CEP SEASON THREE EP: 06 - WITH GUEST PAUL RICE

Feb 16

A short bio about Paul

Paul is married with two sons, 3-yr and 7-mo, and works as an aerospace engineer for a US defence contractor, specialising in experimental helicopters.

About nine years ago, he started serving as his Church’s treasurer. After an “enlightening” conversation with his pastor, he developed the financial and accounting systems they are still using today.

Paul hosts the Mission Driven Budget Podcast to help church leaders eliminate financial stress and generously fund their Church’s mission.

In this episode, we explore with Paul the nuts and bolts of having a healthy framework for the church budget. Paul shares out of his ten-plus years of experience both in the church setting and from his role as an engineer in aerospace, leading people, projects and financial resources.

SHOW NOTES

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FULL TRANSCRIPT

CREATED BY AI - SO NOT 100% accurate.

David Mckeown 0:00

Welcome to the church explained podcast conversation to grow your leadership and build your Church today. I am the host of the podcast. Nathan is not with us today. So it's myself and our special guest, Paul Weiss. Paul, welcome to the show.

Paul Rice 0:17

It's an honour to be here, Dave,

David Mckeown 0:19

it is so good to have you. Let me just share with the audience a little bit of a bio about yourself. I'm going to look at my notes here and just read a few things. So to give our audience and our listeners a little bit more detail about you, Paul, for those who don't know, you, so you've been, you're married, you've got two sons, a three year old and a seven month year old. So the dad signs busy to me. And you work for aerospace, you're an aerospace engineer, and you work for a US defence contractor specialising in experimental helicopters. I had to read that a few times, Paul, because that sounds like a podcast on its own. To be honest. We may just come back to that experiment that helicopters maybe it's just a guy thing. You look at that and think that sounds exciting. But about nine years ago, you were serving in your local Church, and you began to serve as a treasure. And no, you had an enlightening conversation, as you've said, with your Pastor. And from there, you develop some systems and financial accounting, really, the Church is still using today. So that sounds great. And we're going to talk about finance day. This is the nuts and bolts of the podcast as we go through support. You host your own podcast called the mission driven podcast, mission driven budget budget podcast, whose goal is to help Church leaders eliminate financial stress and generously fund their church's mission. So we're gonna dig in a little bit to that as well. Because really, I think that will help our listeners, you play drums, and you've been doing that for over 30 years. Well done for that. And of course, you've had one of the guests we've had on our podcast has been in your podcast, as well. And apparently he is a drummer. That's John Hampton. So make sure the job, whatever he's doing today, maybe he's still a male, I do not know. Hey, Paul, welcome to the show.

Paul Rice 2:09

Thanks for having me. It's, it's really good to be here. And yeah, you know, whenever I connected with Chad, and then shortly thereafter connected with you, I don't know Some months later, you had mentioned that he was a drummer, and I had to give him a hard time because I said, Chad, how did this never come up? We have this drumming thing in common how? I don't know how we how we even got past that. So

David Mckeown 2:29

well, maybe maybe Paul, maybe he was intimidated by your your, your ability to play drums. But listen, it is so good to have you here. And as I've said already, to our listeners and to those who are watching, this is going to be a bit of a nuts and bolts around finance we want to talk about because it is such a big subject. But before we get there, let's find out a little bit more about you, Paul down a little bit about your background, your your maybe a little bit about your faith journey, if that's okay, if you're able to share that with us. That would be fantastic.

Paul Rice 3:07

Sorry, I dropped microphone, not a problem.

David Mckeown 3:09

There we go. Did you hear that? Did you hear that? Or do you want me to repeat that?

Paul Rice 3:13

Can you repeat the question? Please? Sorry. Yeah.

David Mckeown 3:15

So we want to find out a little bit about your faith journey. And maybe even you could share with us a little bit about your background, where you're living and what you do for fun.

