Frugality: The Secret to Ministry Generosity

On this episode of The Lead On Podcast, Jeff Iorg, president of the SBC Executive Committee, tackles the discipline of frugality—not as self-imposed poverty or cheapness, but as mission-driven choices to live within means, avoid consumer debt, and prioritize generosity. He urges pastors to model frugal living among their people while building organizational reserves for long-term health.

Creators and Guests

Host

Jeff Iorg

President, SBC Executive Committee

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Jeff Iorg: 00:54

Welcome to the Lead On podcast. This is Jeff Iorg, the president of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, continuing our ongoing conversation about practical issues related to ministry leadership. Well, today on the podcast, I want to talk about a subject that, I don't think I've ever really addressed on the podcast. I also am concerned about doing so because quite frankly, I don't want to be perceived as the gripey old man yelling, get off my yard. And that sometimes is how I feel when I talk about an issue like this one.

Jeff Iorg: 01:32

I want to talk about the discipline of frugality. Now, some of you just clicked off the podcast. Come back. Come back. I wanna talk about what it means to be frugal and why that still matters as a ministry value and perhaps in some ways that may surprise you, what

Jeff Iorg: 01:56

that really looks like and what some of the true applications are of being frugal in ministry. Now, I also wanna say that it's easy to think about frugality only in terms of income level or your background and maybe where you've come from and think that that's the only influence or

Jeff Iorg: 02:20

the only model of what frugality needs to be. That that's that's not what I'm talking about here today at all. No doubt, like some of you, I I grew up in humble circumstances. I I remember my first earliest memories were of living in a trailer house. Now I know today, we call them, you know, mobile homes or modular homes, but I didn't grow up in a mobile home or a modular home.

Jeff Iorg: 02:47

I grew up in a trailer house. Okay? My first earliest memories. Now if you're living in a trailer house today, I'm I'm not talking down at you. I'm I'm saying you're my people.

Jeff Iorg: 02:58

Okay? That's that's where I came from. And so it'd be easy to to think about that and say, well, you you just believe in frugality because you were kind of marked by that kind of, limited income upbringing when you were younger, and and and you somehow had that inculcated in you as a part of who you are. And, man, there may be something to all of that, but that's not really what I'm talking about today. I'm not talking about the value of poverty or the value of living in a poor way or or or somehow thinking that that kind of living is is the only way of living as a Christian.

Jeff Iorg: 03:35

I'm not talking about that. I wanna talk much more positively and proactively about what it means to live and have a value called frugality.

Jeff Iorg: 03:47

Well, first of all, let let's define what it means. It it it frugal living means living within your means. It's operating on a margin. And in our culture, particularly, it means limiting consumer debt. Frugality is not self enforced poverty,

Jeff Iorg: 04:07

but rather disciplined choices based on mission driven priorities. Man, let me say that again. Frugality is not self enforced poverty, but rather making disciplined choices based on spending according to your mission driven priorities. Frugality does not equal being cheap, but focuses on priority driven spending.

Jeff Iorg: 04:43

Frugality identifies what really matters in your life and then makes choices to spend less on things that don't matter so much so that you can spend more on the things that do matter. Let me give you a couple of examples. I have a friend who's a person of significant financial resources. He is, to put it in a word, rich. You'd never know it if you were around him.

Jeff Iorg: 05:18

He dresses very, modestly and, in

Jeff Iorg: 05:21

fact, normally. He he drives a truck, but it's not an extravagantly, you

Jeff Iorg: 05:31

know, tricked out truck. It's just a truck. He lives in a nice home, but not an extravagant home. Because of my personal relationship with him and some spiritual counsel he's had come to me for over the years, I know that he gives 6 and sometimes 7 figure gifts

Jeff Iorg: 05:54

to global missions. He is passionately committed to getting the gospel to the nations. And in order to do that, he spends less on many other things so that he can spend more on what really matters to him. However, in the context of all that, he once told me,

Jeff Iorg: 06:19

I have one thing that I guess I do spend money on that's about my about me.

Jeff Iorg: 06:24

I said, what's that? He said, well, once a year for a week, my sons and I, we go away and we hunt together. I said, man, that's that's awesome. He goes, yeah. We we we spend some money on it though, Jeff.

Jeff Iorg: 06:39

He said, we we go, you know, into some

Jeff Iorg: 06:42

nice places that require outfitting and a lot of equipment. Over the years, we've obtained all that and and and that's something that we really enjoy doing together and it gives us a bonding experience, but but we really do have a sort of an extravagant week of hunting together. I said, man, I think that's awesome. You're investing in your family. You're investing in your own mental health by taking that break, which enables you to continue to prosper and lead your businesses in effective ways.

