064: Why We Chose To Be A For-Profit Ministry (& What That Even Means)

064: Why We Chose To Be A For-Profit Ministry (& What That Even Means)

Laurie Graham 0:01
Hey, this is Laurie Graham. Welcome to the Small Church Ministry Podcast.

Laurie Graham 0:15
Hey, welcome back to Small Church Ministry Podcast where we believe small church ministry is not less, but it is different. Today’s episode is going to be a little bit different and a little peek behind the curtain of our organization at Small Church Ministry. If you are new to the podcast, I actually hope maybe you’ll start somewhere else because you’ll get a little better gist of what we do and how we help equip small churches. This podcast is filled with all sorts of help and support for getting volunteers, staying healthy in ministry, doing Jesus-style ministry where relationships come first, a women’s ministry, kids ministry, facilitating small group, help for Sunday school teachers.

Unlike most church-oriented podcasts, our focus is actually not on pastors, but on the volunteers who power the church, because I really believe you do. I believe you power the church, and I also believe that that is by God’s design. The pastor was not meant to be at all or do at all. And yes, he or she has a core responsibility of leading and often preaching, but the work of the church, that’s for all the saints, which includes you. We exist for volunteers, and for those who lead them, which in small churches is usually also volunteers. Different from large churches who hire out a lot of leadership positions, many small churches are staffed with lots of volunteer leaders, some trained, but a lot not. They’re just accidentally in the spot of leading and equipping others thinking, “Where do I start?” And honestly, even the pastors, sometimes, are volunteers. Meaning they’re not paid. Oftentimes, they’re bivocational.

Laurie Graham 1:53
So here we are in Small Church Ministry. Our mission is to support and train volunteers, and those who lead them with the truth about small church ministry and the tools and strategies that actually work in small churches, so that we can be leading the way in doing ministry with excellence. I always like to say Jesus-style ministry, where people are more important than programs, and our success has more to do with transformation than numbers. But today, we’re gonna go off the beaten path, as I mentioned, to talk about our organization here at Small Church Ministry, specifically about money. Now, occasionally, we have some questions, and I just want to take time to address them. And I thought the podcast would be a great place of reference for people who are looking for this answer.

So if you’ve ever wondered why we charge for resources, or why we’re a nonprofit, I just wanted to take a minute to answer those types of questions. And just for a little context, people have asked these kinds of questions for a few, from a few different viewpoints. Some people are asking because they have a calling, and maybe that’s you, too. Like you’ve considered starting a nonprofit or a ministry. You’re wondering how to make a go of it, and why we’re doing business the way we are, and others do what they’re doing. Now, other people have asked these questions because they’re wondering why a ministry would charge for resources, and shouldn’t we just be giving everything away? And then I have others who are asking these questions because they love us and support us so much, and they think we should be a nonprofit, because they think then we could ask for donations and they’d like to give too.

Laurie Graham 3:32
So I thought I’d take a quick minute to let you know why we do what we do here. And if you’ve never heard our story, you might want to take a quick listen to Episode 24. It’s called, Where We’ve Been And Where We’re Going: The Story Of The Creative Little Church. And if you’re kind of new to us, and you’re like, what’s the Creative Little Church? That’s what we used to be called before we changed our name to Small Church Ministry. Episode 24 is a fun episode with some great stories and a pretty surprising journey. I hesitate to say it was a total accident when I can see where God’s hand was all over it, but that episode will give you a little more context and might give you a few laughs as well.

But let’s get into the money side of our ministry, because here’s why we made the decision we did. When we were first starting out, which wasn’t even three years ago, I explored the idea of being a nonprofit versus a money-making business. There’s kind of a feeling of godliness about being a nonprofit, like it’s more noble. It feels a little less self-centered and more like you’re giving to the world. Like why would a Christian not want to be a nonprofit? Because isn’t it more humble or more Jesus-like? Well, as our business started taking off, I was researching the ‘hows’ of starting a nonprofit because I had some of those thoughts. And I came across an article that talked about having a for-profit ministry, and I totally fell in love with the concept and the principles.

