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Memphis Church Gives $1K Each Week to Local Nonprofits

Brown Missionary Baptist Church
Photo courtesy of Baptist Press

MEMPHIS (BP) – Brown Missionary Baptist Church’s $1,000 weekly anonymous gift to area nonprofits has morphed into a partnership to train such groups for maximum impact and engender church-community cooperation.

It began in November 2020 with the church anonymously giving $1,000 to every nonprofit honored as a Community Changer in an outreach the church negotiated with local CBS affiliate WREG.

Brown Baptist gave more than $100,000 in the outreach before revealing its identity as the donor in November 2022, WREG reported. The church is continuing to give $1,000 to each group WREG recognizes in the weekly feature, Orr said.

“We didn’t want it to be about Brown, but just all of these other great organizations in the community,” Senior Pastor Bartholomew Orr told Baptist Press. “Sometimes if we’re not careful, it becomes about the organization rather than about the greater good.”

At the church that received $12.5 million in undesignated giving in 2022, according to the Annual Church Profile, Orr said the identity of the Community Changers donor was unknown even to Brown’s membership.

“Our own members didn’t know that we were the ones behind it, as part of our overall outreach that we were doing,” Orr said. But he revealed the church’s identity to the congregation to show members their “giving has been impactful over the last couple of years in this (COVID -19) pandemic, and (to tell members) we couldn’t have done what we’ve done without you.

“And then reveal it so that we can go to the next level as well.”

The next level is to work with Mission Increase, a national group headquartered in Portland, Ore., offering free training to help nonprofits operate effectively and to help churches and other nonprofits and parachurches work together to meet broader goals.

“We’re working now to actually bring Mission Increase to the area,” Orr said in January. “We’re doing this now so that all of the nonprofits in our area can benefit from a company that focuses in on how do you make nonprofits more evangelistic, as well as more equipped in building their donor base, and so forth.”

Scott Harris, a Brentwood (Tenn.) Baptist Church member and Mission Increase’s vice president of church and global engagement, is working with Orr to establish a Mission Increase chapter in west Tennessee. Mission Increase will station a coach in Memphis, Harris said, to train nonprofits in subjects including board governance, strategic planning and fundraising.

Instead of charging the nonprofits for the service, Mission Increase covers its costs through local funders including individuals, churches and foundations. Healthy community nonprofits are a benefit to Gospel outreach, Harris believes.