Center your capital campaign on mission for success

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The Rev. Greg Allen-Pickett is a pastor — but also embraces his role as a “cheerleader and storyteller for the grand mission history” of his church, First Presbyterian Church of Hastings, Nebraska, and the larger Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

Allen-Pickett led a workshop at this year’s Stewardship Kaleidoscope on the connection between a church’s mission and its capital campaign. Stewardship Kaleidoscope is a conference presented by the PC(USA) and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America; this year’s conference was held in Portland, Oregon, Sept. 23-25.

Allen-Pickett’s church conducted a capital campaign that raised $2.25 million for improvements to the church property and a community center which the church owns and operates. The church’s legacy of taking the love of Christ into the neighborhood and the world became the foundation of the campaign’s story.

Creating clarity around your church’s identity is essential to a successful capital campaign process, he said. “Vital congregations contribute to the vitality of their communities — the congregation is alive when it does that,” Allen-Pickett said. “This church has always been focused on mission, both local and international mission, and our capital campaign needed a strong missional focus in order to be successful.”

The five major denominations in the American Protestant movement have similar definitions of congregational vitality:

• ELCA: Positive Impact on the Wider Community
• United Methodist Church: Engaged disciples in mission and outreach
• United Church of Christ: Connection to the world: Social outreach and evangelism
• The Episcopal Church: Risk-taking mission and service
• PC(USA): Outward incarnational focus

The PC(USA), he added, believes that “the Good News is meant to transform and transcend. Outward incarnational focus means we daily take up our cross and follow it to the marginalized of society, the poor among us, the suffering and sick, the stranger and the enemy, the downtrodden and ‘the least of these.’” Vital congregations are far more than people in the pews on Sunday morning.

In what has become an inside joke for his congregation, the pathway to broadening the outward focus at First Presbyterian of Hastings came in the form of an opportunity to expand the church’s parking lot.

Several years before Allen-Pickett accepted the call to serve as pastor, the church had purchased a nearby middle school annex that had been closed by the school district. “They really wanted the parking lot,” Allen-Pickett said with a grin. “But they also began to ask, ‘What can be done beyond parking?’”

The members began to imagine the 100-year-old building (named the PEACE Center, for Presbyterian Emmanual Arts Community Engagement) as the home for the church’s mission programs and a resource for the community. They also realized that their church could not accomplish these goals alone and created partnerships with a neighboring United Methodist Church, Catholic Social Services and nonprofit organizations in the community. The PEACE Center began hosting a monthly mobile food distribution and an international food packing ministry in collaboration with the local Kiwanis Club. It’s the storage and sorting facility for the Hastings Community Food Pantry. The facility is also used for church programs, including the high school youth ministry, Christian education, a senior walking club, and a quilter’s club.

When Allen-Pickett arrived in 2017, the church was in need of significant renovation and repairs — updating bathrooms, improving sanctuary lighting, making it a more accessible campus, completing the Christian education spaces, creating family-friendly spaces. As they developed the list of projects and began contemplating a capital campaign goal, someone asked, “What if 50% of what we raise goes to renovating the PEACE Center for mission and service?”

“And I just began saying that out loud every chance I had,” Allen-Pickett said. The more times he said it, the more it seemed possible.

The 150th anniversary of the founding of the church in 2023 was a natural anchoring event to launch an auspicious capital campaign. First Presbyterian interviewed several campaign consultants and selected Horizons Stewardship in large part because the assigned consultant lived in Nebraska and was pastor of a “mission-focused UMC church.” They also brought in an architecture consultant to produce conceptual drawings “because it is easier to inspire people to give when they can see a visual representation.”

With the help of a local advertising agency, the drawings were made into posters and placed around the church. Whenever he saw anyone taking a look, Allen-Pickett would step in to answer any questions or hear their comments. The goals of the campaign were arranged into thematic categories:

Church

• Hospitality
• Accessibility
• Family-friendly
• Preservation and sustainability

PEACE Center

• Hospitality and accessibility
• Community-friendly
• Long-term sustainability

There was one part of the fundraising process that was challenging for Allen-Pickett: Creating a stakeholders list and determining which members of the church to approach first based on the gift potential determined by Horizons.

“I understand why they recommended that, and we conducted a very successful capital campaign, but it was challenging for me,” he told workshop attendees. “I believe that as a pastor I strive to treat everybody in my church the same. It did help that we had a very good campaign committee of session members and congregants that supported the process.”

Horizons conducted a feasibility study and estimated that First Presbyterian could raise $1.6 million to $1.8 million. The campaign committee set a big goal of raising $2 million total: $1 million for the church project and $1 million for the PEACE Center project.

Gifts for the church projects primarily came from members of the congregation. The church also sought community funding and grants to support the PEACE Center project, given its positive impact on both congregational vitality and community organizations.

Two booklets were produced to support campaign communications — a 10-page publication about the church capital campaign called “Living a Legacy of Love,” and a trifold that focused on the PEACE Center project called “Uniting a Community with Love.” These served as both guides to conversations with potential donors and leave-behind pieces to reinforce the campaign messages.

Allen-Pickett acknowledged concerns that a capital campaign can reduce giving in support of a church’s annual budget, but that was not the case at First Presbyterian of Hastings. In fact, annual giving increased slightly during the campaign’s three-year pledge period.

Why was this capital campaign successful in raising $2.25 million? Allen-Pickett points to several factors.

“We began with a focus on mission, both its history in our church and its future. We secured significant lead gifts of $250,000 from a member of our congregation and $125,000 from a foundation, which gave the campaign momentum and excitement,” he said. “Finally, we rallied around the call to continue our legacy of mission commitment for the next 150 years and sharing the love and light of Christ for the future.”