Laurie Graham 5:00
First off, I loved that I could still call my business a ministry, because that is my heart. And honestly, until I read that article, I thought I had to choose between having a ministry or a business, and I realized I didn’t. Profit and nonprofit simply have to do with the structure of a business. So whether you are a profit or nonprofit has zero to do with the amount of impact you can have, the amount of good you can do in the world, your character, your integrity, how wide your reach is, or even how close you can stay to Jesus. It’s simply an organizational structure with different rules and different strategies, really. You can be totally smart as a nonprofit or not. You can have a huge budget as a nonprofit, or have a really tiny struggling budget. As a nonprofit, you can pay huge salaries or meager salaries. As a nonprofit, you can totally be ethical and make great choices, or you can actually be pretty sleazy with zero integrity, even as a nonprofit. I’ve seen nonprofits that serve really, really well. And I’ve seen nonprofits that have terrible values, very little accountability, and really, they don’t honor humans at all. And every single thing I said, could be the same of a for-profit business. A business can do a lot of good, serve with a lot of integrity, give a lot of stuff away, be generous, be full of integrity. So what drives a business or a nonprofit has nothing to do with that structure. It has to do with values, character, heart, diligence of the people leading it.

So I decided that I wanted to be a for-profit ministry, and here’s why. Number one, I want people to give to their local churches. Being in the church for many, many years, I know how people often find causes, and divert their tithes or they’re giving away from the local church, and it actually can hurt the local church. My heart is for the local church, so I don’t want to ask you to give your money here. I want you to give your money to your local church. I believe in that. It’s one of my values. The other reason I decided to be a for-profit instead of a nonprofit, is because I knew we could create incredible, valuable resources and sell them. And that we could sell them at a low price for, with an incredible value to people in small churches. I knew we had that ability to be self sustaining. And I always go back and think about the Apostle Paul who did tent making. He worked hard at a craft and earned money by providing value, and also did ministry. The third reason I decided to be a for-profit ministry, honestly has to do with the oversight. The oversight of a nonprofit is very different. They have a board of directors, and I really liked the idea of leaders in the company having decision-making ability for where the money goes and what direction we go, and our, you know, our strategies and everything. Now, I’m not saying I don’t want any accountability, because I formed an advisory board right away. Even before we were making any money. I formed an advisory board right away to give advice and to help with critical and creative thinking because I am a team player, but I really wanted the decisions to be made by me and my working team.

Laurie Graham 8:29
So that’s the short answer to why we are a for-profit ministry. I just want to answer a few other money questions. We often get this one I got an email the other day, and it was phrased pretty much like this. They said, why do you charge money for digital resources that don’t cost you anything to make or send? Now, if you have had that thought, like why do people charge for digital resources when they’re just hitting send on an email, I totally get. I honestly remember thinking that years ago, when someone was charging a few dollars for a PDF, I’m like, well, they must be making bank because that doesn’t cost them anything. I was like what? Well, I just have to say, starting an online business has been very eye-opening and shocking and stressful and quite a huge education. Whenever you find somebody selling a digital resource, and you wonder how they can possibly charge whatever amount, whether it’s $2, or $10. I just want to share a few things with you that I’ve learned along the way.

Here are a few things that we pay for in order to send those free things. We pay for email services, hosting platforms, design platforms, people to do everything from design to customer service, to working out the kinks technically. We pay lawyers and accountants. We are just a baby organization and I pay for over 15 subscription services that just helped me do everything we do technically online. For example, this podcast. People tell you that it’s free to create a podcasts and put it in all these places, and it is free. It’s free in a lot of ways. It’s free to put it on Apple or on Spotify, but getting it there. So you need a microphone, and a computer, and an editing program. We pay whatever platform it is to process it and put it up and organize it. We go through Buzzsprout. I honestly don’t even know exactly what they do because Maggie has set all this up for me. And Maggie takes a few hours to take this recording and do whatever she needs to do with it, to put it wherever it needs to go, and that girl needs to pay her rent, and also for her computer and for everything that she’s using.

