Vision

The cause of poor giving to a church is a lack of vision.  If the only thing a church is going to do with its finances is pay the utilities and salaries, that is all the money that will come in.  People give to vision; they give to ministry; they give much less to maintenance activities.  In a lifetime of attending smaller churches I've seen it happen numerous times that a church that struggles to pay its bills each month suddenly raises a large sum of money within days or weeks to fund a major project.  That alone proves the church is not without resources.  The problem is that we've not challenged the people to part with those resources for something more exciting than an electric bill.