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Why do conversations about money still feel difficult in so many churches? In this episode of the Next Sunday podcast, Jim Shepard and Frank reflect on what has—and hasn’t—changed across more than three decades of church generosity work. The tools look different, but familiar pastoral questions remain. Together, they explore the discomfort surrounding money conversations, the importance of a pastor’s personal conviction, and the relationship between generosity and discipleship. They also consider how culture and consumerism shape the messages people hear about money throughout the week. For pastors shaping vision and leading its implementation, the conversation offers a reason to revisit how the church teaches, communicates, and equips its people. Listen, then bring one observation into a conversation with your team.

How can a church make giving easier to understand while staying clear about how gifts will be used? In this episode of Next Sunday, Jim and Frank explain the Generis one fund approach and the leadership work behind it. They discuss the difference between one giving invitation and the church’s responsibility to plan and allocate funds, why reporting matters to congregational trust, and how a clear invitation can help people who join the church after an initiative begins. The conversation also considers what changes when pastors can talk about generosity as part of discipleship, beyond a single project or campaign. For church leaders weighing their next season of ministry, it offers practical questions to consider before choosing an approach. Listen to the full conversation.

Sunday comes every seven days, even when a church is preparing for a major generosity initiative. So how much additional work should pastors, staff members, and lay leaders expect? In this episode of Next Sunday, Jim Sheppard and Frank Bealer explain why the answer depends on more than a standard workload estimate. They explore senior-pastor involvement, leadership structure, staff experience, hidden responsibilities, open positions, and the importance of choosing a point person with genuine capacity. They also address a commonly overlooked reality: the work does not end after the public phase. Continued communication and encouragement help people follow through and give new members of the church an opportunity to participate. Listen for a practical, honest conversation about preparing your team to carry an important initiative well.

Churches often focus their generosity efforts on the congregation. But what happens when the staff members responsible for leading those efforts are not personally participating? In this episode of the Next Sunday Podcast, Jim Sheppard and Frank Bealer explore why staff giving is more than an internal policy or financial matter. It affects leadership credibility, staff advocacy, and the broader culture surrounding generosity. The conversation also moves beyond expectations to pastoral care. Jim and Frank discuss reluctance, marital concerns, financial pressure, compensation, onboarding, and why staff giving should never be reduced to forced compliance. Listen for a candid and constructive conversation about helping the people closest to the mission understand, practice, and lead generosity with integrity.

This is episode 5 of 5 of the Next Sunday Podcast Summer Session: five focused conversations to help pastors and church leaders arrive at fall with a congregation of ready hearts. Download Beyond The Generosity Gap Workbook, a free guide designed to help you put these conversations into action before the season arrives. For God loves a cheerful giver. It is one of the most quoted lines in conversations about generosity, and one of the most misunderstood. In this final episode of the Next Sunday Summer Session, Jim Sheppard unpacks the Greek word behind "cheerful", hilaros, and reveals that it carries two co-equal meanings: joyful and ready. Paul uses the word ready five or six times in the verses immediately before that famous line. The point was never just happiness. It was preparation. Jim and Frank close the series with a direct challenge to pastors: stop apologizing for the offering moment. Stop managing reluctance. The goal is not to protect people from their wallets; they know how to do that better than you do. The goal is to form people into ready, eager, willing givers. And that formation work does not happen in September. It happens now.

This is episode 4 of 5 of the Next Sunday Podcast Summer Session: five focused conversations to help pastors and church leaders arrive at fall with a congregation of ready hearts. Download Beyond The Generosity Gap Workbook, a free guide designed to help you put these conversations into action before the season arrives. The data is encouraging. Gen Z's propensity to give is at or above that of Boomers. Their faith is growing. So why isn't their generosity keeping pace in most churches? In this episode, Jim Sheppard and Frank Bealer name the gap honestly and place the responsibility squarely where it belongs. Frank introduces the idea of "checkmatic giving," the way automated digital giving, while convenient, has quietly removed generosity from everyday family life and eliminated the natural discipleship moments that used to happen around the kitchen table. Jim traces the larger pattern: Boomers didn't disciple Gen X well in this area. Gen X didn't disciple Millennials. And now the gap has compounded into Gen Z. The good news is that their willingness is there. The question is whether the church will disciple that willingness before the window closes, and whether it will start building the formation pipeline for Gen Alpha before it is too late.

