Healthy churches are generous, and generous churches are healthy. I have found this to be generally true. There are several factors that mark a healthy church (however one defines "healthy"), but no matter the measure, my unscientific observation is that church health and generosity are inseparably linked.

The idea of "generosity" is not just a financial one. It's a posture about all aspects of church ministry. Generous churches bless others financially without requiring a benefit in return. They send their people out to help other churches, to serve local ministries, and to serve ministries overseas. They train up and joyfully release young leaders to serve in other churches. They easily share their intellectual property. They are eager to give (Acts 20:35) and proactively look for opportunities to do so.

When a church hits a rough patch or has trouble meeting its budget, the temptation is to pull back on the generosity and enter a scarcity mentality. Although we'd never recommend unwise stewardship, this tendency ends up contributing to the distress rather than helping to solve it. But it's important to note the difference between a generous posture and just tossing dollar bills out of the window. A generous church can watch their spending carefully just as much as a wealthy church can be anything but generous.

It's the posture more than the spending. See the widow's heart in Mark 12:41-44. 

Therefore, when a church finds itself struggling to balance the giving with the expenses, the elders should stop before making changes in order to first discuss, "How do we truly keep a generous posture as we steward our finances well?" I don't believe you can be ungenerous and healthy, so if a church wants to be healthy, they need to check their attitude of generosity no matter what the budget is.

The EFCA has produced a bundle of resources to help you teach our Statement of Faith with videos, commentary, and references. Check it out here: https://helps.efca.org/bundles/sof-series.

We found found that the Statement of Faith is great for teaching:

• As a sermon series

• As a Sunday school class

• In a membership class

• As part of your liturgy

One great example of incorporating the SoF into your liturgy comes from Louisville EFC. Every Sunday, the congregation reads the next article of the statement and an elder brings a short devotional on one part of the statement. Not the whole thing; not a dissertation; one thought about one part. Over the course of the year, the church has cycled through the SoF 4 times. This congregation knows their Statement of Faith and how it impacts their elders.