Paul Rice 3:25

Yeah. So As Dave said, my name is Paul. And, you know, my background is I was born and raised and I'll say Dallas, Texas, most of your listeners probably know where that is. Dallas, Texas, born and raised here and family was very, very involved in Church very early on. The my dad served as the prayer partner prayer team kind of head guide, my mom played piano for the worship team forever and ever. And so I kind of grew up in this Church type environment, really came into my own faith later on in high school and early college years and began becoming heavily involved myself, play drums and high school and college for the worship bands, play some gigs on the side. And yeah, went to college had a great Church experience there. I went from my degree in mechanical engineering, and love every second of it. I was one of those guys that kind of knew what he wanted to do. By about freshman year in high school. I knew I was gonna do engineering, just didn't know what and was heavily involved there, at the Church in college, play drums for them, did some leadership things on the side there small groups, things like that. And when I got home, it was when I got home from college was looking for a Church. My Pastor, my current Pastor, turns out we were actually Elementary School compatriots, he was a grater to ahead of me. So we didn't spend a lot of time together, but we knew of each other. And of course, we all went to the same Church as well. So my parents found him on Facebook, he's starting to Church, he's planning this Church 25 years old, and I'm 22 You're 21 pretty young, pretty young crew. And so So, I show up there the second week in the building, they were in a house previously for about nine months and then started renting a facility once they got outgrew the house, so showed up there on the second week. And I remember praying, you know, asking God to help me find a Church that I could plant be planted in, stay out and help. And I felt the Holy Spirit just there in that moment. during worship time, he said, I want you to serve here. And I want you to give all of your expertise so that you can give me as much help to these folks as you can. And so, let's start at a now 10 some odd year 11 some odd year relationship with revived Church in Arlington, Texas and Pastor Steven Kilgore, grateful to you for developing me, and just being a leader that I'm proud to follow and continue to gain increasing responsibility. That conversation that you mentioned in the bio there, I just want to tell the story real quick, go for it. So I work I had been, I moved over into a project manager type of role and managing some multimillion dollar contracts with this defence contractor. And I remember having this conversation with Pastor Steven, and he was talking about the very first Easter that we had there arrive, he had this brilliant idea to put a radio ad out there on a very popular rock radio station called Kiss FM, here and here in Dallas. And the idea was that, you know, we'd put this ad out there for Easter, and it would, you know, help to reach people who, you know, might not normally be coming to Church, or maybe we're D Church, things like that. So the result of that radio ad was one person showed up from that radio ad. And it turns out, they already knew Jesus, they already had the Church they belong to, they just heard the they just heard the radio ad and said, Oh, I'll go check that Church out and then never came back. So here's the kicker, though, that radio ad costs $3,000, which turns out was the vast majority of the savings that the Church had at the time. And the radio ad was about three seconds long. And it said something like revive Church, Easter, and so the radio ad would loop, I don't know, once every several hours for about a week. And so that sparked a conversation, I said, you know, maybe we need a budget here at the Church and my experience with project management and you know, managing lots of manpower and money at work. So I think, you know, I don't have a finance background, per se. But I think we can put something together here. And so began serving as the treasurer at that point. And again, like you said, developed a lot of the systems and the accounting things that we're using today and continuing to build upon that. And that we could talk about some of that a little bit later. But that's how I got involved as the treasurer. That's how I, that's how I got to revive. And so yeah,

David Mckeown 7:45

brilliant. Hey, well, thanks for sharing a little bit about your story there. And before we sort of get into the nuts and bolts of the conversation around finance, and budgeting and systems, because in one sense, it doesn't sign that sexy for people. But you know, we really want people to stay on today, because it is it is the stuff that we all need to talk about. We all need to be aware off. Yeah. But before we get to that, you've mentioned drums, you do that, what else you do for fun, anything else,

Paul Rice 8:11

I really enjoy the podcasting, it has really allowed me to expand a lot of my connections. I've met people that I never thought I would meet people that didn't know people that I do know, that I've heard of. And that's really helped me to stay curious to stay interested and other people that don't have maybe your listeners have heard the phrase, if you want people to be interested in you, you know, be interested in other people stop trying to be interesting and actually start being interested in what other people are about, what what are they doing. And a lot of lessons learned out of podcasting persistence. If anybody has a podcast or listening the thing called pod fade, where after about seven or eight episodes, the pressure really is on you start running out of gas, you start running out of things to talk about learning to push through that. So I really enjoy the podcasting side of the house as well.

