Episode 4: Interview with Jim Sheppard

Today we want to be encouraged and enlighten by listening in to a special interview. 

Jim Sheppard is CEO & Principal of Generis, a consulting firm passionate about helping churches inspire and cultivate generosity through giving development, coaching, and strategy.

After college, Jim passed the CPA exam and pursued a career as a financial executive. Though he grew up in the church, Jim was not a believer until he was 28. That part of his life intersected with his business life in 1991 when he thought he might be called to the pastorate. This came at a time when he was at a very high level in a major financial services company. After an intense spiritual period in his life, Jim realized that was not where God was calling him. Seven months later through a corporate buyout and a series of providentially inspired events, Jim moved from the corporate world to giving development for churches and ministry organizations.

Jim is a student of generosity and is passionate about spreading it throughout the Church. For the last 27+ years, he has devoted his life to coaching pastors especially in navigating the resource limitations that restrict their ministry potential. Jim understands the financial challenges that churches face today; annual giving, debt, capital projects, and planned giving. He is a positive force in bridging these needs with the power of spiritually motivated stewardship. Cumulatively, Jim has partnered with his clients to raise over $1.7 billion for local church ministry. Jim is a frequent writer and speaker on generosity and ministry funding. He is co-author of Contagious Generosity: Creating A Culture Of Giving In Your Church.

Jim and his wife, Nancy, live in the Atlanta, GA area and they have two married daughters. He is actively involved in his church where he serves as an elder and provides guidance to the Generosity Ministry Team

"This is HIS story Podcast" focuses on ministry backstories of a people God is using for his Kingdom work and those pouring out God’s grace to hurting people around the globe. From Bible teachers to counselors to those that feed the hungry, pull people from dark places, and missionaries… we look into to the events, personalities, callings, and circumstances of those God is using as His hands and feet.

Listen to the stories of the men and women God is using for his Kingdom work and those pouring out God’s grace to hurting people around the globe. From Bible teachers to counselors to those that feed the hungry, pull people from dark places, and missionaries… we look into to the events, personalities, callings, and circumstances of those God is using as His hands and feet.

Transcript

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welcome to the this is his story podcast the executive director and pastor guide to sewing and reaping online givers pastors and leaders at christian organizations wear many hats and let's face it they all don't fit perfectly while focusing on mission staff vendors finances and goals there's the matter of digital strategies technology and trends move at breakneck speeds and managing your christian organization's online efforts can seem like a full-time job todd turner has been in your shoes he spent his life helping faith-based organizations build solid ethical online fundraising strategies that work listen in and subscribe to grow your knowledge increase your ability to lead your digital efforts and be encouraged as you navigate your organization in the digital world of ministry and fundraising hello and welcome to this is his story podcast i'm todd turner and my special guest today is jim shepard ceo and principal of generis welcome joan hey todd good to be here with you today brother man i'm so excited i got to be honest you and i are friends i've known you for a couple of years and i've had you know i've had meals with you but i haven't really got to pick your brain on your life story and i certainly have worked with you enough to know your passion about what you do and so i want to i want to learn about you as a person and i also want to learn more about um your career your passion and your ministry within your career so and i i i've been thinking about this for weeks i'm glad i'm glad to be here brother glad to be have a chance to tell my story and let people hear some things that um you know maybe they've assumed about me may have heard bits and pieces but they'll hear a lot more of it today man well let's start with just the the plain and simple like where were you born telling me about your childhood rearing your family life just uh backtrack a couple years here yeah so i was born in georgia lived all of my life in georgia but i was born way down i-75 almost to florida a little town called tifton georgia and my mom and dad were from south georgia and my dad was a banker down there and when i was two years old i don't remember it so i'm relying on my mom and dad's version of this um he got a promotion to another bank in augusta georgia and we moved there there's a little clue to where i grew up right there the masters golf terms that little community event that they have there every april so uh really my home is augusta that's where i grew up from the time i was two until you know i went to college and even some after i was in college that's where i grew up i have a younger brother steve he's two and a half years younger than i am and it's just the two of us um had a great mom and dad brother i'm i'm telling you i tell people today and i realized the more and more the older i get the more the more i realize this is not the norm i've never been to bed a day in my life that i doubted the love of my mom and dad never i've never spent a second of my life i've spent some some time wondering whether they were mad at me that's not that's a whole nother issue even when we were going through that time you know even when my dad was administering punishment whether it was corporal which was rare but but if it happened you definitely remembered it or whatever it was i've never doubted the love of my mom and dad you know so i was raised in a very stable family my dad was a banker my mom was a housewife uh my mom were very faithful members of the the methodist church there in augusta saint mark is where i grew up just right down the road from the office national um i was confirmed into the membership of the church when i was seventh grade but i would say to you and everyone listening here and looking back it's clear to me i didn't have a relationship with christ i was following more of an obligatory family expectation than i was into a personal relationship with christ i was a pretty natural student i didn't have to study real hard and i made pretty good grades education came pretty easy to me until i got to junior high school that was transformational but even i adjusted to that and became a pretty good student through there and um i like to tell people like hey so my mom her undergraduate was english education and she had a master's in english education people asked me they said you seem to have a pretty good command of the language and i was like well yes because i got it at school and at home i mean we couldn't even we couldn't use bad grammar at the dinner table i mean for gosh sakes i mean you'd be called down for how many times i've told you the object of a participle is never the nominative it's always the objective no no double negatives no uh you knew how to hang in part dangling participles i mean you couldn't do that stuff even at the dinner table you're just kind of talking hey what happened to football practice today you're my mom so but i'm grateful for that man and yeah i'd say when i was really grateful when i sat for the for the s.a.t and they threw that verbal at me man i mastered that because i already i mean i was getting it at school at it and at home that's awesome so but so it's a natural suit but here's here's what here's the part of my life and we'll kind of cut this short uh because it leads to some other things but i was a rebel man i i just you know i knew inside of me that i was just a bit of a rebel in spite of my mom and dad's love for me that i wanted to pursue some things that were not healthy for me i started hanging with the wrong crowd started smoking cigarettes when i was 15 started drinking beer started smoking marijuana and started and then that of course any let the other thing anybody who says today that one of those is not the gateway to other things i can tell you maybe not for everybody but it was for me because every one of those when you get to this and that no longer satisfies then you've