Laurie Graham 10:34
And I also want to say this, we love that this podcast is free for you. We love that our conferences are free for you. We love that our website is free for you. That is part of our core values and desires, to give generously and serve well. But just a reminder, and again, I learned this along the way, I did not understand this before, but just because it’s free for you doesn’t mean it’s free to actually produce. My goal as a for-profit ministry is to sell enough stuff so we can give even more away for free. That’s one of our values. I am totally sympathetic to the fact that many people in our audience will never ever pay for a single resource. They don’t. They only want free. And if that’s you, I want to serve you for free. It’s my heart. We receive occasional emails saying we’re poor in a rural church, we can’t afford your resources. And I want to say, I totally get it. In fact, that’s a big part of our audience.

So if you feel like you don’t have the resources, it’s okay. Many small churches don’t which is why 90% of everything we offer is totally free. If you don’t want to pay for the pretty Five Day Challenge Workbook, you can get it free by email. We give free weekly content and content, not just sales stuff, we give support in emails. We produce a podcast and a website filled with hundreds of posts, which is getting bigger by the day. We have an amazing free Facebook community, and I do occasional free workshop series on Facebook, also. Our quarterly conferences are even free to attend live, completely free to attend live. They’re amazing! All for small churches created and served with love. So if you can’t afford the amazing Network or the Academy, it’s okay. We’re supporting you in other ways.

Laurie Graham 12:31
Another question I get is, well, don’t you want to be a nonprofit or will you ever become one? I’ve kind of already answered this, but there’s another piece I want to address because someday down the road, we actually might start a nonprofit scholarship like, arm, like a different arm of our business, which would be a nonprofit scholarship kind of arena. We would love to be able to offer scholarships to the Network, to churches who would benefit from some of our paid resources, and really can only pay partial, someday. Now I have no idea how to do this. We don’t have the capacity or the staff to do that right now, but someday, I’d love to see that happen. Where people in bigger churches or people with resources, could give money to support some of the smaller struggling churches to help them get not just most, but all of our resources that we do to equip small churches to do excellent ministry.

For those of you who wish we were a nonprofit, so that you could give us money, I’m going to tell you, you can still give to our ministry, and some people do this. First off, if you have extra money, and you’re like, we want to support this ministry, we love what you’re doing. I encourage you to join the Network. Join our Network, and learn and grow your skills, and be an even bigger blessing to your church or gift the Network to someone else in your church so they can grow and get stronger and better and lead with more influence. We have people who give the VIP bundles at our conferences, sometimes. If you ever want to donate some VIP bundles, we kind of keep loose tabs on people who really could benefit from the VIP bundle and they truly can’t afford it. And so, sometimes people come up and say, hey, we would like to give that to somebody, you totally can do that. Now, there is no tax deduction benefit to that, because again, we’re not a nonprofit. But you can totally support us in those ways, and even more. Feel free to shoot me an email to laurie@smallchurchministry.com if you have some ideas as well.

Laurie Graham 14:30
And the last question, I think this is the last one I want to address before we wrap up today, the last question I just wanted to address was, “What does your business look like?” I’ve been asked this question more and more recently. Somebody messaged me a few months ago asking for our customer service number and somebody just this week said what, what does this really look like? Like where do you work? Like, where’s like the hub of all this? And every time people ask that I kind of laugh a little bit because by and large, I sit on my floor a lot with my computer on my lap and my puppy at my side, or sometimes I’m working on my back porch. My daughter works for me part time from her apartment. My sister works for me from North Carolina. My niece works for me. My daughter’s sister-in-law works for us. We have a team of remote workers all sitting around their kitchen tables or on their couches. We connect by zoom. We send things by email. We use Asana, to keep all the pieces and parts working together. I do hire expert contract help as needed. And it’s needed more often than I would have thought. But by and large, what you see are things that we have figured out and produced. We’ve done our own website. We run our own conferences. As I mentioned, my daughter has figured out podcasts and all sorts of back-end stuff that I never would have even known had to happen.

