Yesterday at Elevation we kicked off our DOMINATE campaign. I’ve been praying and preparing for this campaign pretty much all year, and I felt very strongly that we needed to intentionally turn people’s perception of what a capital campaign is all about upside down.

So we kicked off the whole campaign by giving away $40,000 to our people yesterday. Yes, you heard me correctly: We began our first ever capital campaign by giving away roughly the equivalent of our 2007 weekly offering average. Every adult got an envelope with either $5, $10, $20, $50, or $100. And one participant in each of our five worship experiences actually received $1000.
The instructions were simple:
Take this money and use it to bless someone beyond yourself. You can’t give it back to the church. And let us know what you did with it.
We set up a site at www.blessbackproject.com for people to tell their stories, and they are pouring in indeed.

The spiritual truth I was trying to communicate is a powerful one, based on Matthew 25:14-30:
God has entrusted each of us with different amounts of His resources, and He wants to see a Kingdom return on it. He has blessed us so we can bless back (see also Genesis 12:1-3).

It’s turning out to be quite a powerful experiment. I think people were shocked by the concept to begin with, and even more surprised that we didn’t even take up even our regular offering, or any offering at all this Sunday, on the first week of a capital campaign.
Our goal wasn’t to be gimmicky. In fact, it’s quite a sacrifice and a bit of a risk for a church as young as Elevation to pull this off. It puts us in a difficult short term cash position to say the least.
But I’m praying God will honor this exercise of faith and radical gesture of generosity to our city, and embed a DNA of generosity deep down into our culture that will spread throughout this city like a wildfire.
And I’m praying that He would drill the “It’s all God’s to begin with… I’m blessed to bless back” theology of giving down into the hearts of every man, woman, boy and girl at our church.
After all, that’s the whole point of this season called Dominate.

You can watch the sermon here beginning tomorrow morning.
Elevators, keep your stories flowing here.
Dominate!