Financial Partnering

Fundraising Plan: 33% Church Fees 67% Financial Partnerships

One of the significant strengths of the ministry model we are using is that several churches can share our counseling/personal ministry leadership without having to hire staff on their own. And, we do not own or rent real estate since counseling and classes can be done in space churches have free during the week or online when needed. This keeps allows to keep a low annual budget of just over $100k, which helps make our ministry as affordable as possible. Even with this low overhead, church budgets are tight, and it’s hard to afford the full costs of classes, counseling, training, and ministry oversight. So, in the two prior years to launching the ministry, we consulted with multiple CCEF-oriented counseling ministries, in addition to our own conversations with church leadership teams, and our own personal experience. We found that for the small churches (over 90% of churches are under 200 in weekly attendance) and even middle size churches we are most eager to help, sharing in around 20-25% of the costs is the most they can afford. Individuals receiving counseling, groups or in classes cover about 10% of the cost as well, giving us about 33% of the budget covered by fees. This has proven to be an affordable cost approach with almost two dozen churches right now, that seems to create an appropriate financial, while not stretching budgets to far in most cases.

This leaves us with about 67% of our budget to raise through financial partnerships, almost completely from regular financial gifts from individuals and families who want to make the ministry of RCM. By God’s grace, we were able to hit our partnership goal after about six months of fundraising in February of 2023 to launch full time ministry for the first time — everything we did had been limited part time work prior to that. God used this change to more than double the amount of churches we serve, to hire and oversee additional counseling staff (and now teaching staff), to further develop our curriculums and new trainings, and to work with churches to develop a new depression and anxiety support group (similar to the format of Griefshare). As our budget needs increased each year at higher than expected levels due to inflation, our financial partners (over 50 regular givers and dozens of single gift givers) have helped us continue to make budget and keep full time ministry going. God is richly providing through them.

If you would like to join this team by enrolling in regular giving (or to make a single gift), you can access our giving platform, hosted by Planning Center (the same highly-trusted platform used by most churches), through the black button below. And if you would like to talk more about about financial partnership, the second button links to our contact form that you can fill out.