got to find something else above that and you know i ended up taking pills and i didn't know where they came from and just doing stupid things to my life and my body um so you know my mom and dad put up with that and still love me unconditionally i could tell you a couple of stories one of which is you know my dad treated me like the prodigal son you know he put the ring in the and the robe on you know when i'd gone through a very very difficult time for for them and for me you know and so when i read luke 15 today i was like yeah my dad did that for me one time you know i came to myself and came back to my house and my dad greeted me like that so i knew those things but i was still a rebel man and uh went off to the university of georgia and now that your parents you're not living in your parents home you've got a lot more freedom to do all the dumb stuff that you're doing and you do a lot more of it but the whole script for my life flipped on three days after my birthday after my freshman year so i turned 19 on july 12 1973 and my father died very suddenly on july 15 1973. um wrecked me man and and just you know looking back now i can see the the vastness of the wreck that that it costs in my life because of all the things that you have as a teenage kid in your life script none of those things include your parent dying very suddenly there's a massive heart attack my mom and dad grew up in south georgia where you know there was it was really north carolina was more of it later on but that was the tobacco capital of the south and so they didn't think smoking hardship my dad smoked two three packs of cigarettes a day which very obviously contributed to his death may not have been the only factor but you know so there was that but but i was there so there i was just think about this time here i am and i'm 19 years old and i don't have a relationship with my heavenly father clearly don't have that despite this fact i was a member of saint martian at a methodist church and i don't have my earthly father and and the rest of my life takes shape around that day july 15 1973 because everything that happens thereafter i can i can pin almost everything in my life back to something that happened directly very directly from that deck so for me the next nine years of my life were just lived out in just anger some of it internal some of it external that you could see but mainly anger at god i i was never an agnostic i was not i didn't doubt the existence of god my state was in a lot of ways todd was worse than being an atheist i knew he existed i knew he was a god of love and a god of might and a god of power i had an incredible sunday school teacher so in terms of the head knowledge about god i didn't lack that here's where it was i didn't think he gave a rip about me and that's probably in its own way that's worse than unbelief because you think he cares about other people and he doesn't give a rip about you but here's the thing man even back then and i can see it now his hand his providential sovereign hand was working in my life even when i didn't know it even when i didn't know it and one of the primary ways of that is that he put nancy into my life back then and even now people would say y'all are a little bit of an odd couple aren't you well yeah i mean her hurt her starting with a blind date by the way blind date as i like to say university of georgia so i stayed home from my sophomore year there i stayed home with my mom my mom was 44 years old and a widow i had a younger brother i was now the head of the family for all intents and purposes and so i stayed home went to augusta college for a year and then i returned to the university of georgia after that and that's when i met nancy and i was the blind date as i like to say she was blind and i needed a date and that's how it worked out that's a great line a pretty good blind date but lots of people in her sorority knew me and even after she went out with me and said she had a good time they were like what you had a good time with him i mean and and so you know i tell people today you know it's the evidence of god's sovereign hand i don't know that we would have absolutely picked each other and not god done that yeah and and we didn't know that at the time we thought we picked each other but in looking back you can just see all of these things even even later on when you do compatibility tests we would be the couple that would go into pre-mounted account metal counseling and someone would say why are you all getting married right you don't have a chance 42 years later we've made it work wow because you know nancy has her world and i have my world and then we have our world yeah we don't think about the way he's for success was she a believer before you were and no no she wasn't she was the same thing now here this is a really good good way of looking at this too because lots of our friends knew um both of us back then you know pre-pre um uh conversion which you know i'll get to in just in just a minute but we both came to christ at about at the same time right nancy was just a nice girl a nice moral person and and i was not as as one friend of mine who knew us back then said hey so so back then when jim and nancy were you know better than the days where jim was going did you did you know that you know that he's and my buddy my one buddy he's like was nancy you weren't really sure whether she was a believer or not because she was really nice with jim no doubt no no he's not a believer you know me well enough to know that's no surprise i mean this what for me is what you see on the outside probably what's going on on the inside there's nothing right so but the kindness of the kindness and the graciousness of god and the sovereign providential hand of god was at work in my life for those nine years even in ways that i didn't i graduated from from college got a great job passed the cpa exam i mean my whole background is accounting and finance that's what i was when i came and you knew that's the way you wanted to aim from the get-go or you just made that no i started off when i went to the university of georgia i was going to be a lawyer okay you know and nancy sometimes now when we're when we're debating back and forth you know you can call it arguing we call it healthy debates but within our family she just she'll just give up and she's like you should have been a lawyer you should have been a lawyer that's funny it is funny because i could have been but but i just got sidetracked and really the whole idea of money and finance because my dad was a banker both of my grandfathers were bankers i was intrigued with money and finance but not from the banking side it was more the accounting side that got me even though i never i passed a cpa exam but i never went into public accounting i was working in you know corporate finance had a great job nancy and i got married and um you know it was about three and a half years later they said nathan was a flight attendant for delta airlines so for us we were young marriage with no kids both i had a good career and todd we were free man we were we weren't believers we weren't tethered to a church we weren't tethered to anything so it wouldn't be unlike us this is you know uh let's just say it's a friday morning and uh and and i just called nancy up like hey what do you want to do this weekend i don't know hey let's go to new orleans good let's get a pass and we'll go to new orleans we'll just fly to new orleans we'd go down there and you know hang out on bourbon street you know even back then we were foodies we like to go to all the great restaurants and we come back home on sunday night and go to work on monday morning hey you want to go to key west for the weekend yeah let's go to key western a week hey you want to go to let's go to san francisco for the weekend i mean that's just what we would do man and so in our minds we were just like we're going to do that because when we have kids we won't have all this freedom it's when we have kids it's not if we have kids it's when we have kids right knew the day was coming so um our journey so this is another one of those flip the script moments it's another one of those transformational moments in our lives we were kind of living that out and i was sitting at my desk i worked at 14th and peachtree in downtown atlanta there's a big office tower there now but national service industries is a company that i work with now got a call on a late wednesday afternoon about four o'clock and yet it's nancy um she's at her doctor's office and she's crying and she says hey i need you to come over here it's like what's up she said well dr