This is episode 3 of 5 of the Next Sunday Podcast Summer Session: five focused conversations to help pastors and church leaders arrive at fall with a congregation of ready hearts. Download Beyond The Generosity Gap Workbook, a free guide designed to help you put these conversations into action before the season arrives. Most churches treat their fall giving campaign, year-end giving, and new year launch as three separate events. In doing so, they exhaust their congregation, miss their best opportunities, and arrive at January wondering what happened. In this episode, Jim Sheppard and Frank Bealer make the case that September through February is one continuous discipleship rhythm, not three disconnected seasons. They unpack the theological difference between Cain's question and Abel's question as the frame for what truly transformational giving looks like, and show what it means to build a second-half narrative that carries people through each moment rather than resetting with every new push. They also land on what may be the most overlooked communication opportunity of the entire church year, the annual giving statement. Everybody opens it. Almost nobody uses it well. This episode shows what it looks like when you do.

This is episode 2 of 5 of the Next Sunday Podcast Summer Session: five focused conversations to help pastors and church leaders arrive at fall with a congregation of ready hearts. Download Beyond The Generosity Gap Workbook, a free guide designed to help you put these conversations into action before the season arrives. Most pastors sense it. Generosity feels harder to cultivate than it once did. But few can name exactly why. In this episode, Jim Sheppard and Frank Bealer bring the explanation to the surface. The environment that quietly reinforced giving for decades has shifted, and the formation gaps it was masking are now fully visible. Jim introduces the idea of false signals, the metrics that make a church look healthier than it actually is. Hitting the annual budget. A faithful older generation quietly carrying a disproportionate share of the weight. Attendance growing while generosity participation stays flat. Frank adds a challenge that cuts to the heart of it: getting really good at budgeting and forecasting is not the same as making disciples. The status quo is not working. And the summer is the right time to figure out the difference, before fall demands results you haven't prepared for.

This is episode 1 of 5 of the Next Sunday Podcast Summer Session: five focused conversations to help pastors and church leaders arrive at fall with a congregation of ready hearts. Download Beyond The Generosity Gap Workbook, a free guide designed to help you put these conversations into action before the season arrives. Before you diagnose your congregation's giving culture, there's a harder question to sit with first. In this opening episode of the Next Sunday Summer Session, Jim Sheppard and Frank Bealer make the case that the giving temperature of a congregation almost always reflects the spiritual and emotional temperature of its leader. A great strategy launched into unprepared hearts will run off like rain on hard ground. The real preparation begins with the pastor. Jim and Frank walk through what an unresolved relationship with money actually looks like in practice, the apologetic tone before a giving message, the constant rationalizing, the tendency to reach for a new strategy rather than do the harder interior work. They challenge pastors to identify where money still creates tension in their own lives, and why that unresolved tension will quietly limit everything they try to lead this fall. This episode is not a diagnosis of your congregation. It is an invitation to look in the mirror first.

High-capacity givers and major donors are often approached transactionally—by schools, charities, alma maters, museums, and causes that lead with one question: “How much can you give?” This episode explains why pastors must lead differently, and what your biggest givers wish you knew about shepherding them well. In this episode of The Next Sunday Podcast, hosts Jim Sheppard and Frank Bealer continue the conversation on segmentation and generosity by asking a practical question: once a church knows who its high-capacity givers are, what should pastors do—and how should they relate to these givers with integrity? Jim makes a clear point: don’t start with the money conversation. If a pastor leads with giving, it immediately signals a transactional posture—treating a person like a resource instead of someone to shepherd. Instead, Jim reframes high-capacity giving as a stewardship assignment—one many people are unprepared to carry, especially first-generation wealthy families or newer believers who suddenly find themselves with significant resources and little discipleship framework for what to do next. The episode also challenges assumptions about financial ease. Frank references a recent study noting that even households earning around $500,000 report feeling “paycheck to paycheck,” which exposes how common lifestyle pressure and financial tension can be, even at higher income levels. The takeaway: pastors shouldn’t assume complexity disappears with wealth.  A key leadership moment comes when pastors fear reaching out to a major giver who is pulling back, because they worry it will be perceived as “I’m only here for your money.” Jim pushes deeper: that fear often reveals the pastor’s own transactional mindset. Until that posture is corrected, the conversation will stay awkward, because the awkwardness is coming from the leader, not the giver. Finally, Jim and Frank emphasize that generosity is discipleship—progressive sanctification—and churches can hit a campaign goal while still failing their people spiritually. The call is to help people grow over time, strengthen the “muscle” of generosity, and steward the pastoral opportunity with clarity and courage.

Leadership transition and executive succession are hard, especially in the faith-based sector, where healthy succession stories can feel way too rare. This episode revisits a real transition one year later to unpack what actually makes succession work when the predecessor is still around and the organization keeps moving forward with trust and momentum. In this episode of The Next Sunday Podcast, hosts Jim Sheppard and Frank Bealer reflect on Generis’ CEO transition—15 months in—to share the behind-the-scenes realities that made it sustainable. They aren’t telling the story to brag. They’re telling it to prove it can go well, and to offer practical “nuggets” that might help leaders facing their own handoff. A key framework Jim shares is the relay race analogy: Succession requires baton release and baton embrace. The outgoing leader has to let go fully. The incoming leader has to take it and run. But the hidden work is what determines whether either side can do that well. Jim explains that before handing off leadership, he had to confront two internal deal-breakers that could have wrecked everything: identity and control. Frank highlights what many teams miss: the hard work is heart work. It’s the internal readiness, the posture, the humility, and the willingness to do deep work before the public announcement ever happens. They also get practical about what protects the new leader: building relational capital and trust long before the transitionleaders backing words with actions (not operating with “shadow leadership”)letting the successor lead meetings and make decisions without constant oversightgiving context without controlling outcomes—so the new leader can lead with freedom  A standout line from Jim reframes why he stepped out of the CEO role: “I’m not doing this so I can leave quicker. I’m doing it so I can stay longer.”  The episode closes with a challenge for leaders navigating succession: talk to trusted people, do the identity work, do the control work, and make sure you’re truly ready to release the baton—because the greatest gift you can give your successor is a clean handoff they can fully embrace.

Leadership problems don’t disappear when you rename them. But many leaders do exactly that—calling a problem a “tension” so they don’t have to deal with it. This episode exposes that pattern and offers a better path: accuracy, courage, and the willingness to turn the light on.  In this episode of The Next Sunday Podcast, hosts Jim Sheppard and Frank Bealer unpack Frank’s Substack post Misdiagnosed and the leadership drift it names: misdiagnosis becomes a sanctuary for the tired leader, the insecure leader, and the leader running low on emotional margin. The conversation starts with a well-known leadership idea: some things are a problem to solve, and some things are a tension to manage. Frank explains how that true principle often gets misused. When a leader is conflict-avoidant, exhausted, or protecting themselves emotionally, they may start declaring problems to be “tensions,” because tensions feel safer. They can be tolerated. They don’t require action. Jim and Frank explore what fuels that pattern: Fatigue and relentless paceConflict avoidance that intensifies when leaders are tired“Avoidance in wisdom’s clothing”Growth as a mask that makes misdiagnosis easier to ignoreFrank argues that a healthy leadership habit is learning to keep “new eyes” even when you are no longer new, and to ask, “If someone took my job tomorrow, where would they look that I should have been looking?”  They also get practical around one of the most common places misdiagnosis shows up: team dysfunction and staff issues. Jim makes the case that keeping the wrong fit around is not kindness. It is costly to the whole team and ultimately costly to the person who isn’t thriving. He even recommends generous severance, because the delay almost always costs more than the decision. This episode is a must-listen for pastors, nonprofit leaders, executive teams, and church boards who want to lead with clarity instead of convenience.

Church building campaigns and facility projects often get framed with one phrase that creates confusion fast: “We’re spending money on ourselves.” This episode explains why that language is theologically inaccurate, practically unhelpful, and unnecessarily apologetic—especially when the goal of church infrastructure is mission, not self-indulgence. In this episode of The Next Sunday Podcast, hosts Jim Sheppard and Frank Bealer unpack why pastors and leaders say this so often, even when their vision is clear and their motives are good. Jim argues the phrase usually comes from anxiety about money, inherited church tradition, and a leftover transactional mindset that makes leaders feel like they have to justify internal investment by attaching an external “offset.” Jim offers a cleaner, more faithful framework that brings everything into focus: We invest inside the walls so we can be more effective outside the walls. That shift changes the entire conversation. It clarifies that facilities are not inherently selfish. It reminds people that ministry happens both inside and outside the church walls. And it removes the subtle message that internal investment is spiritually suspect. They also talk about how “percentage give-back” language can unintentionally reinforce guilt: “We’re keeping most of this for ourselves, so we should give some away.” Jim argues it’s not wrong to have multiple goals in a generosity initiative. It’s the framing that gets sideways when it sounds like a penalty for building capacity.  A key biblical anchor comes from Nehemiah: the burden “out there” drove the project “in here.” That’s how church infrastructure should work. Leaders build and strengthen the base so the mission can expand. And when those projects are aligned to mission, clearly articulated, and rooted in real capacity needs, churches often respond with clarity and faith. Finally, Jim gives practical counsel for changing the culture: the senior pastor has to lead, staff need retraining, and it will take time. But the result is worth it, because when everyone understands “inside the walls, outside the walls,” the whole church can move forward with confidence.

“If we treat gifts differently, aren’t we treating people differently?” This episode brings clarity to that question with a simple principle that every church leader needs: all givers are the same, but not all gifts are the same. In this episode of The Next Sunday Podcast, hosts Jim Sheppard and Frank Bealer unpack why the widow and her two coins is not the only giving story Scripture celebrates—and why forming your entire generosity theology around that single moment can unintentionally limit discipleship and communication in the local church. Jim explains what often triggers this conversation in leadership rooms: a fear of favoritism. Pastors worry that gathering certain givers first, speaking differently to different groups, or acknowledging the impact of larger gifts will create division or compromise spiritual integrity. But Jim argues the issue is usually a misunderstanding of what Scripture means by favoritism—and an assumption that healthy segmentation is the same as special treatment. To reset the conversation, Jim points to three givers in Scripture with very different gifts: The widow and her two coinsMary’s lavish worship at Bethany, offering what may have been her dowryKing David’s giving in 1 Chronicles 29, a gift that—by modern valuation—could be measured in the billionsThe gifts are wildly different in magnitude and impact, but Scripture honors all three. And Jim offers a memorable summary that ties the stories together: The widow’s gift was magnanimous because of sacrifice. Mary’s gift was profound because of worship and devotion. David’s gift was transformational because of its scale and impact. Scripture honors all three, not because the gifts were equal, but because the givers were.  The episode also brings this into real church practice. Jim explains why gathering faithful givers first is not favoritism—it’s often reverse favoritism. These are the people asked to go first, sacrifice most, and set the pace so the whole church can move forward. And he offers a practical reminder: churches already differentiate people in many areas (like worship teams and leadership roles). Money just makes leaders feel nervous in a way other conversations don’t. This episode is a must-listen for pastors, executive pastors, elders, boards, and generosity teams who want clear biblical language and a healthier framework for honoring every giver while communicating with wisdom about the different impact gifts can have in the mission of the church.

Giving initiatives and generosity campaigns are like an X-ray: they reveal what’s already happening inside your church. Giving initiatives don’t cause fractures, they expose them. And that’s why giving initiatives can become one of the clearest diagnostic tools a church leader will ever experience. In this episode of The Next Sunday Podcast, hosts Jim Sheppard and Frank Bealer unpack a simple but powerful idea: giving initiatives are never really about money. They’re about people—trust, clarity, alignment, leadership health, and spiritual maturity. A generosity season surfaces what’s strong, what’s weak, what’s unified, and what’s fractured. The good stuff rises. The not-so-good stuff shows itself. Jim explains how this became obvious early in his work after several initiatives went well, then one didn’t. On the surface, the church looked healthy. The goal wasn’t unreasonable. The strategy was sound. But traction stalled. And that experience forced a deeper realization: when generosity doesn’t move, something underneath the surface usually needs attention. The giving initiative simply reveals it. Jim and Frank also address a common misconception: that a major generosity initiative can “reunite” or “revive” a church that’s already divided. A giving initiative won’t heal fractures. It will magnify them, because the church is forced into conversations about trust, vision, and commitment.  But there’s hope in the X-ray. Once you can see what’s real, leaders can finally address what needs to be strengthened. Jim describes the role of a campaign guide like a whitewater rafting guide: someone who has navigated these waters before and can help pastors avoid “dumb tax” mistakes other churches have already paid. When a church hits unexpected turbulence, the goal isn’t panic. The goal is perspective, intervention, and wise next steps.  This episode is a must-listen for pastors, executive leaders, and church teams who are considering a giving initiative, or who are already in one, and want to understand what generosity reveals, why it matters, and how to respond when the X-ray exposes cracks that need healing.