they still have debt, but everyone is in the same set of buildings all because the pastor was willing to challenge the people with wallets, adults, to give more.


Lead On!
Steve