A church budget is an interesting thing. It can challenge your mindset and empower you to do more. It can also trap and distract you. A budget can help you manage your resources, avoid financial mistakes, and plan for the future …or it can restrain you from living into what God has for you and your ministry.
As we wrap up 2025, take a minute to ask yourself and your team a few thought-provoking questions about your church’s 2026 budget. This is more than a financial exercise. Consider it a leadership audit.
Is your executive team on the same page heading into the new year? Are you using your finances as a tool to pursue your mission, or is it a distraction keeping you focused on the wrong things? Use these questions to find clarity as you prepare for the year ahead.
Before you get into the nitty-gritty stuff, start from a 10,000-foot perspective. What is your budget for? No canned answers. Dig deep. Ask all of your senior leadership for their opinions, too. You might be surprised at the range and nuance in the answers you get.
Do you see your budget as a control mechanism designed to maintain the status quo? Or is it a discipline your leadership shares that sparks imagination and empowers effective ministry? While your budget reveals the practical limitations of your ministry, it shouldn’t be a halter around its neck. Treat it as a collaborative effort to help executive pastors, finance teams, and ministry leadership across the board stay aligned.
Is financial planning helping you line up resources with your God-given calling as a ministry? Is it giving you the confidence and vision to invest in areas of impact? Or is your budget purely practical?
If you see budgeting as an exercise in maintaining your facilities, paying your people, and keeping the lights on, you need to think bigger. There is obviously nothing wrong with those things. (We encourage you to be generous with your staff and keep paying your bills!) But don’t stop there. Use your budget to dream, explore, and ask the Lord what he is financially equipping your ministry to do in 2026.
This is a common issue we see. A ministry exists to pay for its church building. That’s backwards. Church real estate is as functional as your finances. It is a practical asset that helps your ministry have a greater impact. The last thing it should be doing is cannibalizing your budget.
It’s important to be real with your answer here. It’s easy to lean on the “well, every building comes with a cost” excuse and move on. But how much of your budget is going toward facilities?
Here’s an even better question: How many of those facilities serve current ministry priorities? Understanding these questions can help you get a better picture of the long-term health of your church’s finances and facilities as you decide where to put your resources next year.
Another question on facilities: Do you have a clear lifecycle plan in place for your church spaces? Are you thinking ahead when it comes to things like maintenance, replacement, and capital improvements?
This is important. If you only invest in your building reactively during a crisis, you’re going to create budgeting conflicts. Ignoring facility lifecycles now only creates bigger problems in the future.
Start thinking about facility lifecycle budgeting. How can you plan ahead? Where can you activate your spaces to offset future costs that would otherwise hold your ministry back down the road?
Data is an unbiased, neutral source of truth that can help you with your budget. For instance, when King of Kings church was looking for where to invest in a multisite location, we used data from heat maps to identify where their people were most concentrated. That helped them invest in the best location.
Prayer should always come first, but don’t be afraid to incorporate data into your decision-making, too. Use it as an impartial influence on where you should focus your money in the year ahead as you make the hundreds of smaller financial decisions necessary to carry out God’s mission for your ministry.
Let’s rewrite the stigma around church budgets. They don’t have to be boring. Nor do they have to be purely practical.
Planning your budget gives you and your team a chance to pray big and dream boldly. It is an opportunity to see the resources God has given you and decide how you should invest them in His kingdom.
Remember, your budget should fund mission, not just maintenance. If you want support in vision casting and budgeting for the future, our team at Ministry Solutions Group can help. Reach out for a Free Analysis, and together, we can discover a clear path forward for your church in 2026.