David Mckeown 8:58

Yeah, and it's great to have a fellow podcaster on, we don't often get that. So it is great to have someone who has a similar experience. And yeah, I hadn't heard of that term IQ. But I did experience that we did experience that after we had done our first number of podcasts, you're thinking okay, well, what's next? But here we are, we were not on season three of our podcast. And I think we've probably done a bite close to 60 podcasts. So it's hard to believe

Paul Rice 9:25

congratulations.

David Mckeown 9:26

We've got that far. But can I tell us a little bit more about your podcast? I know we've mentioned that I've mentioned in the bio. But tell us a little bit more about your podcast, its purpose, and I guess your passion behind it? Yeah, so

Paul Rice 9:39

the podcast started out of a passion project that's still on the work. It started out as a book. It may become an online course we'll see how things shake out. But as I was learning to the finance background and pieces to actually running a Church budget and managing the finances and accounting, I discovered that there were shockingly few easily accessible resources out there in the public domain. usually had to be a part of a existing denomination, which we were not. We were independent at the time. And I was asking lots of questions, just talking to anybody that I could find who might have some information, I had to do this properly handle the finance piece. And there just seemed to be lots of limited resources, you'd go online, you'd look up how to do Church finances, and you'd get a blog that says five tips for a better budget or 10 things that your Church needs to track in your expenses, and likely, that's fine and everything, but the how do I how do I go about doing this? What is what are some best practices. And so I just found the content that was available, lacking even still today. I did some searches the other day, just I think I found one actual online course that deals anything with Church finances, and so it's. And so I said, you know, I think I could take the experiences that I've had it revive piece those together, let's let's curate something that could actually help Church planters and small churches who might not have that finance background, using the skills that I've gained over the last 910 years. And maybe let's see about putting that out there. So I started doing interviews with people with the intention of starting a book project. And as I did these interviews, I discovered that, you know, the conversations that I'm having could really benefit, I think, other pastors, I wasn't sure how it was gonna go, how it was gonna go at first. And so I said, Well, what would it take to launch a podcast launched the podcast, and have gotten some very positive feedback, especially in the last 10 or so episodes, as we really dig into the conversations that are just not really being had in the public domain that I can see, if you go through any number of podcasts out there, there's not a whole lot that are covering very specific finance, accounting, budgeting type topics that we're that we're covering on the podcast. And so I felt like it was a pretty niche space that I could tap into, and try to provide a resource to pastors who are feeling that financial stress who are feeling the overwhelm, and who might feel like I just don't have enough giving coming in, or why are we always over budget, just trying to help bring some clarity and shine a light on an area that maybe just doesn't get talked about too much? So yeah, I wanted to have those conversations that I just I just didn't see happening in the public domain. And you know, really, that kind of intuition has been validated a number of times, because as I talk with people and my guests on the podcast, many whom many of whom are pastors, former Church planters. And I asked them, you know, what was your experience about budgeting? The number one answer that has always come back was, well, we just had to figure it out. And I'm calling, there's got to be a better way, there's got to be a curated set of information that we can hand to people, instead of them just doing what I did, having to ask questions having to figure out on my own. And so I'm continuing with the podcasts in that light. And again, maybe looking towards a book or an online course in the near future.

David Mckeown 12:49

Well, that's good, it's good. It's come out of a sort of passion project for you. Yeah. And I think there's something you know, even a bit of a side note that leaders can learn from that or other people listening and you know, they have a passion for something that is worth exploring, and having a go at it. So as we think about finances, what do you think is a healthy way for Church leaders? To think about money?