We’ve had people asking if we have job openings. And while someday I would love to hire a CFO and a CMO and every other C blank O, that there are, we currently run on a shoestring budget. The people who are getting paid aren’t getting paid nearly enough. And if you’re listening, by the way, Jill, or Clara, or anyone else, I do know this. And most of the people who are keeping everything going, honestly volunteer their time and their energy, and so much of their hearts. We are smart. We are, you know, working in diligence and as much wisdom as we can find and get. We are making the best choices we can. And we are still a startup. It hasn’t even been three years yet, and we are in the lives of 10s of thousands of people pretty much every single month. It’s quite crazy. And at the same time, once again, our conferences and communities are largely powered by volunteers, and people who simply resonate with the mission, and they are 100% on board with changing the world through small churches. They are people who see small churches not only as instrumental but vital in being Jesus, not just bringing Jesus, but being Jesus to a world who needs hope and love.

Laurie Graham 17:08
Small churches are totally in the position of being able to see and hear and value everyone who walks in our doors. We can do this. Large churches cannot by the way. I’ve worked in large churches. I’ve been in large churches. In large churches it is inevitable, no matter how much they try, it’s inevitable that people will be missed. Small churches though, we only miss people when we are too busy, or fussing with things that don’t matter nearly as much as God’s kids who just walked in the door. I hope you enjoyed this little peek behind the curtain of Small Church Ministry. I will be back next week again with more hope and help for small churches worldwide. We’ve got interviews coming up. We’ve got more strategies and tools all for free, right here on the Small Church Ministry Podcast.

But as a final thought, I always end the podcast with a phrase, we say, be a light, and I thought I’d tell you why and how that happened. When we started the podcast, my daughter said, Mom, you need a thing. No, she didn’t call it a thing. I don’t remember what she called it, but it was something about like having a phrase that you’re always going to end with, something that sticks with people. And she talked about it becoming part of our branding. That was tough for me, like I was like, I don’t know what to say. We were trying out ‘be a light’. And the reason this came up in my mind is because this is a Bible verse I cling to, I teach from, I talk about it often because I believe God has called each of us to be a light and to be an influence, that every single human, you were created to shine. I don’t believe this verse is just for pastors or leaders or people who feel like they are called. I believe this is for every single one of us. Every single Jesus follower is called to be a light, to be an influence.

Laurie Graham 19:02
If you think about being a light in the dark world, I don’t even think of it as just us and them, like Christians versus people in the world. I think about it as our world we’re walking in every day, even as Jesus followers. I think, so often, we set up this differentiation of us and them, but honestly, even us who are following Jesus, there’s a lot of darkness. There’s a lot of deep struggles, every single one of us deep question, deep hurts. I know you have them too. I do. And one of my desires is that I would be a person that doesn’t miss that. Whether I’m thinking of people who don’t know Jesus, or people who do, like every single human, that I would be a person who doesn’t miss people. To me, this is our responsibility, to be a light right where we are to every single person we rubbed shoulders with, every single person who crosses our path every day.

And recently, my daughter brought this phrase up and said, Mom, don’t you remember? That’s what you used to say when we went to elementary school every morning. My kids walked to school, and they would leave from the front door, as they, you know, trecked off down the sidewalk to walk to school. And as they left the house for public school, I gave them a kiss, and I would say, “be a light.” I think it might have even annoyed them after a while because I did say it pretty much every day. But so funny now that they’re all grown, I had forgotten that I said that. Almost every morning throughout their childhood, I would say, “be a light.” So, I guess saying be a light to end the podcast is a little more of a natural ending than I thought it was. And as I encourage you, please know, I am also speaking to myself. It’s a reminder, a goal, an intention to shine the light that Christ has already put in us to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly. I can’t wait to talk to you again next week. Be a light.