Church gives money back

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I found out about this from friendlychristian.com. Here’s what a church in Charlotte is doing, according to the Charlotte Observer

Elevation Church in south Charlotte — with no home of its own — funded $40,000 worth of kind acts around the city last week.

The church, celebrating services today as always on high school campuses, gave the equivalent of a typical Sunday collection back to its congregation last week.

When pastor Steven Furtick instructed members to pluck from the collection bowls, filled with envelopes containing $5, $10, $20, $50 or $100, some people didn’t believe it. One person at each of the five services even got an envelope with $1,000.

Members looked at Furtick like “What’s the punchline?” he recalled. “Then the creative wheels started turning.”

The money isn’t to keep, Furtick told them. Instead, members were to go out and do something random for someone else.

Get inventive, he said, and tell us about it.

Evidently this is the (rather unusual) start of a fundraiser

This isn’t the way churches usually launch fundraisers, and Furtick wasn’t initially sure his two-year-old church, which doesn’t even have land or its own building, should kick off its first capital campaign with a mega-giveaway.”I had to pray about that one for weeks,” said Furtick, 27, who preaches from the auditorium stage at Providence and Butler high schools in jeans and close-cropped dyed blond hair. “It was a very difficult financial move for us to do.”

The church is calling this the Bless Back Project. You can read stories of what some of the 2,000 members have done with the money on the church’s Bless Back Project website.