How to Engage the 70% of Church Members Who Don't Give Regularly

"What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open country, and go after the one that is lost, until he finds it?" — Luke 15:4 (ESV)

Read it again, slowly. Jesus left the ninety-nine to go after the one.

Now look at how most modern church giving strategy works. We pour every platform feature, every email sequence, every campaign cycle into the thirty percent who already give — optimizing the existing 30% for slightly larger gifts, slightly more frequent gifts, slightly better-tracked gifts. And we leave the seventy untouched in the pew, mostly because no tool we've had has ever known how to reach them.

Friend, this is backwards. Jesus did not preach the parable of the ninety-nine who already came home. He preached the parable of the one who hadn't. And in your congregation, the seventy is the one.

This post is a pastoral framework for reaching the 70% — the silent majority who sit in your services, love the church, but have not yet stepped into rhythmic, recurring giving.

How to engage non-givers at your church without making them feel like targets

The first move is a posture shift. The 70% are not "non-givers" in the sense of unwilling, hard-hearted, or rebellious. They are most often:

• People who give occasionally but cannot see a path to recurring
• People who would give if they knew what they could afford
• People carrying debt or anxiety they have never named
• People who tried to set up AutoGive once, watched it overdraft, and quietly cancelled
• New attenders who have not yet been discipled into generosity
• Faithful members in seasons of unemployment, illness, or transition

When you stop calling them "the unengaged" and start calling them "the not-yet-equipped," your strategy changes. You stop trying to extract a gift and start trying to equip a steward. Generosity follows discipleship. It does not lead it.

The 70% are not who you think they are

Here is something that may surprise you — and pastoring well requires us to sit with it.

Did you know that, on average, households earning over $70,000 a year give a smaller percentage of their income than households earning below it? This is one of the more uncomfortable findings in giving research, and it cuts against every assumption we tend to make from the pulpit. The seventy percent in your church who do not give regularly is not concentrated in your lowest-income members. It is spread across every income bracket, and often weighted toward the middle and upper households you would expect to be most generous.

Why? Because the weight of responsibility tends to increase with income. The household earning $70K-plus often has children to provide for, a mortgage or rent payment they did not have at 22, a car payment, student loans, childcare costs, retirement they have started to think about, and a thousand quiet financial decisions they are wrestling alone. They are not hard-hearted. They are carrying a load that nobody equipped them to carry well.

There is a name for what many of these members are quietly experiencing. The financial-content world has started calling it financial nihilism — the sense that the rules their parents played by no longer work, that home ownership is a fantasy, that retirement is a myth, and that the only rational response is to give up on stewardship entirely and find small moments of joy in spending. Voices like Graham Stephan in the personal-finance world have named this generational mood out loud. Your members are not immune to it. Many are quietly drowning in it.

Their parents, in many cases, bought a first house on what would today look like a minimum-wage income. The members in your pew today are working in leadership and still cannot get out of an apartment. The math has changed, and with it, the mood. Roughly half of American adults cannot cover a $1,000 emergency without borrowing — that is the world your seventy percent are stewarding inside.

When a member is in financial nihilism, the offering plate does not reach them. Sermons on tithing do not reach them. They have already concluded that nothing they do matters financially, so why give? The pastoral question is not how to pressure them — it is how to walk them out of the nihilism.

This is why we built Stablish the way we did. Not for the optimized giver who already tithes. For the member who loves the Lord but feels too late, too lost, or too defeated to even know where to start. The Money Map gives them a map. Giving Power gives them a number they did not know they had. Dynamic AutoGive gives them a way to commit without putting their family at risk. Together, these tools quietly disprove the lie that nothing they do matters — and recurring giving becomes one of the first acts of hope a member takes back from the nihilism.

If we are going to reach the seventy percent, we have to first see them clearly. Not as the unwilling. As the unequipped, the overburdened, and in many cases, the quietly hopeless. The Lord meets them in that place. Our job is to make sure the church does too.

Why your existing giving platform cannot reach them

Here is the structural reality. Every church giving platform on the market is designed for the donor who already gives. The user flows assume an active giver. The dashboards measure existing giver behavior. The features optimize existing giver retention.

None of them are built to engage someone who is not in the giving funnel at all. The 70% are not on the platform. They are in the pew. Asking the giving platform to grow them is like asking the cash register to grow the customer base.

This is exactly why we built Stablish as the engagement layer that lives in their pocket — alongside whatever giving platform you currently use, not in place of it. The 70% need a different kind of tool, in a different posture, doing a different job.

The shepherd's framework for reaching the 70%

Three pastoral moves, in order, that actually move the needle:

1. Lead with stewardship, not the offering

The 70% have been hearing offering sermons for years. The sermons did not move them — not because they are hard-hearted, but because the sermon answered a question they were not asking. They were not asking "how much should I give?" They were asking "what do I have, and how do I steward it?"

When you reframe your money teaching from giving to stewardship, the 70% lean in. The frame we use is the Money Map — four flows that organize a household's entire financial life. Generosity becomes one flow among four, taught from the foundation of Christ as the source of every dollar. Our piece on the stewardship-first path to generosity walks this through.

2. Equip them with a tool that lives in their pocket

Sunday is two hours. The 70% need discipleship in the other 166. Without an engagement layer in their pocket — surfacing their finances, calculating their Giving Power, nudging them toward small acts of stewardship through the week — Sunday morning sermons land in soil that is not prepared to hold them.

This is what the Stablish Stewardship App was built to do. It is a daily, in-pocket discipleship companion that meets members where they actually live their financial lives.

3. Make recurring giving safe to commit to

The 70% have watched static AutoGive overdraft accounts. They are not going to do that to the Lord. Until you give them a recurring gift model they can trust, they will not sign up. Dynamic AutoGive — the gift that adjusts or pauses based on real balance — solves this. Once the commitment is safe, the seventy begin to move.

The Scripture under the calling

"And he told them this parable: 'What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open country, and go after the one that is lost, until he finds it?'" — Luke 15:3-4 (ESV)

The shepherd does not go because the one is the most valuable sheep. The shepherd goes because the one is his. The 70% in your congregation are yours — sheep with names and stories and burdens, sitting through your services week after week, hoping someone will notice that they want to give but do not know how.

You can notice. You can equip them. The Lord will give the growth, as He always has. Our job is to leave the ninety-nine of strategy and go after the seventy that no platform has reached.

What changes when even a fraction of the 70% steps in

Three things shift the moment a fraction of your 70% becomes recurring givers — every one of them visible in your budget within a year:

1. Recurring giving baseline rises. Even small, sustained gifts from previously unengaged members begin to compound the 120% recurring lift into your church's annual income.
2. Variability drops. New consistent gifts from the 70% smooth out the offering line. Your team moves from reactive to plannable.
3. Discipleship deepens at the household level. As members steward, marriages improve, debt comes down, generosity rises — and the church sees the long-term fruit our companion piece on habits of generous churches describes.

A final word

The 70% are not your problem to solve. They are your flock to shepherd. They have been quietly waiting for someone in the church to notice that the silence is not rebellion — it is need. Most of them want to give. Most of them love the church. Most of them just need a tool that meets them where they are and a pastor who treats their financial life as part of their discipleship, not separate from it.

That is what Stablish is built to do. And that is the heart we hope it carries into your congregation.

If you would like to see how the Stablish Stewardship App reaches the 70% in your church — and what their first ninety days might look like — take a look here. We will walk you through it without a pitch. Just an honest look.

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