hindi's found something and we need to talk about it and i was like can you tell no just come on over here so that's all i knew and um obviously i'm pretty upset and i'm thinking you know what i'm thinking i'm thinking c cancer good news is um from my office to emory where his office was about 12 minutes so i could get that pretty fast i knew where his office was i went got parked walked in there's nancy she's crying dr hindi walks in and he said hey thanks for coming over i think this is a good time for us to talk i was like what's going on he goes up to the wall we didn't have you know mris and cat scans back then we had ultrasound this was 1980 uh 1983 82 1982 says 82 november of october november 82. so he flips on the screen todd and he says and i don't know what i'm looking at and there's there's all these white spots in there and he said well that's nancy so that's a shot of right here in her abdominal section what's going on i said are we talking cancer he said no probably not because it doesn't look like cancer he said but um he said i do suspect it's probably endometriosis well let me tell you something i didn't even know i i couldn't even pronounce the word what he said much less knew what it was i mean females obviously know what that is but i you know i didn't know what that was and very quickly what i came to understand was it was so widespread that the most likely scenario was a hysterectomy which means a death of a dream yeah so it's no longer when we have kids it's if we have kids and we may not so we both i mean we broke down right there both cries right there you know his office and we're just like okay doc let's just go ahead and take care of this as soon as we can so we scheduled the surgery for about four weeks later i'll tell you this todd i mean for for that four weeks every time we went into any environment and we saw parents with kids that in our minds were not treating their kids the right way we would just we would just become in effect i would say anger is probably the best word angry that maybe we couldn't have kids and they could we would treat our kids better than that you know that and again we're not believers so you know there's no framework for any of that sure schedule the surgery well nancy was going in the night before and so we had the pre-op conference with uh dr hindi who came into the room and we had to sign all of these forms todd we base it he didn't know what he was gonna have to do we were basically giving him permission to take nancy's entire reproductive system if he needed to i mean even all these years later man i just think about that moment we were signing away our rights to be parents now god has not god is is in our lives what's we're not a cognizant of his presence in our lives he's there providentially sovereignly already working the common grace of god working in an and in a person's life before they come to believe you know and so we signed those forms and we cried our eyes out and i went home and left nancy there that night and i went home that night todd and i put my head on the pillow and here's what came out thank god it's been a while since we talked i know you're there i know you care i know you love some people i'm not sure you love me and i know you could i don't know if you're willing but you could heal nancy if you're willing and if you do that i'd give you the rest of my life now you know that's a classic 9-1-1 i mean let's pick up the phone let's dial the heavenly 9-1-1 number man who hasn't done that somewhere along the way the next day it was supposed to be an hour and a half it was three hours and 45 minutes and i hadn't heard anything i had my brother and my college roommate my college roommate who um to this day is a great friend he was him and his girlfriend he never married he didn't marry her he married somebody else but him and his girlfriend that set me up with the david mansion he was there in the waiting room well dr hindi comes walking down the hallway i've got out of my chair and ran to meet him i said doc how are we doing back there and he said we're wrapping up right now he said i'm going to give you a chance to see her on the way from o.r to recovery he said couple of things she's a very pale chip don't get scared she says she's fine but she lost a lot of blood we've replaced it she's going to be fine but she is white as a sheep so don't be scared she's okay and um and he said we're not going to have it let's stay in there long and i said okay i said but how did it turn out in there he said well he said here's the other part he said um nancy i remember these words it's exactly what he said to me todd nancy still has everything she was born with those are the words he used well well that's fine what happened doc he said the reason it took so long is that it's all isolated and i could see it all when i got in there and he said for reasons listen to this time for reasons that are not even clear to me right now i decided to go ahead and remove all of those white growths that you saw on that screen they're all gone wow i said you didn't do a hysterectomy he said probably would have been the easier solution but i just thought if there was any way i could give you guys a chance i wanted to do that wow wow oh yeah yeah and you're sitting there with a tear running down right now he did say i'm not saying you can have children i don't because there's extensive scarring in there from what i've done but i've at least left over the possibility and i was like yeah thank you thank you so um casey gets home and starts healing up and it's um you know six or eight weeks later it's january and i said to nancy hey um so i haven't said anything about this let me tell you what happened that night when i left you at the hospital and went home and i told her about my experience and praying that night she said i did almost the same thing and i said what do you think we ought to do with that she said we probably have to find a church and maybe start going back to church so we started going to old church uh not a wheelchair pretty good science church near norcross first united methodist church and we started attending a bible believing very orthodoxy not in methodist church even to this day very very orthodox and um at least a couple of times every month they would have an altar call i mean their pastor at the time would have an altar called into the service and uh uh what they did back in the day was when you started attending you know a couple of times they would figure that out because you signed the attendance pad right jim and nancy they gave you a new a big brother and a big sister who we're going to kind of shepherd you through the process well mike and star scott never forget that they got us in their sunday school class even before we became believers and so we were being loved on and just you know treated as if we were already members of the household of faith we hadn't joined but it was palm sunday so for nancy and me every palm sunday even though it's not the same date on the calendar it's the same day in our minds every palm sunday that palm sunday 1983 nancy and i for the altar call that day we got up out of our seats and we went down front gave our lost christ right and everything's been everything's been different since then so death of my father in 1973 you know that moment in dr hindi's office which then leads to this moment at the altar in 1983. those are flip scripters man well a whole flip script for our live flip that and hasn't been the same out of curiosity just the details so how much longer till because you have two girls is that correct right just give me a quick yeah we need to close the loop on that because i've left you hanging what yeah you know i've got kids but they don't know that everybody's listening here so in um late spring early summer after she'd been to a checkup dr hindi said hey look i think you guys are in good shape here he said you know the scarring is there is some scarring i don't know what's going to happen here but as far as i'm concerned if you guys want to you know start trying to have kids why don't you go ahead and do that and um so it was shortly after labor day it was mid-september of that year nancy gets up one morning and she is so nauseous so nauseous and she's in there and we're both we're laughing at each other and we're like because she knows what it is she's like i think it's morning sickness right and again remember this is back 1983 we didn't have quite the pregnancy test the sophistication it was kind of hit and miss they had them but if you didn't know whether they were right or not you had to see a bump before you really