Like every organization, churches need financing to carry out their numerous undertakings seamlessly. Besides teaching morals, preaching the gospels, and performing marriages, funerals, and baptisms, many churches also perform charitable functions that require serious funding—for example, providing shelter for the destitute, feeding the hungry, and helping the needy, among other things. More so, for your church to operate effectively, you should have sufficient cash to run its day-to-day, pay your employees, and finance church building projects that will allow you to expand and house more worshippers.
However, it’s not easy to have all the money necessary to reach the above lofty missions without adequate planning for financing. To run a successful religious service, you’ll want to expand your revenue base or borrow money from financial institutions.
Read on to know how you can get the necessary financial assistance that will help facilitate your church operation.
Summary
What Are Church Financing Options?
Starting a church and growing it into a thriving organization can be challenging. You must spend a considerable amount of time thinking and planning how you can get the money that will enable you to pilot your ministry’s affairs. Knowing how to get the requisite funding that will streamline the operation of your church down the line is a very important step worth taking.
With this in mind, you’ll want to consider the available funding options to bankroll your religious activities. Commercial bank loans, grants, lines of credit, income from investment, and crowdfunding are some of the go-to financing alternatives.
Commercial Bank Loan
As a church leader looking for financial support, you’ll want to consider borrowing money from a bank to settle your financial concerns. However, you must meet specific requirements for a successful loan application as banks don’t understand morality and virtue. Instead, they’re concerned with profit and loss. Therefore, you need to satisfy the bank’s preconditions to get funding for your church program. 
You should have an excellent financial statement, credit history, cash flow statement, and collateral for your loan application to be favorably considered. Banks are always cautious when advancing loans to their customers. They want to ensure they can recover their money regardless of what might happen. As a result, they are seriously concerned with the risk of people failing to meet their financial obligation. In other words, when a church leader applies for a loan, banks will assess their ability to pay back to know the potential risk. And if the risk is too high, your application will be turned down.
For a successful loan application, ensure that your church has a proven track financial record that can convince the bank that it’s capable of paying back.
Grant
Another important way to fund your church program is through grants. Grant is financial assistance given to you by the government, foundations, or a person to perform a specific project. Unlike a loan, you will not repay the money. However, to get a grant from government institutions or private foundations, you must first register your church as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization with the IRS.
Although most government grants don’t support religious activities, still there’re some faith-based federal and state grants you might qualify to apply for. In addition, private foundations do give grants to whatever causes they deem fit to support. So, you can start building rapport with some local foundations that might want to help your religious or charitable activities.
Most importantly, you will write a compelling proposal that can convince the grantmaker of the need to give you the money. You can consider using experts with grant proposal writing experience when you source for a grant.
Church Line of Credit
A church line of credit can be likened to a revolving line of credit. In other words, it’s a preset borrowing limit that you can tap into at any time once your organization receives a preapproved amount from the financing institution. Plus, you can access the entire amount all at once or a portion of it when you need it. However, fees are only charged on the money that has been withdrawn.
The application for a church line of credit is easy compared to a conventional bank loan. As a revolving line of credit, once the withdrawn money has been repaid, the money becomes available to be used again without the rigor of making a fresh application.
If you need a church line of credit, don’t hesitate to reach Financing Solutions for your inexpensive and easy-to-set-up credit line.
Crowdfunding
Crowdfunding is a form of a fundraising campaign aimed at audiences that are sympathetic to your cause. In other words, it’s a means of encouraging the public to invest in a specific project that might interest them. Recently, crowdfunding has become popular and can significantly help you generate money for your church when properly done.
There are numerous online platforms that support crowdfunding including, Fundly, Classy, CauseVox, Donately, and more. Do your research to figure out the particular platform that suits your need.
Income from Investment
Investment in properties or financial markets can generate income to help your church financing. An investment tip you can consider is buying real estate to get revenue from the cash flow from rents, or capital gain realized when selling the property. However, investing demands disciplined savings so that you can grow moderate savings into a large portfolio that can be invested.
Does Your Church Need Financing? Financial Solutions Line of Credit Can Help
Running any establishment with limited funding can be pretty tricky. While most churches hugely rely on donations and offerings from members to finance their programs, it isn’t always enough. And unforeseen circumstances or emergencies can even hamper your already lean cash flow.
However, having a cash backup plan like Financing Solutions’ church line of credit can significantly affect your organization’s cash flow. Unlike a commercial bank loan, Financing Solutions church credit line requires no collateral, personal guarantee, a large amount of backup documentation, or a specific reason for the loan. Plus, our credit line is easy to set up, costs nothing to set up until used, and when used, it’s inexpensive.
A church line of credit is a great financing option when the church needs it. Check out if your church would be approved and for how much by filling out the no-obligation, 2-minute line of credit application here.
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