Generosity as Spiritual Warfare

Giving was not where it needed to be. This summer, the Vineyard Community Church of Overland Park, Kansas found itself in a financial bind. The incoming lead pastor, Mark Stephenson, was fretting over the numbers every day. In May, in June, and then into July, the finances kept getting worse. Mark felt like he was hitting a wall with the burden of finances weighing heavily on him. Then, in prayer, God challenged him to change the way he was praying.

“We have a pretty active inner healing and deliverance ministry here that I brought with me when I came to this church,” Mark explains. “And so, casting out demons is something I do every week. I know that might sound weird, but every Wednesday, I’m praying for somebody, and demons are leaving.”

The exhortation Mark felt he heard from God was, “Mark, you pray differently for people when you’re casting out demons than you do when you’re praying for money… why? You pray differently in deliverance ministry because you know my heart is to set people free. But you don’t have a lot of confidence in me as the provider, and that when the Kingdom comes, there’s flourishing.”

In midsummer, Mark accepted the Lord’s challenge and changed the way he was praying. “I prayed boldly, the same way I’d pray to cast out a demon,” Mark says. “God, your kingdom come. Let your flourishing come. I bless the church budget with abundance, and not that we would just have enough, but that we would have more than enough.”

Less than two weeks later, a church member approached Mark and said, “I know we’re struggling as a church; God put it on my heart, and I really want to give this gift of $100,000.”

Mark sobbed with relief. “There was just this massive weight off my shoulders,” he remembers. For months, he had been applying for grants and trying to rent out the building, but nothing was working.

“All the things that God had been challenging me on, and then how He provided… I couldn’t believe it. I was in a daze, just in awe.” Mark shared the story with everyone he could behind the scenes–his family members, his best friend, and his spiritual director. “I couldn’t stop thanking God, and I knew we had to find a way to be a good steward of that gift.”

The donor also asked if the church could turn his donation into a matching campaign, after which several more families in the church came up with an additional $40,000. This kickstarted a “Give Big” campaign for the church for the month of October, where every additional dollar given to the church’s general fund was matched up to $140,000.

Meanwhile, Mark felt a tug on his heart from the Lord to respond with generosity, specifically to apply the practice of tithing–the Biblical command to give a tenth of your money to the Lord–to the $140,000 gift.

Now, who most needed $14,000? The bi-vocational pastors of two smaller churches in the region immediately came to mind. Through Vineyard area meetings, he had met Greg Hall of Innovo Vineyard in Wichita, and Matt and Nikki McMaster of The Family Room Church in Omaha. Mark separately asked each of them what would be a great month’s income for the church. Each church said about $7,000 would be a phenomenal month–exactly the amount that Mark had committed to tithe.

“I was like, this is totally the Lord. We gotta do this,” Mark remembers. After approval from the elders, Mark shared the good news that each church would receive $7,000 with which to run their own matching campaign. Greg and the McMasters were incredibly encouraged by this unexpected generosity.

Greg Hall said this gift “turned the tide” for his church, located in a low-income neighborhood in Wichita and focused on serving the poor. As a bi-vocational pastor, Greg delivers mail during the week so that more of the church’s money can directly serve the community, including a food pantry that serves more than 100 families per month. In a good month, Innovo brings in $6,000, but with the inspiration of the matching gift, the church was able to raise $8,500 during their monthlong campaign, for a total of $16,000.

“We’d had a rough summer, and Mark’s gift reminded everyone that something miraculous like this could happen, out of the blue–that God is with us,” Greg says.

In Omaha, three hours north of Kansas City up the Missouri River, the McMasters also jumped at the opportunity to launch a matching campaign with VCC Overland Park’s gift. “It was just the push we needed to step out in faith,” Nikki says, explaining that with a small congregation mostly in the middle-to-lower income bracket, they had been tentative to talk about finances.

In faith, the McMasters prepared to launch a three-month campaign, October-December, with the audacious goal of raising $30,000.

Once they said “yes,” the Family Room Church experienced an incredible outpouring of abundance. “We’ve had people land new jobs when they’ve been out of work for months and give when they didn’t have much, and the Lord provided for them that very same week,” Nikki recalls. They also received a $7,000 gift from a couple in their church, as well as unexpected gifts-in-kind, including people coming to serve from Vineyard Kansas City West and Matt’s place of employment.

While they had been barely meeting their budget before, incredibly, their campaign exceeded their original goal, raising more than $45,000 in all.

“Gratitude and generosity truly are spiritual warfare,” Nikki says. She and Matt believe that because of the heart posture of VCC Overland Park, giving out of gratitude, something has “broken open in the heavenlies.”

For Mark, it feels like the miracle of the fish and the loaves: God provided abundantly, and the gift continued to be multiplied out to other ministries as it was given away in faith. It’s an idea that he hopes other large Vineyard churches might try in their regions.

“I learned that believing in Kingdom Theology is believing boldly that God wants to usher in His Kingdom ‘on earth as it is in heaven’ through us, and this includes His financial provision for His Church,” Mark says.

Greg appreciates how Mark has jumped into caring for the wider Vineyard family as a relative newcomer. “A lot of people have a generous heart,” Greg says, “but Mark made a bold move to bless us. I think Mark’s got a good vision for the bigger picture of the Vineyard, and this was an outgrowth of that. It’s going to hopefully lead to partnership between our churches in other ways, too.”