Every summer, pastors do the math.
And the math doesn’t work.
A free playbook with five ready-to-use tools for the summer giving dip — and one foundational question about what kind of people your church is forming.
Every pastor knows the feeling. June arrives and something shifts. The parking lot is lighter. The offering is thinner. By July you’re doing the mental math on whether September will be enough to recover.
Giving tracks attendance closely. When families travel and routines break, the offering follows. For most churches that gap doesn’t recover until October — which means fall launch season is already compromised before it starts.
“What the summer dip reveals is something worth paying attention to all year: most of our people give as attenders, not as disciples. That’s not a cash flow problem. It’s a formation diagnostic.”
The summer slump is a discipleship problem.
Most resources on summer giving are practical: set up online giving, push recurring donations, send a reminder email before Memorial Day. That advice is worth following. But it treats the symptom.
When giving tracks attendance closely, generosity hasn’t been formed into your people yet. It’s a habit built around Sunday — and when Sunday changes, the giving changes with it. Summer just makes the gap visible.
“They gave of their own accord, begging us earnestly for the favor of taking part in the relief of the saints — and this, not as we expected, but they gave themselves first to the Lord.”
2 Corinthians 8:3–5Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21). Most of us read that as a diagnosis. But the grammar is more active than that. Where you place your treasure is where your heart will go. Giving isn’t just a symptom of formation. It is one of the instruments through which formation happens.
That shifts the pastoral question. It isn’t only “how do we maintain giving in July?” It’s “what are we doing with our people the other eleven months of the year that shapes how they hold money?”
Formation and multiplication are inseparable. You cannot fully form a disciple inward without forming them to give themselves outward. Generosity is one of the clearest expressions of that outward movement.
Every congregation has givers at different stages of formation.
Most pastors know this intuitively. But intentional pastoral leadership starts by naming the levels clearly — because you cannot cultivate what you cannot see. The goal is not to move people up a financial ladder. It’s to form people into disciples who hold money the way Jesus described: loosely, generously, with open hands and a heart oriented toward the kingdom.
| The Giver | What Drives Them | What They Need from You | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Tipper | Gives when present and emotionally prompted. Attendance-driven — when not in the room, they do not give. | A tangible connection between their giving and real impact. A clear, low-barrier next step toward regularity. |
| 2 | The Periodic Giver | Gives with some regularity but without a percentage or plan. Understands ministry takes money, but the amount is intuitive. | Vision. A challenge to move toward intentional, percentage-based giving. |
| 3 | The Tither | Has made a deliberate decision. Gives a percentage as a discipline and a declaration. Most will tell you it changed them. | Encouragement to see the tithe as a floor, not a ceiling. Teaching on generosity beyond the tithe. |
| 4 | The Generous Giver | Gives beyond the tithe. Thinks in percentages, not amounts. As income increases, the percentage increases. | Reinforcement that they’re on the right path. Opportunity to give toward specific, meaningful kingdom purposes. |
| 5 | The Sacrificial Giver | Has flipped the question. No longer asks how much to give — asks how much to keep. Money has genuinely lost its grip. | Personal pastoral relationship. Gratitude, not more asks. These givers are rare — honor them well. |
Five tools you can use this summer.
Each one is ready to adapt for your context. They work best together, but any one of them is better than nothing.
One foundational question.
Is your church forming disciples — or managing attenders?
Those aren’t the same church, and they don’t respond the same way to summer.
Always reading the room. Full seats in the fall feel like health. Empty rows in July feel like failure. Everything depends on whether September comes back strong — and it usually does, until it doesn’t.
Disciples are being made. Leaders are being developed. The mission is moving even when the building is half-empty. Generosity follows — not because you ran a better campaign, but because your people are being formed into the kind of people who give.
That’s a different operating system. And it’s not built in a summer.
I work with pastors who are building that operating system.
The Journey is a 12–18 month coaching process that helps a church make disciples, develop leaders, and plant churches. If this question resonates, I’d be glad to spend 20 minutes with you.
No agenda. No pitch. Just a real conversation about where your church is and whether what I do might be worth your time.
Either way — I hope your summer is better than the numbers suggest it will be.
Ray Brandon · Director of Church Planting, ABWE