Originally published by Church Executive Magazine
C3LA is a young, vibrant multi-site church in the sprawling city of Los Angeles whose vision is to help people know God personally, find freedom from their past through the power of relationship, discover their purpose through servanthood, and ultimately grow into leadership.
It’s no secret that in order to make a difference for Jesus by impacting a city like L.A., resources are needed!
Senior Pastor Jake Sweetman recalls how mobile giving has continually helped to fulfill the church’s vision.
Our church, C3LA, started using Tithe.ly at all three of our services about three years ago. My team and I attribute much of our financial growth to consistently teaching about generosity and the tithe, along with making the giving process streamlined and easy to use on a mobile device so that our church could give in the moment in a way that was familiar to them.
The three areas where we’ve seen the most success are:
Each year, we have a Vision Builders fundraiser which raises money above and beyond our weekly giving for building campaigns, various types of marketing, local and overseas missions, and expanding our church experience (i.e., — worship, kids church, guest experience, etc.). We are always astonished by the generosity of our church and seeing the fruit that comes from such generous givers. Ninety percent of “pledges” towards our yearly capital campaign are set up as recurring gifts.
Because Tithe.ly makes this simple, we see more pledges fulfilled, and that allows us to move resources much faster so we can react to the needs of our community.
One area of unexpected growth was the increase we saw from receiving “recurring gifts.” We have a lot of millennials in our congregation, so using an app isn’t a big adjustment; but, the consistency of giving has been a challenge. Life is busy, and people are busy.
Setting up recurring giving has helped people in our congregation to “take themselves out of the equation” and automatically have their tithe deducted from their account. Six percent of our church gives using the recurring feature, which is amazing considering hardly no one in our church was using recurring giving previously.
Our hope is the percentage will go even higher as our mobile giving app becomes even more ingrained in our church culture.
Before this mobile giving app, we were manually entering hundreds of credit cards, which was a tedious and time-consuming process for the admin team. Making it easy for people to give has saved us countless hours of admin time and reduced the tedious work of data entry so our staff can spend time on more important activities.
Over the course of three years, we’ve seen digital giving grow by 372%, with nearly half our budget now coming in through mobile giving. We’ve seen countless testimonies about the blessing that people have seen due to selfless giving.
This type of giving, along with the proper church giving tools, has empowered us be fully funded and prepared to support our community, build the Kingdom, and ultimately see people saved and their lives transformed by Jesus!