Paul Rice 13:12

Yeah, so I saw that question. From here, I've done a little blurb here, we can unpack this, I said, Money is an investment tool that God has entrusted us with. And when we actually think of it this way, there's some very positive behaviours that come out of this. And so we're just going to break the statement out here a little bit, first of all, you know, that God has entrusted us with, you know, we should be treating money, as if it's God's resource that he's given to us to steward. You know, when people give, it's an act of worship, and they're not giving to the local Church, they are giving to God through the local Church. And having that mindset shift, I think, as leaders and pastors and then Church leaders, really helps us to grasp, hey, this is not our money. And it is our responsibility to make sure that we are using it in the wisest way possible. I always go back to the parable of the talents, which is which is a great, great biblical illustration of that. And you know, it is dealing strictly with money, although Jesus relates to the kingdom of God and their spiritual pieces there as well. But we deal with money every day in Church, people are so surprised when things cost money, and they're go, I thought churches, you know, the light, though, was free, and you're like, No, it's not. And so we have to, we have to be able to steward that as well as possible. The second piece is the investment piece, you know, we don't spend money at Church, we should be investing money with intentionality, not just oh, wow, that Church down the street did something that was really cool. Hey, let's try that. Let's take a second and just stop and think about what are we about to invest this money into? There's really a nice paradigm shift that occurs when you stop thinking about money as something to spend and thinking of it as something to invest. And that brings us to the kind of a third piece of how I think about money and sure is an investment demands or return on that investment. If you have, if you're a Pastor, and you have a stock brokerage account or you have a retirement account, you're making sure that that retirement account is actually generating a return on the money that you're putting in there, right? Maybe you're checking it monthly, once a quarter, something like that, but you're looking at it on a regular basis to make sure that it's actually doing what you've put that money in there to do, which is to grow. I think the same thing should be expected, maybe even to a higher extent, with the money that God has entrusted us to invest. And so when we are investing our money into an event, or we're investing our money into a ministry, that investment should demand a return just as the master in the parable of the talents, demand and a return from the servants that we're investing and working with his money. And, of course, what happened to the guy that just buried it in the ground, you know, he was kicked out gnashing of teeth, all that kind of stuff. But the ones who actually generated the return on the investment by working and stewarding the money that they were given, they were the ones that were, they were blessed. And then in fact, they were given even more to steward and to and to work and to make a return on investment. So really, those three behaviours, I think, come out of this idea of thinking of money as God's and thinking of it instead of terms of spending but thinking of it in terms of investing.

David Mckeown 16:19

Yeah, a some some great insights, like that idea around investing rather than standing. I've heard people say, you know, as well as time as well, you know, we know that we should spend time, which invest time with people that show there's something there. Let's dig in a little bit, though, Paul, because when we think of this idea of investing for return and Church, you're trying to work? Hi, I'm trying to think and my mind like, Hi, did we really get that return? Because let's say, for example, like you chose to either say, Okay, we're going to put on a project, we're going to do a mission, we're going to do something, they invest their money. Like, what's the return they're looking for? Let's say they're looking for many people to join the Church. Going back to your first example, one person turns up, they're really happy. Yep. So how can we measure that? What can we what's the most unique thing that we can help people think through? How they should approach that investment? And look for that return?

Paul Rice 17:21

Yeah, absolutely. And to go back to that first example, yeah, based on the math, if you do it strictly by the math, we had a 0% return on investment. And the reason for that is, and I think this is going to speak to the question that you're asking here, the reason for that is, is the metric or the desire to measurement that we set up at the beginning was to get people who did not know God into Church to get people who, you know, maybe were far from God, maybe they went to Church as a kid or something, they've been discharged in the doors for Easter, so we can preach the gospel to them. We had one person show up, that person already knew Jesus already had a Church. So by that measurement, by that metric, we had a 0% return on investment. And so I think it really comes down to your listeners and other Church leaders. What are you wanting to accomplish with the money that you're about to invest? And the reason I asked that question is because there's a number of different things that we invest money into at Church that have different types of return on that investment. You might invest money into a, a giving campaign through social media through ads, spending money to do an event to dinner at your Church. And the goal might be to increase your overall years giving by an additional 10%. So thereby, that measurement of the return on investment would be that return on the money that you are expecting, that you're expecting to receive out of the investment that you've made into the dinner, or the social media ads, things like that. Conversely, if you are trying to get more people to come in your door, and you do a you spend money and invest into invitation cards, for example, and you spend, I don't know $1,000 on invitation cards, yeah, you're going to measure your return on investment by tracking guests that show up tracking, not only guests that show up, but how many actually stay, how many people are getting engaged if you have some kind of a growth track or you have some kind of an assimilation process, tracking how many people if you do small groups, or whatever you might call them, how many timberland joining those, how many people are volunteering. And so that really brings up the importance of metrics inside of your Church organisation. I know that some people get a little bit hung up on that, well, Church isn't about the numbers. It's all about the people and life changing them. I get it, and you're you're right at the end of the day, you're right. But how are you going to know if the investments that you're making are actually effective? If you're not tracking those metrics in the first place? And it comes down to very clearly defining before you make that investment? What are we trying to do? If you're just doing it because the Church down the street Didn't you think that was cool? That is a waste of money. Maybe that's harsh, I don't know. But your your have no way of knowing if your investment is actually effective if you're not tracking anything. And if you don't clearly define what you're trying to do up front.

