Christian Legacy encourages more churches to promote leaving a legacy
Howard Lake | 19 October 2015 | News
Christian Legacy Week gets underway today with a consortium of Christian charities encouraging churches to talk more about legacy giving.
Christian Legacy is a consortium of Christian charities, including Care for the Family, the Bible Society, Church Mission Society, the TLG, Livability and Stewardship. Its annual Christian Legacy Week this year runs from 19-25 October.
It is offering resources to help Church leaders and small groups to talk about legacy gifts.
Research last month for the consortium found that 45% of Christians plan to leave a gift to a church or charity in their will. However, just 5% of Christians saw legacy giving as an important way to impact they world positively after their death.
The broader charity coalition Remember a Charity have found a similar divergence between support for leaving a charitable gift in a legacy and the number of people that actually do: 35% of people questioned say they would, but just 7% do so.
The research was carried out by Christian Research amongst its online community of nearly 17,000 practising Christians in the UK. It revealed, for example, that single people were far more likely to view leaving a gift to a Christian charity or church as important compared to married people.
Paul Chenery, from Christian charity TLG, and part of the Christian Legacy consortium, said:
“Legacy gifts play such an important role in ensuring the fantastic work of charities and churches continues. However many Christians have never considered leaving a gift in their will.
“Death and legacy gifts should not be a taboo subject for Christians. That’s why this Christian Legacy Week we are excited to be raising awareness of the issue and providing resources to get Christians talking about it. A gift in your will can powerfully impact future generations and bring healing and hope to a broken world.”
Church of England video
The Church of England has created a video to promote legacy giving to churches. John Preston, the National Stewardship and Resources Officer at the Church of England explained:
Advertisement
“The call to Christian stewardship doesn’t just apply to our church and charitable giving – we’re called to be generous in all our giving throughout life and at the end of life. I commend Christian Legacy’s efforts to raise the important opportunity to give through our wills.”
[youtube height=”450″ width=”800″]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_e02Fh4XB4[/youtube]
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.