did exactly exactly but um hers did show positive and then of course you know she was was sick of the dog so we're just like yeah there it is so um on in june of 1984 our first daughter was born and todd you know everybody's kids are special you got kids you know how that was the fulfillment of just god's tangible presence in our life answering a most unworthy prayer a very unworthy prayer that we had which by the way all of our prayers are unworthy you know there's one of the old liturgies that leads up to communion that says you know i love this i think it came out of an anglican or maybe a catholic tradition we are not worthy so oh lord so as to pick up the crumbs under your table right and that's really and so when we come to god and think and so but for us you know we're still trying to think you've got to be a good person to come to god and pray and so we're just thinking our unworthy prayers have resulted in this this little work this princess that we now have and then almost three years later our second one was born our kids are very very special to us they're part of you know kind of the stones that god's put in our life to remember what i did for you remember what i did for you yeah that's where my girls and their husbands have heard this story very specifically because we want these stones to live on in our family now it's beautiful because it it what a great way to start a family where you you realize they're they're your gift from god and so it just changes the way you parent it changes the way you it really i can see how it changed your life changes everything man changes everything okay so so jim thank you for all that so so i'm going to skip your accounting career and we're going to jump into what you do and then we're going to go backwards because i do want to hear the journey of how you got from accounting to your life ministry is what i'm going to call it but let's talk about i i want people listening to to sort of know what you do for a living but i'm going to set the table so let's talk about churches in general and giving so as i'm sure you you know so many stats it always amazes me but what percentage of people who sit in a church pew actually give to the church it's it's a fraction of what you would most people would think yeah you know um i would say for me todd is somewhere between a third and a half um probably closer to a third i mean it's hard to get really meaningful information because you're talking about other givers and not the people who actually come on a regular basis which is you know hard enough information pre-covered it's really hard to figure out now but you know i've looked at enough church databases i think that's a pretty good answer i'd be i'd be really comfortable with 40 okay you know plus or minus some do better some do worse but i'd be really comfortable with it in general well i'm going to set the table and then you correct me if i if i don't frame this correctly but here's the way i i see it so if we have catholicism here and protestant here and one of the advantages of the hierarchy of the catholic church is accountability and teaching and well you know what i mean like and then yeah and protestant we're over here we have all these autonomous we have denominations we have a lot of on time you know people can do what they want they're a non-profit or non-denominational church and they don't really have any accountability in anything but they would say god in the scriptures right and what that you add that to the american christianity model where the pastor is a ceo a lot of times it's a lot of denominations not all but a lot and what you get is this phenomenon of if the pastor doesn't like talking about money yeah then money doesn't get talked about yeah and no one's telling him to and if he feels like asking is bad and this is sort of this attitude and i see it a lot i'm sure you do too it's like well the lord will find what he wants to find and we don't even pass the plate anymore just i mean we put giving boxes in the back and and it becomes this culture of if you uh because of of tv and radio there's a lot of bad people asking for money and somebody's like we don't want to be associated and increase this problem is the american christian giver doesn't always give healthily or for the right reasons because they're not being taught about it and they're not being taught about it because the pastor may or may not want to talk about it and it creates this giant problem which i think leads to why only half or less than half of the people get would you agree or you want to add to that yeah yeah and i think and really kind of what happens as a result of all of that taught is this is that and this is what i've seen you know 29 years i've been out here this september will be my 29th anniversary being out here doing this is that you know most pastors in most churches have this is what they want to do feel like god's called them to do god's vision for your church if you want to put it there and here's the resourcing they have so there's this massive gap between what's god god's called you to and what you think are your resources and my whole point to most of these leaders is do you think god would call you to this and not give you the resources to do that and if you don't have the resources then are you part of the problem or is god part of the problem right what i see out there if i had to just put it into two very broad categories and there's lots of subcategories two very broad ones uh one of them would be biblical illiteracy our people don't know now they may even know the bible but they don't know what the bible says about money and possessions and it gets so mixed up todd that people actually believe that the primary reason that they give is to fund their church that has nothing to do with what you care frankly that's the that's the outgrowth that's the impact of what happens when you give our giving is designed to be an encounter with god over the one thing that probably tempts us to worship it more than him and that's our money and possessions i know there are other things but that's the one that i think to to to to and i think because i would say that because it's the one thing in the bible and all of jesus is teaching you know the red letters that's why i've got a red letter bible it's really easy for me to zero in he said that not somebody else said that he said that that when he said you can't worship two masters and he called one of them god and one of them mammon mammon is a spiritual term for money and possessions right and so we miss it when we think that our relationship with money is financial our relationship with money is spiritual it tempts us to worship at that altar rather than at the altar of the one true god you know deuteronomy 14 22-24 when god's talking about the the collection of the tithe you know he's talking about and here's how we collect it but then there's a common he finishes out and says and here's why we give i this my belief this is why we give that you might revere the name of the lord your god always that's why we give it's not so that my church can get funded my church gets funded as a result of my understanding that that's and that's where we get it wrong so biblical illiteracy and then what i call vision ignorance you know we're not aware of the vision of what my church intends to do out in in in the community and beyond and then what happens when they do that so even if my church is on point with his vision and winning big time out here whatever that looks like as a win we don't tell the stories man we don't tell the story so even if we have people who get spiritually developed they've gotten over the biblical illiteracy they become spiritually developed givers they do their primary giving somewhere other than the church i'm not going to say to you you have to do all of your giving of the church but i would say i think the bible is pretty clear it's your first place whether you believe all the time belongs there or some portion of the tide i mean we all got room for disagreement i've got my beliefs on that but but i think you have to start with the idea that even before you start to give to all these other kingdom enterprises that god is allowed to to flourish in the world it starts with giving in your church and if we the church are not telling great stories and promoting the impact of what happens we've left you in ignorance no that's on us and so it's the biblical illiteracy and the vision ignorance because i think that is the two pillars of how you develop great giving over the years you have to have financial discipleship and you have to have vision and