Elevation & Pastor Steven Furtick

 Wow check out what pastor Steven Furtick was up to this past month. Read the article from the Charlotte Observer and also check out what this 27 year old preacher is blogging about.  You can click here to go to it. Also check out the homepage of his church- here-one of the fastest growing in the U.S.

 

SOUTH CHARLOTTE CONGREGATION

For church, giving back is its 1st step

Pastor starts capital campaign by giving parishioners $40,000, with orders to use the money to do good

CELESTE SMITH

cesmith@charlotteobserver.com

If you found an envelope of money on your car seat last week, or if someone anonymously paid for your lunch in the fast-food line, you may have been a beneficiary of the Bless Back Project.

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

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

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

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

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

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

For Furtick, unleashing more than 2,000 members on an unsuspecting city, in an idea borrowed from a Cincinnati church, seemed a perfect match for Elevation. The Southern Baptist church worships in nontraditional ways with, for instance, its loud rock band playing praise music before and after Furtick’s sermons. Elevation ranks eighth on a list of fastest-growing churches in America compiled by Outreach magazine, which writes about “outreach-oriented” churches.

Now, examples of the church’s Bless Back Project are filling its Web site, www.blessbackproject.com.

Some kicked in hundreds of their own dollars, or combined their envelopes with others for more of an impact.

One couple spent more than $400 of their own money to buy Wal-Mart gift cards for teenage moms. Another group of friends pooled envelopes to get $70 in groceries for a co-worker staying in a pay-by-the-week motel.

“Now we are ready for our next challenge,” wrote one family, who kicked in their own money to send $160 to a woman with a sick husband.

“Bring it on Elevation … Let’s DOMINATE.”

A funny way to raise money

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

The move also models his message to set aside money first to give to church and charity.

Furtick, from Moncks Corner, S.C., said he was inspired at 16 to start a church. He and his wife, Holly, live in Matthews with their 2-week-old son, Graham, named in honor of Billy Graham, and 3-year-old son, Elijah.

Previously, while in Shelby working for Crossroads Worldwide, an interdenominational ministry, Furtick invited seven other families to move to the south Charlotte region and start a church. The 13-member staff, about half comprised of the founding families, works out of a 6,000-square-foot office in the Lake Park section of Union County, said Larry Brey, who was part of one of the original families.

The first Sunday service in February 2006 had 121 people, Brey said.

“It’s been nonstop explosive growth” ever since, said Brey, the church’s leadership development pastor.

Eighty-five percent of the church’s newcomers show up because someone invited them, said Brey, citing an Elevation Church survey done two months ago. In the early months, the church rarely drew anyone over 40. Then the high school-age students who were regulars brought their curious parents.

“Our church exists for the people who haven’t been here yet. … People who have a sense of religion, but who don’t have a relationship” with a church, Brey said.

Elevation is drawing members like Barry Bertram, 40, who wasn’t sure the pastor could relate to him. “I was a little skeptical at first. The pastor is a very young guy. I don’t know why that bothered me,” Bertram said. Six months later, he’s hooked. He likes the church leader’s let’s-rock-Charlotte style, like the $40,000 giveaway. And he says Furtick’s approach gets Bertram thinking about being more giving.

Elevation set a goal of $3 million in its capital campaign — putting the church in the position to jump on a land purchase opportunity, or renovate warehouses as permanent space, or continue to set up campuses at high schools in south Charlotte, Brey said.

If the plan sounds unspecific, he said, that’s because it is. The expense and lack of available land makes it difficult to know if the church will be able to purchase any.

“We don’t know what the next step is,” he said. “We’re not going to tie ourselves to a particular strategy,” because opportunities change.

Funds from the capital campaign go into an external agency overseen by a certified public accountant, Brey said. That’s separate from the three-member ministry leadership team, which includes Furtick, that sets the church budget. The church undergoes an external audit every year, Brey said.

What is definite about the capital campaign, Furtick said, is that 10 percent of what’s raised — or $300,000 if the church makes its goal — will go to five local charities. That giving is happening along the way — Elevation pledged $25,000 to Friendship Trays last week. On Saturday, the church presented a $10,000 check to a family north of uptown Charlotte for home improvements, and $25,000 to Crisis Assistance Ministry.

“We never want to turn inward and turn the focus on us … It’s all God’s stuff anyway,” Furtick said.

Of the $40,000 giveaway to the congregation, Furtick said, “I thought it would be a cool moment in the church’s history. … Not as a gimmick, not as a publicity stunt, but to get it in the DNA of our church to be a blessing to others.

“Now we have people talking about how they can be generous in their everyday lives.”

Stories of Sharing

All week, members have been sharing their stories:

• With Furtick’s charge to “get radical,” Barry Bertram wasn’t sure how, after opening his envelope to find $5. Then the tennis pro decided to take $5 he got from every lesson he taught last week. When clients learned what he was doing, some added an additional five bucks. Ending the week with $475, Bertram plans to donate it to Habitat for Humanity. He wants to hand over the original $5 to the beneficiary family — and ask them to use it to do something for someone else.

• When Jennifer Rinaldo received the $1,000 at last week’s Providence High service, the stay-at-home mom who sells products for a health and wellness company knew exactly what she would do. She had been looking for a way to inspire a friend, a divorced mother of two, to develop a career. Now Rinaldo will use the church money to pay her friend’s airfare, registration and hotel at a job training conference.

• A recipient wrote on the Web site how her friends went grocery shopping for her with their church money, and how the gesture came at a critical time: She is behind on her rent and utility bills. “I have never felt so blessed,” she wrote.

The story sharing no doubt will continue today at a church luncheon following the last service.

Paying it Forward

The church’s Web site lists more than 100 stories of how parishioners have been spending the money. Here are what some of them have done:

• Bought lunch for a co-worker

• Gave roses to a friend

• Bought gas for a friend

• Donated money to charity

• Gave money to the homeless

• Paid for a friend’s hair appointment

• Helped neighbors buy costly prescription drugs

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