Jeff Iorg: 07:10

And also is a part of keeping you who you are so that you

Jeff Iorg: 07:15

can continue to give what you're giving. I would describe this man as frugal. You say, well, if he

Jeff Iorg: 07:22

was really frugal, wouldn't take that trip. No. I I don't see it that way. Remember, frugality is not self enforced poverty. Frugality is disciplined choices.

Jeff Iorg: 07:33

Saying, what do I need to spend money on that really reflects my mission driven priorities? In this man's case, his priorities are global missions and his family and being the right kind of man to lead significant companies. And so investing some resources in his own mental health, his own physical and emotional recovery, and his family that really rejuvenate him, that's not being wasteful, that's being wise.

Jeff Iorg: 08:08

So get it in your mind now. Frugality means living within your means, operating on a margin,

Jeff Iorg: 08:14

staying away from consumer debt. It's it means all those things, but it's not self enforced poverty. It is instead disciplined choices. Now, I'd like to think that I learned from my friend and I'm trying to do some same things with my family. Anne and I, we we watch our our nickels.

Jeff Iorg: 08:33

We we we we're careful about what we spend on clothing and on entertainment and on eating out and those kinds of things. You know, we do some of those things, but we we we carefully monitor that and we budget for it and we keep it to a reasonable

Jeff Iorg: 08:45

amount so that we can have more resources to spend on our family and on God's mission.

Jeff Iorg: 08:55

And we don't consider investing in our family or in God's mission to be, extravagant expenditures. We consider those things to be our mission driven priorities. So we wanna be frugal in other areas so we can be generous, in fact, sometimes even extravagant in areas that really matter to us. Now frugal living is a hard choice in our in our world today. It's a hard choice because we live in a consumer culture that insists materialistic purchases are essential

Jeff Iorg: 09:27

for happiness. The world we live in is constantly pressuring you to spend, to buy, to obtain with a subtle message that doing so is going to bring you a sense of fulfillment, but that's simply

Jeff Iorg: 09:45

not the case. Resisting that, however, is resisting one of the great temptations of our era.

Jeff Iorg: 09:55

Another aspect of this is that when you do have resources that come your way,

Jeff Iorg: 10:03

those resources will challenge you to really stick with your values and stick with your mission driven priorities. This happened to us a few years ago. We were rolling along, you know, spending all the money we could on trying to help three kids get through college and it was challenging. I'm telling you, for nine years I had college bills and it took just about every dollar we could scrounge up to get that done. But you know what?

Jeff Iorg: 10:31

It was our priority to help our children get educated and launch them in their lives. So we were glad to do it, but it was taking about everything we had. We got down to the end of that, and the first month after we didn't have any more college bills after nine years, it seemed like we got the largest raise, if you will, in our lifetime. Now I working for the seminary at the time and believe me, they didn't pay me any more money. But I got a big raise because suddenly I didn't have this outflow any longer.

Jeff Iorg: 11:02

So the question was, what do we do with this increase? And quite

Jeff Iorg: 11:09

frankly, it

Jeff Iorg: 11:09

was tempting. It's like, wow, let's spend it. I mean, we've been scrimping and saving and investing in our children for these years. Now let's do something for us. Well, we thought about that, talked about it a good deal,

Jeff Iorg: 11:26

but finally concluded that while we may need to adjust a little bit to take some of the pressure off of us that we'd been putting on ourselves to make this happen over these nine years. We really didn't need to adjust that much.

Jeff Iorg: 11:39

We liked the life we had. We were satisfied with the lifestyle we were maintaining. We had enough discretionary money to take care of

Jeff Iorg: 11:49

our own needs and to have a few nice things along the way. So we decided to take the most of that increase that we got by the college bills going away and do two things with it. We decided to save some of it, and we decided to start giving away the rest of it. And for these last several years, we've been doing that. We've been able to give away more than ever before because we've had this opportunity to hold the line with some frugality on where we were living, recognizing that the standard of living that we had at the time was just fine.

Jeff Iorg: 12:28

There was no real reason to inflate it, and instead to give away these resources that now came our way because the bills,

Jeff Iorg: 12:36

so to speak, had slowed down.