David Mckeown 20:13

So maybe the answer is not as you've said, there is, there's Orion determining your win rate at the outset and thinking, Okay, this is what the window looks like for us, et cetera, you know, financial increase, people increase. It could be anything about but I guess it's about leaders, thinking more creatively, I suppose more intelligent intelligently about how they use the money, yes, that people give to God and just picking up your friends or through the Church, I think there's something quite powerful in that as well, to have that mindset of really investing as well. A company think of this idea of like, what happens? I suppose if churches get the money thing wrong, they're not thinking about it, right? Does it kind of negatively impact how they lead the Church? What's your thoughts on that?

Paul Rice 21:04

100%? The short answer is yes. And yes, even if they don't, even if they don't have like a corrupt what I would call a corrupt view of money, or they view it as theirs. To use however they want. I sincerely doubt that the vast majority of pastors actually hold that kind of view. But when you don't hold the view of, I think it goes back to the spending versus investing. If you're really stuck in the spending mindset, it is to the detriment of your mission. It's to the detriment of the vision and the strategy that you have at your Church. What is your Church trying to accomplish back to defining what you're trying to do? And when you have an incorrect mindset about money, if you're trying to spend it, you will never be as effective in your mission as you possibly could be. And what happens is our mutual friend Steven Webb, I think he has also been on your podcast.

David Mckeown 21:57

Yes.

Paul Rice 22:01

He always says, you know, Have you have you thought about it? Have you thought about it in the first place? And, and we create lots of what we call ministries, I'm using air quotes here. We get we get the knitting ministry, we get the baking ministry, and those are great, and everything. But are those really actually driving your mission forward in the first place? That's the question we should be asking yourselves. And so when we're just thinking in terms of spending money, we go, okay, well, yeah, we'll give the knitting ministry 100 bucks a month, 200 bucks a month, to subsidise the yarn, and the needles and you know, the space that they need, or maybe we'll buy some food or something like that. But most of the time, those little side hustle type ministries aren't actually driving the mission and the vision of the Church forward. And so that means that there's fewer resources to actually drive your mission and vision forward. A lot of times what will happen, and I've had conversations like this, pastors will say, I just feel like we don't have enough money to do what we're trying to do. Okay? Well, if there's either two things going on here, either one you're giving is not where it needs to be. Or number two, or maybe it's both or number two, you are wasting money into things that do not actually fund and tribe, your mission forward. All the little side hustle ministries, all of the outside organisations that you know, where somebody's pet project 10 years ago, and you have no idea why you're still supporting them. Are they even around anymore? Where's the money actually going? And so I always challenge pastors to, hey, let's take a look at your expenses. And let's see what that money is going to that is actually going to advance that mission is going to drive those metrics for that we talked about grow those metrics. And and so then, of course, you have the giving piece, too. And we can we can talk about that a little bit later, I'm sure. But yeah, your mission is going to suffer or even if it's not suffering, it's not going to advance as rapidly as it could or as strongly as it could, simply because those resources that you're putting into the side hustle stuff, and the things that don't work is not going into the actual mission itself.

David Mckeown 24:13

Yeah, poll, of course, we're talking about finances. But in reality, those side hustles are pet projects that somebody set up 10 years ago, they left the Church not even with you anymore, all that sort of stuff. All those are resources in themselves in the sense of people resources, time, resources, energy that goes into that, and maybe leaders do need to set time, maybe on a on a on a yearly basis and think okay, all these things mentioned on where we're going if they're not, let's remove them. They they're the difficult conversations. Leaders need to have, but of course important once because we really want to have a return on the investment then we need to be doing something about those side hustles excited Nice. Sometimes we don't want to touch them because they may have upset somebody who left the Church five years ago. But actually, we need to be more, I guess bold with these conversations that help us move the mission forward. So as we think about budgets, the best way for leaders to think about budgets and money, look, what has been your experience, what is the new framework, you think that leaders need to be thinking about whether they're setting up a Church, Church plant, whether they're already running a Church? What are some of the key things you think that we should be taking off as leaders?

