Church hands out cash and says, 'Bless it forward'

It backed $40,000 worth of kind acts

If you found an envelope of money on your car seat last week, or if someone anonymously paid for your lunch in the fast-food line, you might have been a beneficiary of the Bless Back Project.

Elevation Church in south Charlotte -- with no home of its own -- paid for $40,000 worth of kind acts around the city last week.

The church, celebrating services today as always on high school campuses, gave the equivalent of a typical Sunday collection back to its congregation last week.

When Pastor Steven Furtick instructed members to pluck from the collection bowls, filled with envelopes containing $5, $10, $20, $50 or $100, some people didn't believe it. One person at each of the five services even got an envelope with $1,000.

Members looked at Furtick as if to say, "What's the punch line?" he recalled. "Then the creative wheels started turning."

The money isn't to keep, Furtick told them. Instead, members were to go out and do something random for someone else.

Get inventive, he said, and tell us about it.

For Furtick, unleashing more than 2,000 members on an unsuspecting city, in an idea borrowed from a Cincinnati church, seemed a perfect match for Elevation. The Southern Baptist church worships in non-traditional ways. Before and after Furtick's sermons, the church's loud rock band plays praise music.

Elevation ranks eighth on a list of the fastest-growing churches in America compiled by Outreach magazine, which writes about "outreach-oriented" churches.

Now, examples of the church's Bless Back Project are filling its Web site, www.blessbackproject.com.

Some kicked in hundreds of their own dollars, or combined their envelopes with others for more impact.

One couple spent more than $400 of their own money to buy Wal-Mart gift cards for teenage moms. Another group of friends pooled envelopes to get $70 in groceries for a co-worker staying in a pay-by-the-week motel.

"Now we are ready for our next challenge," wrote one family, which kicked in its own money to send $160 to a woman with a sick husband. "Bring it on, Elevation. Let's DOMINATE."

Church, charity first

This isn't the way churches usually launch fundraisers, and Furtick wasn't initially sure his two-year-old church, which does not even have land or its own building, should kick off its first capital campaign with a mega-giveaway.

"I had to pray about that one for weeks," said Furtick, 27, who preaches from the auditorium stage at Providence and Butler high schools in jeans and close-cropped dyed blond hair. "It was a very difficult financial move for us to do."

The move also models his message to set aside money first to give to church and charity.

Furtick, from Moncks Corner, S.C., said he was inspired at 16 to start a church. He and his wife, Holly, live in Matthews with their 2-week-old son, Graham, named in honor of Billy Graham, and 3-year-old son, Elijah.

Previously, while in Shelby working for Crossroads Worldwide, an interdenominational ministry, Furtick invited seven other families to move to the south Charlotte region and start a church. The 13-member staff, about half comprised of the founding families, works out of a 6,000-square-foot office in the Lake Park section of Union County, said Larry Brey, who was part of one of the original families.

The first Sunday service in February 2006 had 121 people, Brey said.

"It's been nonstop explosive growth" ever since, said Brey, the church's leadership development pastor.

Eighty-five percent of the church's newcomers show up because someone invited them, said Brey, citing an Elevation Church survey done two months ago. In the early months, the church rarely drew anyone over 40. Then the high school-age students who were regulars brought their curious parents.

"Our church exists for the people who haven't been here yet," Brey said. It's for "people who have a sense of religion but who don't have a relationship" with a church.