Jeff Iorg: 12:39

Now I have a hunch that a lot of you listening to this podcast would say, I wish something like that would happen to me. Well, it will just you gotta live about twenty more years. I I wanna remind you that that I was a pastor of a very small church, then I was a church planting pastor, and then I was a state staff member at a small state convention. Yeah. I know exactly what you're going through right now.

Jeff Iorg: 13:02

I'm just simply saying that what enabled us at the latter part of our lives to be able to be generous with what we had was this discipline of frugality we'd built into our lives. Meaning not choosing poverty and not choosing to to put ourselves in financial, financial bondage or bind by materialistic spending, but instead choosing to live on our income, choosing to adjust our lifestyle accordingly. And then when the opportunity came, yeah, we could have inflated that lifestyle or changed it dramatically,

Jeff Iorg: 13:33

but instead, we made the choice to save and give more than we'd ever been able to up until that point in our lives. So I want you to

Jeff Iorg: 13:42

understand that frugality is a personal value that can go a long way toward helping you in managing the resources God puts in your hand. But I also want you to understand that frugality is also an essential mindset for you in leadership. We're supposed to model passionate and sacrificial commitment to God's mission as well as disciplined choices that maintain this reasonable standard of living. Now, I know the prosperity gospel says that wealth is evidence of God's blessing, but my friends, that is just not true.

Jeff Iorg: 14:17

It's a bold lie. God blesses leaders,

Jeff Iorg: 14:21

not not with a luxurious lifestyle, but with adequate resources so we

Jeff Iorg: 14:26

can live reasonably and responsibly in our ministry context and set an example and set an example of frugal living and generous giving tempered by our personal choices for our followers.

Jeff Iorg: 14:41

Now, one of the subtle parts of this is that frugality in leadership is what will enable you to live like your followers. Now, this is a missiological principle that's oftentimes, missed by people in American culture particularly. Some ministry leaders think that they're owed a certain standard of living or a certain level of living. That's simply not true. In fact, the standard of living that you're supposed to have is to model for your followers how to live in their community on their income.

Jeff Iorg: 15:20

Say, well, what what what kind of income should a should a pastor make? Well, it it depends on the community in which he's serving. One of the good ways to determine that would be to to take 10 comparable people in your church, people that have your maybe comparable, lifestyle, comparable age, comparable education, and try to find out what their salaries would be. I don't think you can just ask them that, but by looking at the community and seeing what community pays, that kind

Jeff Iorg: 15:51

of thing. And then you take those 10 salaries and you sort of

Jeff Iorg: 15:55

average them out and that's what you're going to

Jeff Iorg: 15:57

be making. You're you're not going

Jeff Iorg: 16:01

to be able to live far differently than the people you're trying to lead. Now this is hard because quite frankly, some communities are economically significantly challenged. I was talking with a pastor recently. I was so impressed with that his church was reaching and baptizing a number of people with the, with the gospel. And I asked him, how are you doing that?

Jeff Iorg: 16:27

He said, well, I live in a poor community and we operate a pretty substantial feeding ministry out of our church.

Jeff Iorg: 16:38

Our church, in fact, has a reputation of being the place you go to if you're hungry. And so we have this food bank that does its work two, three days a week, and, we've trained people that are pretty, skilled at interfacing with the people who come to us for help. And through that means, we've just led people to faith in Jesus and and they keep coming and keep coming back with their friends and we keep lending more of them to Jesus and they keep coming to our church, and that's where we're baptizing these people. It's all basically coming through the ministry we're doing in a really poverty stricken area with providing food. I looked at how he was dressed,

Jeff Iorg: 17:21

and I looked at how he carried himself, and I saw a man who fit into his community. And because of that, I sensed the love that that church must have for their pastor.

Jeff Iorg: 17:37

He wasn't looking for a rich church somewhere to come and get him out of that poverty place. He is very content

Jeff Iorg: 17:43

where he is to live among his people in their neighborhood on the same kind of level that a

Jeff Iorg: 17:51

lot of them live on. Maybe a little bit beyond having to go and ask the church for food, but not so far beyond it that he's lost touch with the people he's trying to minister to. Man, I respect a pastor like that. A pastor who goes into a hard place, into a difficult community, plants his life and says, I'm gonna live among you and I'm gonna

Jeff Iorg: 18:10

live like you, and I'm gonna live on the income you can provide, be a part

Jeff Iorg: 18:15

of what you're doing here in this community.

