The Region We Can’t See: What Two Years of Narrative Budgeting Taught Me About Stewardship
By Rev. Robin Blakemore, Interim Regional Minister
A few months after we mailed our narrative budget, I walked into a congregation for Sunday worship. There, on the welcome table sat a well-worn copy of the booklet. A few weeks later I found another one pinned to a bulletin board. Then someone told me they kept theirs in the Bible they brought to church every week.
That was the moment I realized we hadn’t simply produced a better stewardship resource.
We had helped people see the Region.
For those of us serving in regional ministry, that may be one of our greatest stewardship challenges. Congregations can see the ministry happening in front of them. They know the pastor who visits the hospital, the volunteers who prepare Wednesday night meals, the youth sponsor who gives up a week of vacation for camp. They can point to the building, the food pantry, the preschool, the choir loft.
Regional ministry is different.
Much of our work happens between congregations rather than within them. We accompany churches through pastoral transitions. We coach leaders. We mediate conflict. We strengthen camps. We cultivate partnerships. We encourage clergy. We connect congregations that might otherwise never know one another.
We’re connective tissue.
And connective tissue is easy to overlook until you need it.
That reality shapes stewardship. People rarely invest deeply in ministry they don’t understand. The challenge isn’t that congregations don’t care about the Region. More often, they simply can’t see all that the Region is already doing. Our task is to tell that story faithfully.
For years, stewardship conversations have been burdened by the assumption that the real issue is money. We know the familiar script: budgets are tight, expenses are growing, everyone needs to do their fair share.
I don’t think that’s the deepest issue.
Stewardship isn’t primarily about convincing people to give. It’s about helping people recognize where God is already at work and inviting them to participate more deeply in that work. Before generosity becomes a financial decision, it is a theological one. People give because they can see a story they want to be part of.
That’s what led us to create our first narrative budget in Nebraska.
When I arrived, the Region already had faithful supporters through our Annual Fund and participation in the Christmas Offering. What seemed to be missing wasn’t another appeal—it was a shared understanding of what regional ministry actually accomplished. Our Regional Board had named strengthening relationships with congregations and individual donors as a priority, and a narrative budget seemed like the right place to begin. We hoped it would tell the story of what God was already doing through the Region and help people understand how their generosity supported ministry that often happened quietly and behind the scenes. More than anything, we hoped congregations would see themselves in that story.
The Hard Work Happens Before the Design
The hardest work wasn’t designing the booklet. It was learning to describe our ministry honestly.
Our financial leaders reallocated the entire line-item budget, Center by Center—the Regional Church, Church Leadership, Church Development, and Church in Mission. That meant a time study for every staff member, including me, tracking how our hours actually broke down. Even a Sunday visit to a congregation required a judgment call. Was it Regional Church because I preached? Or Church Development because I stayed afterward to meet with congregational leaders?
We decided the purpose of the visit determined its Center. That was the right decision for us. It may not be the right decision for another Region. The formula matters less than the honesty of asking the question.
None of this felt much like ministry while we were doing it. It felt like accounting—detailed work that falls hardest on people who would rather be with congregations than tracking their own hours. But the discipline mattered. It forced us to name our ministry instead of assuming we understood it.
Once we could attach percentages and dollar amounts to each Center, we could create a pie chart that communicated our ministry at a glance. More importantly, the process helped us understand our own ministry more clearly. We couldn’t tell the story well until we had first learned to tell it to ourselves.
Turning Numbers into Ministry
Regional budgets are administratively heavy by nature. Salaries, Pension Fund contributions, mileage, insurance—none of those line items immediately look like ministry, even though they make ministry possible every day.
The narrative budget became the place where we translated those numbers into stories. We shared photographs, celebrated ministries, highlighted partnerships, and reminded congregations that their own ministries were woven together with the work of churches across Nebraska. We also included endowments, designated gifts, and partner ministries so people could see the broader picture of God’s work through the Region.
We discovered that how you tell a story is part of the story. We chose to produce something people would want to keep—a well-designed booklet, printed in full color on quality paper through a local print shop. We wanted to create something worthy of the story we were telling.
What Year Two Taught Us
The first year, we introduced the narrative budget as part of our Annual Fund. It gave individual donors a clearer picture of the ministry they were supporting and became a new way of telling the Region’s story.
In the second year, we realized that story belonged in another place as well. Our congregations weren’t seeing the narrative budget because they don’t receive Annual Fund materials. So when we prepared our Christmas Offering resources, we included copies of the narrative budget along with a personal note from a member of the Regional Board thanking each congregation for one specific way they had engaged in ministry during the year.
Giving has increased. I can’t say with certainty that the narrative budget was a factor, but I do know it helped congregations and individuals see more clearly what their shared ministry through the Region made possible. It is a reminder that stewardship is built on gratitude long before it is expressed through generosity.
Finding Ourselves in the Story
Two years in, our giving has grown modestly. I’m grateful for that.
But that’s not the measure of success I think about most often.
I think about walking into congregations months later and finding copies of that little booklet still sitting on Narthex tables, pinned on a bulletin board, even carried inside someone’s Bible.
People kept it.
Not because of the photography or the pie charts or the numbers.
I think they kept it because they could finally see the connections. They could recognize that the ministry of their congregation wasn’t isolated. It was woven together with dozens of other congregations across Nebraska through relationships, shared mission, leadership, and care.
I used to think our challenge in regional ministry was convincing people to support the Region.
I don’t think that anymore.
I think our challenge is helping people recognize that they already belong to something larger than their own congregation. A narrative budget didn’t create that reality. It simply helped us tell the truth about it.
Perhaps that’s what stewardship has always been.
Helping people see the community God is already creating among us.
Helping people see the connections that have been there all along.
And when people recognize themselves within that larger story, generosity becomes less about obligation and more about joyful participation in God’s work.