Paul Rice 25:32

Yeah, and we can dive into this as deeply or as shallowly as you like, what most Church plant small Church pastors who are just getting started, or, or maybe they need to overhaul what they're trying what they're doing financially, what most people will hear is kind of this generic rule of thumb, percentages rule, which is important, because it gives you some clear boundaries, and some guidelines to stick to and that's kind of the 40%, staff, 20%. Building and facilities, some people might call it housekeeping 30% 20%, to your ministries, and then 10% savings. That's a pretty well known type of formula. Those are generally considered healthy type percentages, you don't want to be too staff heavy. And so that's great. And at a minimum, folks can start there, I would like to suggest and challenge people to go a little bit deeper than just that. And what we were talking about earlier, let's really give some thought to the actual things that we're investing our money in. And you know, honestly, just because a Church is finances is, is in the black is financially, you know, they're they're not haemorrhaging money. That doesn't mean they're actually being effective as a Church. Just because you have, you know, positive numbers on your net profit at the end of the year, does not mean that you're actually doing what you set out to do and what you're trying to accomplish as a Church. That just means you're really good at staying within your budget. That's all that means. And so I'm going to challenge people, let's go, let's go deeper. Let's go deeper than that. And so I've been working on as a part of this project, putting together some language around this budgeting and finance process that, that Church pastors can maybe hopefully easy easily grasp onto. Unfortunately, it's not all the same starting a letter. So you know, it might not preach a great sermon. But, but I've got five things that in my experience over the last 10 years, really need to be a part of people's financial framework. The first of which is to clearly define your mission. And we've talked about this at length already. What have you defined for your Church to do? Is it clear? Is it measurable? You know, Can you can you actually measure those things? Do you have those metrics that you're tracking? And then past mission, I'm using mission as kind of a collect all bucket term here. Really, when I say mission, I'm also including a vision? How are you going to do or excuse me? What what are you going to do to make this mission happen? Your strategy, how are you going to go about doing it, the team that you're building around yourself, to help make this mission and vision come to pass, and then of course, the culture of your Church as well. All of those things should be defining how you are investing the money that God's entrusted you with. So we talked about this just a second ago, when you're investing into the side hustle type ministries that are not actually funding your mission, those resources are going to waste. So when a Church team and leadership team sits down to think about how am I going to spend this money? How am I going to invest this money, it should be being filtered through each one of those things, your mission, your vision, your strategy, the team that are around you, your culture, that should be acting as the filter for every decision that you make. I've talked with a number of pastors on the podcast, one of them in particular out here and in the city, just across from where I am in a place called Mansfield. They actually were running out of room at the building that they were in, and they're just, you know, four or five services, it was just becoming unsustainable for for the size team that they had. And they said, Okay, well, we could buy some land, build a building or maybe buy a warehouse and renovate it or something like that. They did a big campaign and all that kind of stuff. And what they decided ultimately was that while that might be important for the future, it's not it's not going to as effectively advance our mission as it could right now. And so what they did instead was they took a bold step and they said, You know what, we're gonna keep this building that we have that small one will use it as a, you know, ministry space or something. We're actually going to go portable again, and ingoing portable, which is, you know, kind of the opposite of what a lot of churches might do. They would look for this new building, they would renovate the warehouse. In going portable. They actually experienced more growth, even in a portable location. And guess what they're actually able to not only experience that growth, but they are able to now sock away that extra money and reinvest that money, that they're not spending on building insurance, that they're not spending on maintenance expenses that they're not spending on electric bills and utility bills and things like that, they're able to reinvest that or put that money away. So in the future, when building size is becoming a limiting factor for them in a portable location, then they can actually have that pot of cash, they can then go and turn without a lot of debt, actually purchase a building or do the renovation thing or whatever. And so when you have that mission clearly defined, and you're really thinking about what is actually going to be driving this forward, that is what is going to dictate the trajectory of your budget. There's a reason why podcast is called the mission driven