Jeff Iorg: 18:19

That is so enriching to a community and to a church. So humbling for so many of us who see it happening, and I'm just grateful to God for pastors like that. You know, living frugally, as I'm describing it here, is a lifestyle choice. It's not a default position necessitated only by limited resources. This pastor I'm describing and others like him, they've established a conviction that they're going

Jeff Iorg: 18:50

to live a certain way and stand against materialistic temptations. They're going to stand against the insidious longings for bigger and better and nicer. They're gonna stand against all of that. They're gonna model what first Timothy says, they're gonna be above reproach, self controlled, sensible. They're gonna manage their own households well and have a good reputation among outsiders.

Jeff Iorg: 19:11

They are committed to that kind of living, and it shows up in the kind of work they do in pastoral leadership. Well, today, so far in talking about this discipline of frugality, I've approached him two perspectives. First of all, personally applying this in your life where you make a commitment to spending according to your mission driven priorities, to being, if you will, cheap in some areas so you can be extravagant in other areas. And then I've talked about what this looks like in a ministry context where you make the choice to live frugally among people, to live like the people you're trying to lead, to be a part of the community, and to recognize that you're in a challenged community, you're probably gonna have a bit of a challenged salary and a challenged situation financially, but you've made a commitment to be there because that's where God's placed you and where you wanna serve And you know the people there deserve good leadership just like anyone else does, and you're planning to give it. But now I want to talk about a third application of this idea of frugality.

Jeff Iorg: 20:15

And that is frugality in ministry leadership also impacts your organizational financial decision making. Frugality is part of building a ministry for the long haul. Now, as a leader, a pastor or organizational leader, you're entrusted with making financial decisions for your church or for your ministry organization. You you're in charge of things like budget development. You're in charge of resource expenditure.

Jeff Iorg: 20:41

You're in charge of making sure investments are managed appropriately. You are entrusted with making financial decisions on behalf of your church organization. That's just part of the job. And it's essential that those decisions be mission driven, not dictated by self promotion, we know that, but listen also to this. Financial decisions must be mission driven, not not dictated by self promotion, but also not always dictated by pressing needs.

Jeff Iorg: 21:15

Frugal leaders evaluate potential spending as it fulfills their mission, and I mean their mission for the long haul, not just what makes them comfortable or more

Jeff Iorg: 21:29

popular. Being frugal in the context of being a ministry leader means spending wisely to accomplish the mission,

Jeff Iorg: 21:42

not just being cheap. Now, I I I know, especially Baptist, we we have a good understanding of what it means to take the cheap route, but that is not always the frugal

Jeff Iorg: 21:57

route. Remember, frugality is

Jeff Iorg: 22:01

not about being

Jeff Iorg: 22:01

cheap, Frugality is about not spending on some things so that we

Jeff Iorg: 22:08

can spend more extravagantly on other things. Frugality is about making the choices to spend less on lesser demands, lesser priorities, and more on what really matters. And a part of organizational leadership

Jeff Iorg: 22:27

is having the discipline to do that not only in the moment but for the long haul. A couple of applications of this, first of all,

Jeff Iorg: 22:39

related to ministry debt. It is so tempting for ministry leaders to put their church or ministry organization into significant debt to meet the pressing needs of the here and now.

Jeff Iorg: 22:52

But I ask you, is that really the best decision for the long term future of your church or your organization? It's also tempting to spend all the money you have in the

Jeff Iorg: 23:07

moment, not thinking about the long term best interest of your church or your organization. You know, that's why most ministry organizations have some kind of policy that requires them to maintain a certain number of months of operating reserve. It's it's not inappropriate if you're in a church or a ministry organization to maintain about six months of operating reserve. You say, well, we should have that money out there. That money shouldn't be in the bank.

Jeff Iorg: 23:33

No. No. Frugality and I think wisdom indicates that you should have some money that you have been saving and setting aside, that you have as an operating reserve so that when bad times come and they are inevitably going to come, you can weather the storm that comes your way. I remember when the economic downturn happened in 2008. Our seminary was impacted as most organizations were,

Jeff Iorg: 24:01

but we were not impacted that dramatically. We did not have

Jeff Iorg: 24:06

to lay anyone off. We did not close any programs. We did not cut any positions. Now we did have a hiring freeze. We did have no raises for about two years.

Jeff Iorg: 24:16

We did limit program growth, and we did watch very closely every expenditure to make sure we stayed within our our spending plan. Why were we able

Jeff Iorg: 24:26

to do that? Well, because we had

Jeff Iorg: 24:28

a wise CFO who for several years had been telling us, eventually we're going to have a really hard time. And he kept making sure that we spent less than we took in and had some reserve building. And it was hard. People said, but the needs are now and we're saying no to things that we ought be saying yes to. And he kept holding the line.