impact you know if you have all vision and impact but no spiritual development and all you guys fundraising brother and i'm all in favor of some fundraising if your name is wheaton college right but not if your name is wheaton bible church right and so so and then the other side is if you have all spiritual development and no vision and impact you develop spiritual givers who give to all kinds of things other than the church other than the church that's right right so so do you feel um it's really interesting i think you and i both have the same dilemma because we're in the same industry if you will i mean like i focus digital you focus on the the church but i feel like fundraising is a dirty word and with me digital strategy sometimes is a dirty word when the church because they're like we don't need strategy we're the church and we don't we don't fundraise but you know but i guess when people hear your heart is when they flip like you just almost have to get in a room like how do you break through because there's such a what i would call a stiff arm from pastors who think yeah oh we don't do that we're not a gimmicky church we're just going to rely on the lord like how do you break that barrier yeah well i think to me i think todd we have to begin to confront this idea that faith and strategy are mutually exclusive they're not i think they walk on on on when they walk down the road maybe on different sides of the road but there's lots of places where faith and strategy converge you know i think the if you just look at especially if you look at the book of acts the early church was strategic they had deep faith but they had strep paul was paul was always thinking man look at what he said we wanted to go over an asia minor but the door was closed so we did this other is that not strategy no well we wanted to go an asian miner and the door was closed we're just going to rely on the lord and just break that door down no that's not what he did he had a different strategy he said it must be the lord has something in mind so let's go over here and plan what we're going to do here you know and so and there's plenty of places i go to lots of places but to me i think the big idea is this and i say this to church leaders all the time who want to say hey jim i get all this strategy and all this process that you think you're doing you know and i get all that and that's what but we're just going to rely on the lord and i was like hey how do we talk about this there's a verse and i and it's one of my verses that i use a lot because i don't want people to believe that our process is what drives the result at the end of this and it's from you know one of paul's paul's quotes he said i planted apollos watered and god granted the inquiry so pastor will we come in and bring a strategy for you to develop stewardship and generosity in your flock there's process and there's this and but we don't think that's what does it we just think it puts your people in a position where god can come in and grant the increase we ascribe all of it to him we're just doing kind of our part and then they want to say to me well i don't know if you need that for god to grant the increase i said well then maybe we don't need prayer to heal people well it's funny you say that i'm going to pull my verse i'm going to pull my verse in this exact same thing it's the one that says you know we prepared we prepare the horse for battle but the battle is the lords well the battle is the lord god actually if you go back and look in the old testament the israelites won wars where they didn't have to pick up a sword but they also won a bunch where they did so you have to prepare the horse for battle the battle is the lord's god god can make you win or lose it but we can't just wait for a lottery ticket to blow against the wall window it doesn't work that way we have to have strategy to prepare the horse for battle it's the same thing i i mean in your world i mean see in your world i mean for me it's just like we're good anybody who doesn't see we're going through a transformation here in society where we're moving from and it's happened years we moved from an agrarian economy to using cash way back when that's what predates me i know it's hard to believe that predates me you know that's a good place to laugh but and then you know there was this so there was this time back when it was all cash and again this predates me when people are saying wait a second this guy brought this thing in here that says paid to the order of you know my church and he signed his name to it and it says a thousand dollars am i supposed to take that can you give that as a tithing offering i'm sure that was a controversy back in the day right and there was an adaptation well in mind in your lifetime there's never been anything any pushback against accepting checks in the church right we're just moving into a different methodology and what you're doing is your work is you're helping churches to get better at that because it's not their native language they don't know that and they need help to go into that land and so when you're doing strategy over there i see it the same thing is that you're just helping them to put their people in a position where they can have that encounter with god though not by putting a check into play yeah yeah no i like the way you said that you know the thing i get frustrated i'm going to use the word frustrating i think that's right is when people um and i would even say pastors with churches say you know we're just going to trust the lord with this and and we don't see a reason to ask and i was like well what about paul's second missionary journey he literally was collecting um money for the church back in jerusalem because they're in a drought and he was walking around collecting money he was asking them for a gift above and beyond their local church to to fund ministry it's like well if paul did it is that does that not count i mean like it feels pretty biblical to me i'll tell you something it ought to tell you something man i'm sorry you know and the crazy thing excuse me the crazy thing is sometimes we use examples out of context just to prove a point because we've already decided what we want the point to be right and that's what i try to help pastors and church leaders understand is you know hey look i want your church to get all the funding it needs but let's start by developing your people let's not shoot at you know let's not pull the bow back and shoot at people's wallets let's aim it at their hearts yeah and then once we get their hearts transformed here's what i can tell you you're more likely to see full funding of the vision god's given you than if we just start shooting at their wallets right a lot of times they don't think it's a counter-intuitive way to get there it's not manipulation we're not kind of you know trying to bait and switch it's just our relationship with money is spiritual it's not financial as much as we think it's financial it's a spiritual relationship and so that's where we have to find all the answers when we find them there then that's even digital strategy todd until you change people's hearts around around the whole thing they're never going to go online and do a gift or do a recurring gift or whatever they do you know that you've seen it happen no it's true well this is this is why you're on this podcast today is because after meeting you and after being involved with cheneris i i noticed how many pastors you guys have ex-pastors if you will i mean i hate that term ex-pastors because i think what you are you always are but you always are just a different just a different line of work it's a different line of work but you have a lot of ex pastors and i thought what why is that and then when i hear you talk and i hear the things like you just said it's a reminder to me is you're not yes you know tactics and yes you know strategies because you're a smart man but y'all really do have a you know the organization does and you specifically which is why you're here i feel like you are passionate about this ministry to teach people about money because the churches aren't doing it and it results in more giving but you're not aiming at the gift you're really are trying to change culture within churches that's all we're trying to do time you know i i just i mean it doesn't happen so much anymore it still does happen from time to time but there were times over the years when we get people that they're just in a financial panic and they would be it was like you know they're dialing up and calling us hey and what they're basically looking for i'll use this kind of my generic term 30 ways to raise 300 000 in 30 days and i'm just like that's not what we do guys i mean you can go get the google's got that go get that off the internet somewhere and just follow whatever they're gonna that's not what we're doing that's what you're talking about is a quick flame up you know kind of like you know when you and i've got the i don't do it anymore but you know you got the briquettes on the grill and somebody and the wife is in the house hey is that grill ready yet and you go get the lighter fluid and squirt it on there who hasn't done that we've all done that it produces a lot of flame in the moment but then it goes away right that's what those strategies are they don't produce any long-term good and in fact in fact what they do is they work against you because you're teaching your people to give to a financial need not to a transformed heart yeah right and then working against what we want to do is to go back and use the same analogy we want to go out back and we will find some good hardwood trees that kind of wood that it takes a little while to get it started but once you get it started i mean who hadn't had a great fire with some nice fresh seasoned oak that you get it started and it just seemed to burn on forever that's what we're trying to do here is to shift your culture not just change how much money is coming in amen and to keep that analogy going i've also my steak has been done and i look at that fire and you know what i do i sometimes go back to the refrigerator and say what else can i cook that fire is great and i've seen that churches i've done that man i've done that they need this much money they're getting so much like what else can we go do because that's right that's a good analogy too i love that yeah just keep cooking i love that okay so i want to i want some stories from you because and here's how i'm going to set the table is one thing i loved about when we we have our generous meetings is these stories of pastors who may have been reluctant at first like okay we'll hire them because we need this thing and then and then you coach them and on the other side they are actually thankful and say thank you for have causing me to work a muscle i didn't want to work and it needed worked work and now i see things way different than i saw before because you're really in a pastor in leadership transformation business so they can go transform their own churches that's right but but i'm assuming you've got that's the story right isn't that your goal oh yeah right i think for me todd you know what i can say is over the years i have spent um a lot more time than i would have thought i would have spent way back when i started a lot more time behind closed doors with pastors just helping them deal with their issues with money that that's the big limiting factor is most of the time when you find a pastor who in a teaching environment has difficulty with this topic you can usually trace it to their own personal issue with the topic now i'm not trying to expose them out in a group format so that's why i mean you you kind of know i've shared this inside of our team session i always every time i go in to meet with a client i always have an hour to two hours with just me and the pastor door closed off the record just talking so i remember this would be 1998 but it was a very very transformative experience this is a guy who was a pastor in a church in the dallas area he was so good at preaching todd i mean he was just so good but we cranked up the capital campaign and he was starting his sermon series that first sermon i was there for that sunday he was just awful i could say not very good he was awful and he was awful because it was obvious to me that he was uncomfortable i i used the words with him that day he said how did i do today and i said i'm confused and he said what do you mean i said i've heard you teach i've heard you preach a number of times you're as good as anybody i've heard in a while but not today there's something about this topic that's bothering you i said it felt to me like this is the words i used with him i said it felt to me like you were doing you were a cat doing a dance on a hot tin roof and he stopped and he said the problems spin okay let's talk about that so he began to to talk about you know he and i went to lunch and we just sat and talked and he talked about his family history his dad was a pastor and he had a perception from way back when his dad preached a sermon and two weeks later he was released by the church and they had to move in his mind it was that sermon that he preached on money that caused him to have to move um i said like wow do you do you know that's true and he said well i'm assuming it's stressed or not do you know that's true your dad's not alive no he's not is your mom still alive no you have any siblings yeah i've got an older sister why don't you talk to her and see what her recollection of that was yeah i think i just i just wonder whether that's really if that's what's got you i said i said basically pastor you're in a self-constructed prison and you're holding the key i said so i think if we're going to get you any better on this topic we got to get you out of that jail well he talked to his sister and so it was like thursday of that week he's like he called me he's like you're not going to believe this i said what he said i talked to my sister he said that sermon had nothing to do with dad getting moved and i said wow he said she just said she's paul there were all kinds of other issues going on she said dad was just hanging on by a thread that sermon had nothing to do with him leaving and so think about it todd this guy is like 25 years into the ministry and he's been in jail on this topic over something that never really happened yeah now that's an extreme example yeah no i get it by the way just to finish the story the next sunday you want to take some and the sunday after that you want to take any guess he was a lot better you know he was told i mean just that quickly he was freed on the topic because he realized the thing that he believed all of his life about preaching about money in the church that that's what caused his dad to get moved that was not even true and it freed him up he had a key he opened the door and he's out of jail man isn't that great i find it ironic because i know some pastors that fit in this category they they would they would look at you in the eye and say they can't believe people don't teach the full gospel and that people avoid tough tough verses and whatever i'm like you're avoiding one that's not one verse it's in hundreds of verses it's money and and and and how god sees money and how you should see money it's a topic and people are avoiding it like the plague yeah i love tim keller um says this about it um he did a bit of talk in front of generous giving some years ago eight or nine maybe ten years ago now the original versions on youtube was a great 15 minute talk but in it he covers this point i love this point he said so back in the day when it was early on and i did lots of counseling with people he said i don't anymore but we found some people that are a lot better at it than i am but he said i did a lot of it back in the day he said no one not one person he said people came in and they sat on my couch and they would confess the deepest darkest ugliest things in their life family history current sins affairs drug addiction he said you name it you're like never not once did someone come in and sit on my couch and say hey pastor i think i have this problem with money not once he said now let's hold that over here jesus on the other hand spent an inordinate amount of his time talking about that above other things he said he really didn't need to say a lot about adultery because it's kind of if you're in that sin you know you know and lying and other things he said but with money he said so let's hold it this he said if jesus talked about that 10 to 20 times more than the other topics he chose to speak about in his three-year ministry and nobody thinks it's them and then he just kind of does one of these what does that say to us man i think that's the one right there to what you're saying i said i don't know of a better way to explain jesus perspective on it and our perspective on it they couldn't be any different okay so here here's my question i think now people understand more about your heart and what your your life mission if you will your career has become this but get it let's go back you're starting your family you're an accountant how did you how did jim get from there to what you're doing now like what what opportunities what why's in the road did you take to get here yeah so there's there's two or three things that happened in there um todd one of them was that so if nancy and i became christians in 1983 we started becoming generous christians in 1985. and in may of 1987 for the first time in our lives a lot longer journey longer story no need to go into all the details there but we started a plan we wanted to get from where we were less than two percent of our income to become tithers that was fall of 85 and in may of 1987 a lot sooner than we thought it could happen on may 1st of 19th on the first sunday in may of 1987 we wrote a check to the church for the first time in our lives it represented 10 of our income for that month and we've never looked back our whole journey has been so god was developing a stewardship story a generosity story in our lives way back when so that's number one number two um two years after so roughly 1985 not related to the journey of our journey stewardship but 1985 we left norcross first united methodist church and we left to redevelop a church up here in north fulton which was developing very rapidly it ended up being a church plant because the church that we were trying to redevelop just absolutely died right in front of us um you know not for reasons of us getting there because it was an unhealthy church before we got there and then we ended up basically planting a church right here at church right down the road johns creek united methodist church nancy and i were one of the eight founding families there so what happened there was as a layperson i wasn't on staff but other than being the senior pastor of the church todd i served in almost every role at some point in time and planning that church i got a view of church life that was just you know hardly anyone ever gets that view right you know and so so this god is developing this story of generosity and stewardship we're involved in planning a church now i'm very successful i've moved on and i'm now at another company a financial services company i'm senior vice president and cfo there you know of a publicly held very successful financial services companies my business career is going great but move the tape forward in uh in 1992 our company got sold and um so i knew that some things were going to change i thought i was just you know stay around but in june of that year rather than being reorganized into another role i was reorganized off the organization chart okay so now i've got to figure out what i'm going to do well that goes back about six months earlier because i had felt in late 19 to late 1991 i've been to a men's retreat thought that maybe i'd been called to be an ordained pastor so god maybe is calling me out of a a very successful business career to go to seminary i spent seven weeks this is a much longer story than you've got time for on your podcast but seven weeks in front of god asking him what do you want me to do with my life and i got zero answers until right before christmas of 1991 and god said be still be still and so for me you know and i've got some wise counsel some people are speaking into my life including my pastor the one that we planted the church with who are just saying you know be still means don't make any rash decision right now let's wait on god to move and see what his move is well six months later his move was i want you out of corporate world out of corporate world and easy to see now i mean frank that day todd i felt like i've taken a muhammad ali right right cross to the face i didn't see that coming yeah but again it's another one of those you know pivotal times in my life when god's re-authoring what he wants to do with my life so think of this i've got a very successful business career i understand finance very very i'm a cfcpa cfo of a publicly held company i understand finance i've been involved in a church what essentially was a church plant i've done almost everything there and i'm still leading at that church and then god's offer authoring this story of stewardship and generosity and mine and nancy's lives and all of that converged in september of 1992 and i ended up here wow now for me you've heard me say this before i was just doing what i thought was the one step god wanted me to take at the time yeah what i now realize has happened was god was authoring my this is my life's work now i came here out of a step of just that's what i was supposed to do in september of 1992 but this is my life's work this is what he spoke to me at that men's retreat in 1991 and what he wanted me to do all along in the providential sovereign hand of god always kind of guiding it and broke look for the people who are listening i am so terrible at following god i'm a lot better at leading ahead and asking him to come up and bless what i've done the mess i've created right so i don't want anybody to get get the wrong impression talking about these things all these years later i can see god's hand and i can describe it this way but it was hard at the time because i was getting in the way and you know my obstinance and you know my pride and all the other things i don't want creating wrong impressions but it's a clear clear story of god working in my life you know and and then keeping nancy and me together for 42 years we've got a long uh very prosperous marriage we not on we not only love each other we like each other you know we know some families that have been married that long and they you know they love each other we don't question that we're like i'm not sure if y'all like each other they're always ornery with each other well no i i love this story because once again i feel i i know you well enough to know this is ministry to you this is not you're not out trying to make a buck and tell people how to make a buck like this is a passion of yours and you're really good at it and your goal is to pour into pastors and change their heart and people's hearts about how they see money which may result in more fun funding of the church and all the mission work the church should be doing um and and i like how you said and maybe their vision is limited it's like oh here's what we would do if we had enough money but we only have this much money so we only have this much staff this much ministry right well what if if you're telling you god god i do believe god funds what he wants i totally believe it which is the issue is that you can't say well this is how much we made it my one of the mistakes i i'd say is like if when people don't like digital strategies it feels yucky to them i'm like okay do you know that plate you pass through people down the aisles take that plate and you'll stick it out in the middle of the highway and see if it fills up it doesn't you're using a strategy just by running it down the road i said an online their strategy where you where you do that too it's not dirty i'm with you i'm with you 100 okay super so as we wrap this up i want to ask you two two big questions one is i love the moments you've identified the moments but what would you say that your financial background has been a skill that has played you well in your life of ministry here is it the theology of you learning about money like tell me what else might be a skill set that you believe like god prepped in you and put in you that makes you good at what you do right now well i think it's that journey that he started offering in our lives back in 1985 so he planted this inside and by the way both of us are giver so there's no check in our house you know in terms of one person speaking as uh we want to be careful with that you know um nancy and i are both these kids put two givers in the same household doesn't always do this no put two savers in a household or two spenders in a household or whatever sometimes he puts a saver and a spender in a household but in this case he put two givers in the same household so that journey so there is something about the theology and the teaching a lot of it is just experiential for me i can show you the reference points in scripture but i a lot of times just talk about my journey hey it wasn't easy for me when i first took stock of it in 1985 i was given less than two percent but i knew that we wanted to get to hopefully you know 10 we set out a pathway to do that so the theology matters but the financial side matters as well because what i'm able to see over here is i can see when churches are either in or headed toward an unhealthy situation right so for me i always define financial margin as green light yellow light red light people will say things like well you know jim how much should we borrow from the bank and i just say well you