Voice trumps budget every time!

Hey Element Church! This has been on my heart lately, and after this weekend I felt I needed to blog it. I don't claim to be a church leadership, church planting, or church in general expert, but I do feel that through this process of planting a church I have learned a TON of stuff! WOW has this been a learning process. One of the things I have learned the most about doing church is the value of listening to God's voice OVER the budget when the two conflict. Does that mean we don't have a budget. NO! We developed a budget pretty early in the process but I learned very quickly that the voice of God doesn't always come to us when a budget is being made. (I also learned that the budget of a growing church plant changes weekly lol) Sometimes the voice of God comes at a time when it APPEARS there is no money. Hmm, there in lies the conundrum. I TRULY believe that many churches around our country do not reach their maximum impact in their community because they listen to the budget first, and the voice of God second specifically when the two conflict. Now I know that we can use this TOTALLY as an excuse to spend money willy nilly on stuff that is NOT of God, HOWEVER, it is an issue we must address. Already in the life of our very young church I feel God has asked us to do some things that if we we listened solely to our budget, we wouldn't have done them. At the heart of our DNA at Element is serving our city. This already has created voice vs. budget issues. In May of last year we really felt like our opening service project to the city should be a gas buydown. This made NO sense when we had less than 20 people committed to our church. It didn't make sense financially or voluntarily BUT God's voice trumped budget. AND IT WAS HUGE! It didn't make sense in September to do another gas buydown before we launched our services, but voice trumped budget. It didn't make sense in January to give one weeks entire offering away so our people could serve others, but voice trumped budget. We moved into February and we quickly outgrowing our space. Our lead team sat down and talked about options. The ONLY options that would work included MAJOR financial risks for us, HOWEVER, voice automatically trumped budget when it came to reaching our city for Christ. When we did our budget last November we didn't plan on adding an entire service in another venue and seeing 370 people come to church. What if we would have set the precedent of listening to the budget and not the voice? A third service with the price tag it had would have been shut down pretty quick. What about the egg drop? That came out of NOWHERE for us. HOWEVER, our DNA is to serve EVEN if it costs money. We knew God wanted us to do an Easter outreach and when the opportunity arose VOICE TRUMPED BUDGET. We committed financially to the drop and what happened? FREE HELICOPTERS! If we would have listened to the budget we would have NEVER had the opportunity to watch God provide like that. This calls for some SERIOUS prayer for wisdom and discernment as Element continues to minister and serve. As I continue to lead this church, my prayer is that We/I will ALWAYS listen to the voice and NOT the budget. Voice trumps budget every time. Now I probably made some people mad. (the ones that listen to the budget) lol

Following Christ,

Jeff