Jeff Iorg: 24:47

And I supported him in that decision even though it was sometimes difficult even for me, but then when the hard times came, we were able to weather them because we had some reserve in place. So part of being frugal is having some reserve in place. Now I know there'll be some of you who'll say, well, our church has way more than we should be holding, and that's a problem too, but that's another issue. All right? Frugality can easily turn into greed and a sense of pride in how much we've been able to set aside.

Jeff Iorg: 25:17

I'm not talking about that today. I'm talking about being wise to say, here's a reasonable amount of money that needs to be set aside for the long term. And then I would also add one other thing about frugality in ministry leadership, that is frugal leaders who don't spend everything they have in the moment on the pressing needs of the

Jeff Iorg: 25:34

day also save and invest for the long haul. When you save and invest for the long haul, you resist the temptation of spending it on your needs and you model

Jeff Iorg: 25:45

selflessness in serving future generations. You know, when I was at the seminary for all those years, we worked hard at building our endowment And one of my most satisfying achievements at the seminary was, increasing the endowment from about 12,000,000 to nearly $70,000,000 while I was president. Now, the bulk of that increase came, of course, from the land sale in the in Northern California, but that in and of itself was a challenging discipline to maintain. When we sold the property, it was, you know, $8,090,000,000 dollars that we had come in, and then, of course, it grew in the markets and other things. So it's hard to put a fixed number on it, but it was somewhere in that range, in the 90 millions range.

Jeff Iorg: 26:32

We made the decision that we were gonna spend a lot less than that on our campus in Southern California and held the

Jeff Iorg: 26:37

line on doing that. We had a $90,000,000 we could have spent, but we didn't spend that much. We spent far less than that because we really wanted to make it happen, that we

Jeff Iorg: 26:50

would have money left over for the long term generations of the seminary out of that land sale. Yes, it would have been tempting and would have been inviting and might have been even enjoyable to spend more of

Jeff Iorg: 27:03

that money in the moment, But setting aside that 30 or so million that we set aside ultimately from that land sale, that's going

Jeff Iorg: 27:12

to make the long term difference in ways that will change the seminary forever because some of us were frugal enough to say we're only spending this much to get the seminary relocated, and we're gonna do whatever we can with that much money, but no more because we really wanna do something for the long haul, for the future generations to come. Well, today, I've talked about frugality as a value. Yes, I came from some modest circumstances, I'm sure that's marked me in some ways, but I don't believe in frugality because of my upbringing or the way I was raised or anything like that. I believe in it because I think it's the companion discipline to generosity and contentment. I think that generosity and contentment and frugality go together.

Jeff Iorg: 28:02

That if you're going to be more generous,

Jeff Iorg: 28:04

you gotta be more frugal.

Jeff Iorg: 28:06

And when you find the sweet spot in the tension between frugality and generosity, you find contentment right there at the crossroads. Remember, frugality as a personal discipline is not about being cheap. It's about making intentional choices to spend your money on what really matters to you the most. It's about making intentional choices to spend your money on your mission and what drives you forward in that mission. When you practice frugality as an organizational leader, it helps your organization to understand its responsibility to keep shaping its spending toward its mission.

Jeff Iorg: 28:46

And also it gives you the opportunity to model for your followers what it means to be frugal and to have contentment and generosity while living in the context where you've been assigned at the standard of living that your ministry organization is able to provide so that you fit into your community, not living above it or below it, but with it. And in doing so, model for people what you really want them to do in relationship to their resources. And then finally, frugality when it's expressed organizationally means you make decisions not to spend all the money in the here and now, but to recognize that as a ministry leader, you have an opportunity to preserve resources for future needs. Sometimes future needs in the next several months when bad times come, but other times future needs in years to come when you're able to set aside resources to make a difference. And we also make sure that we're careful never to make financial decisions that damage our ministries over the long haul in the way of debt or other kinds of obligations, but instead we make decisions that bless them for the long haul.

Jeff Iorg: 29:51

Well, the discipline of frugality, it's where you find generosity and contentment and companionship. When you bring these three things together, it's a remarkable constellation of a way to view resources and to manage them in ways that really do facilitate our mission. Well, thank you for thinking about this with me today. Maybe a different kind of a subject for you and one that may be hard for you to hear, but I hope you'll give it some consideration, put it into practice as you lead on.