Some Gifts are a Burden

Hey, this is Jimmy Dodd with a pastoral word of encouragement.

Hey, find a way to bless your pastor. But make sure that if you give them a gift, it doesn’t burden them.

We gave pastors a great gift at PastorServe years ago. We blessed a lot of young church planters with a night out to go see a movie, to have a nice meal. And we paid for everything.

Amazingly, very few pastors called and said, “I’ll do it.” We could not figure out why. So, we began to ask questions. And it was so basic. But it dawned on us most of those pastors had young kids. So, they would have to have babysitters. And you know what? That would be expensive. So, in other words, they could not actually afford to even accept our gift because they didn’t have those funds to find babysitters.

So, we changed our gift around. We found some very skilled babysitters, namely, my daughters. And they began to watch pastors’ kids all over town. And floods of pastors began to call and say, “We would love that gift.”

If you give a gift, make sure you don’t actually burden them with a cost which they can’t bear. Don’t say, “Hey, here’s a great gift to Hawaii. You just got to pay for your own flight,” because that’ll be a huge burden upon them.

So, if you wanna bless them with a gift, wonderful!

But make sure that the gift that you give, that they can actually accept it, that they’ve got financial margin to take you up on that gift.