shouldn't borrow any more than you feel comfortable with well that's not a very good answer so and then i can show them maybe some guidelines on what that looks like you know i sit in rooms sometimes todd and i'm sitting in rooms full of lay people and they're talking about a building or you know a big capital project and i'm thinking okay here's what your income is here's what you're likely to be able to raise from a capital campaign here's how much you owe the bank right now here's how much additional you mean by and i'm just doing the math in my head and i've already figured out you can't afford this building right well but i can't say that in room because if i say that in the room then i'm just the bad guy what i've got to do is i've got to plant seeds for them and so i'll do something like this is kind of my favorite tactic you won't surprise you but hey wait a second guys there's a lot of numbers flying around in the room here and you know i'm not the sharpest crayon here i'm from georgia so that has limitations so can i just go up here and put all these numbers on the board and todd you know probably i'm gonna i don't have statistics but i'm gonna tell you seven eight maybe even nine times out of ten all i have to do is put the numbers on the board and somebody's like hey um pastor do you think we can afford this and i'm sitting over thinking nope i didn't say a word if there was a bubble above my head it'd be thank you somebody finally figured this out but what i'm doing is i'm helping them see that their reality is not what they think it is right and so rather than me being the prophet in the room if i just go and say hey guys you know you can't afford this and i put the numbers on the board as soon as i walk out i'm the bad guy and they're gonna go back and like well hey his opinion he's from georgia what is he what is that their defense mechanism kick in so that's been a real skill of mine over the years that comes from my financial background is you know when i see financial statements i understand what's going on right away and i don't i don't i don't always tout that you know it's like hey y'all know i'm a former cpa and a cfo of a 200 million company right you know i do sort of know what's going on here i don't tout that i just it's in the back of my mind because i've always looked at their financials and so i've already figured out what you can and i just and so maybe what i'll say is you know the pastor will call me and say hey jim i felt like you had a point to making that meeting yeah let's unless you and i talk offline let's go get in your office and i'll say i just feel like you're moving into the yellow zone and maybe headed toward the red zone and i don't want to see you do that right and so that's been been helpful for me over the years no i can imagine you know how to look at a spreadsheet a lot differently i was on an elder board and i'm i have zero i was an english major right i mean i didn't have i don't i don't know how to look at numbers and it's got to be super advantageous to have a guy who is i look the the phrase i love to use is um i i attributed to chuck swindoll i'm not even sure he originated it but i know he has it on his desk thoughts disentangle themselves over the lips and through the fingertips and so just getting in a room and talking or writing all those things become evident you know you write it on the board but when it's in your head it's just jumbled right okay i i as we wrap up here's my last question i know you're an avid reader and i don't think i've ever been in a room with you where you haven't told here's the here's a book you need to read so based on the conversation we have anybody's listening and they're they go to church and they feel like they're you know what what books would you recommend anybody listening to read and what what are your top three or four you leave on your shelf well you know um i think there's there's a couple of them um that i really like todd um you know for me kind of i think the the requisite piece that everyone should read about you know this whole idea of stewardship and and and and and money is randy alcorn money possessions and eternity and it's a great book now it's not a quick read but it's a very challenging read it's theologically sound it has to me i think lots of good stuff in there that are reference points that anybody can can dive in and and get some it probably take you a while to work there i mean my version has lots of notes written in it right yeah and um you know i think that there's um i think your money counts by howard dayton i like dayton's work he was one of the founding members of crown financial ministries i think he does a great job in there and talking about that a couple of guys from uh from ivy league schools this is a really good book it's off the radar screen it's called true riches what jesus really said about money and your heart it's john corteans c-o-r-t-i-n-e-s and gregory balmer b-a-u-m-e-r i think it's a fantastic read i don't agree with a hundred percent of what they wrote in that i don't know what i agree with that hundred percent of anything because we all have kind of our only shape but i just i agree with 80 to 90 it's a phenomenal it's about you know i know pretty well uh money and money and money possessions and attorneys it tells me to think about that topic differently so jim what about your book contagious uh generosity yeah contagious generosity would be one i throw in there kind of as a shameless plug but really chris fuller and i wrote that because we're keen observers of church life both of us have been involved in it very very actively over a long period of time and there were ten things that we saw that we thought tripped up churches regularly and that's why we sought to write that book was just to flag these things you know for that for example you said something earlier taught about you know pastors having a hard time asking and so one of our chapters is just devoted to this idea of what if asking was reframed as ministry what have you thought about asking his ministry jim i'm ministering to you by asking you to be involved in something that god is doing here right right um the idea that pastor you have to take the lead your voice is the biggest voice here the idea that the offering moment matters and you probably aren't spending enough time with that you know things like that so yeah i'd love to throw our book in there as just kind of a different view than the others but a real good view of church life and some things that we thought uh we wrote it eight or nine years ago nine nine over nine years ago now but i would still say everything in there um almost exactly the same way probably just change the illustrations a little bit i love it all right brother thank you so much hey man thanks for having me on the podcast time it's great being here with you today i've loved it a lot of fun i love getting to know you and do you mind if i uh pray for you here when we wrap up that'd be a good thing brother i appreciate that let's do that god you are an awesome father lord full of uh good gifts grace mercy and love lord we are grateful to know that you and only you are in control of all things lord thank you for jim how you have uniquely made him and have walked beside him and before him helped shaping him to the man father ceo the counselor that he is today we thank you for the grace you've shown him we thank you for making him a man committed to helping others fulfill their god-size mission or i continue i ask you to continue blessing jim and janeiros lord we ask that you grow as ministry reach not for personal financial gain but that your son's name may be glorified around the globe lord may jim continue to pour into pastors lives in churches and minister to them and teach them what your word says about money show yourself mindly as you use gem to expose your truth in churches where safe teaching and offending people is the new norm lord lord we love you and we thank you for first loving us and it's in your precious son's son's name we pray amen amen thanks brother good to be here man thank you man talk to you love you bro talk soon okay bye thank you for listening to today's episode of this is his story podcast overwhelmed at all the technical terms trends options cost invoice signings for your organization's digital strategies join other leaders of christian organizations as we join hands in our closed facebook group go to creativedigitalguy.com facebook to register and apply for access i'm only allowing executives of christian organizations in no vendors no high 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