budget, our budget should be driven by our missions, our budget shouldn't be driving our missions. Sometimes we get that backwards, we say, well, we can't accomplish everything in our mission that we want to because we don't have enough money. So we'll just throw at it. Again, back to the side hustle ministry, they will just throw it at this thing and will say, Oh, look, look what we're doing. We want to make sure that we're not doing that we want the mission that we've clearly defined to drive the budget itself. The next piece of this is building margin. And this is very, very important. Any financial planner will tell you personally, hey, you need to make sure you have some margin in your personal finance. The same is true for a Church budget, maybe even more. So especially because giving is not guaranteed. You know, a lot of us with full time jobs, we go to work, we get a guaranteed paycheck, or we work hourly or something like that we know that money's coming in, there is no guarantee that people are going to continue to give into your Church. And so even more, so we should be building margin and space. Inside of our budget, my kind of rule of thumb is 10%. That's a number that we kind of set from the beginning, it's worked well for us. And so we have continued using that. I would encourage anybody who does not have margin to their budget to really sit down, hammer out, go back, go back and filter those expenses through that initial filter through the strategy and the vision filter, what do you actually need, if there's no margin in your budget, let's build some in there. whatever percentage you want, start out with 5%. If you have to and work your way up. Again, I'd recommend 10. It's just a good buffer, it takes care of the emergencies, the air conditioners going out, we just dropped $25,000 on five new air conditioners. And the reason we were able to do that in one chunk is because we had savings and we had margin built into our budget, the margin we built into our budget last year, nearly paid for those ACS all by itself. And so we don't have to, we didn't end up you know, using just a tonne from our emergency fund. And I want to take this even one step further here. So we have emergencies. And emergent is great for that. But something that I think people miss and leaders miss is that margin is not just for emergencies. Margin is also for opportunities, particularly unexpected opportunities that might come along, that will drive your mission and accelerate it even faster. And so we build margin not only for these emergencies, but also to be able to seize any new opportunities that we haven't thought of, or maybe that weren't presented to us at the time that we built our budget, and take advantage of those opportunities and really make an investment into something that's going to create a return, I'll give you a great example. This was kind of emergency kind of investments. I'll kind of two and one here. But whenever COVID hit different states in the US were affected differently. And of course, different countries were affected differently as well. We ended up shutting down for a few months. And in 2020, we had already planned on starting to do some online streaming, get the cameras going. And we're going to do this kind of slow implementation across the year to make sure we weren't blowing our budget out or anything like that. But again, because we had the merchant built into our budget, once you know everything shut down here in Texas for several months, we were able to say well, we're going to accelerate this investment that we were already going to make this year using our margin. So it was an unexpected opportunity to make the investment faster than we had planned. But the only reason we were able to do that is because we have the margin to take advantage of that opportunity. And so we threw down, I don't know however much it was 10s and 10s of 1000s of dollars into a streaming and recording setup. We didn't even have to blink. It was we need to do this this as needs to get done. We need to continue engaging people where they're at at home. Let's do it. The money is there. Let's do it. And so I've always thought that that's been a great example of how margin can be used not only to solve emergency problems, but also take advantage of new opportunities that might advance your mission faster.

David Mckeown 34:48

Yeah, I like hey, thanks. We'll put all that in the show notes and we'll link your podcast as well on our site as we put out the podcast so if people want to find you or get some coaching or counselling Patient from yourself. And I guess the great thing is that this can happen, you know, online as well, if somebody wants to grab a zoom call with you, you can do that even if they're a different part of the country or even, I guess a different part of the world, they can still connect with you the genius of technology for us today. So, Paul, thanks for being with us. That is a wrap for us today. So thank you to all our listeners. For those who are watching. For being part of the church explained podcast today. Don't forget to rate review wherever you find us on the church explained podcast. We'd love to connect with you and find out more remember, we've got also lots of free resources on IKON dot Church forward slash open, lots of Team resources, leadership resources, you can house for completely free as well. So hey, thanks for being with us today.

Paul Rice 35:48

Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai