Church building projects are expensive! I’m positive I’m “preaching to the choir” with that statement! But having led six major church expansion and construction projects during my four decades serving as a Lead Pastor, I faced that truth repeatedly. During those years, I developed a strategy to assist in lowering expenses for first my own church, and then other churches on their Furnishings, Fixtures and Equipment costs. Here are some key choices that Church Furniture Partner adheres to as a ministry which separate us from the norm and allows us to save churches money.

• We choose not to print a catalog. We could print one of course by selecting a couple hundred of our 200,000 plus furnishing options and placing them in a catalog. But printing catalogs and distributing them is a very expensive proposition and would result in our having to increase our prices to cover that expense.

• We choose not to incur advertising costs. Google Adwords, various magazines, bloggers, and others solicit us regularly to pay them to tell others about us. We could give them dollars to do so of course, but again the inevitable result would be we would have to pass those costs on to our church customers.

• We choose not to develop a large costly eCommerce website.  Placing online a couple hundred thousand distinct products and then maintaining such a site would mean hiring several employees. The pricing advantage we enjoy by choosing to be distinct in our operation is tremendous and gives us the ability to pass those savings on to our churches.

• We choose not to occupy any brick and mortar.  Buildings are expensive to own and operate and maintain. While a storefront can look nice in a marketing picture, incurring the expense of one would greatly inhibit our goal of saving churches money.

• We choose not to have employees.  All of our team members are either pastors who assist churches while still active in their respective ministries, or stay-at-home moms who do so from their homes.  Our approach utilizes cutting edge technology and ministry passion to save churches dollars.

The bottom line is we have refused to encumber our ministry with expenses that we would then have to pass to churches.  Our overhead costs consist of a few websites and a VOIP phone system. We rely mostly on word-of-mouth to spread the word about our unique ability to save churches dollars.  The church I pastored for almost three decades grew from 50 to 1700 over that time span in a town of 9,000 and looking back, most of that growth was the result of word-of-mouth.  We are committed to our ministry following that same pattern.

If your church is looking to save dollars on church furnishings, we encourage you to contact us soon.  And be watching for Part 2 of this article where we will share what we ARE ABLE to do through our ministry!