Dream Again: A Church’s Journey from Debt to Deep Impact with Mike Winger

Thanks for joining us at the unSeminary podcast. Today we’re talking with Mike Winger, Executive Pastor at Mosaic Christian Church in the Baltimore-Washington area.

What does it take to launch a bold new vision while carrying the weight of financial obstacles? Tune in as Mike unpacks the multi-year process that led to Mosaic’s Unlimited campaign—one that wasn’t about buildings, but about unleashing ministry by removing financial barriers and reigniting the church’s collective imagination.

• See the community with fresh eyes. // Mosaic’s transformative journey began with a simple question: What would it look like if Maryland resembled heaven? The team began viewing their community with fresh eyes, noticing the stark contrast between wealth and poverty—even in their own backyard. Mike and Lead Pastor Jonathan Moynihan were stirred by the suffering happening along Route One, an area plagued by human trafficking and hourly motels. Their conversations led to a renewed vision of spiritual and physical restoration in their region.
• Vision first, then strategy. // Mike’s role as Executive Pastor is to turn vision into action. While Jonathan cast a grand vision, Mike focused on the how. They reverse-engineered a plan by identifying bottlenecks and brainstorming long-term steps to remove them—eventually deciding to launch a financial campaign. But unlike traditional efforts tied to buildings or facilities, this campaign was about removing the “weighted vest” of debt to unlock greater impact.
• Prayer walks, not just planned meetings. // Before casting the vision to the church, the team engaged in prayer walks and “vision tours” through the affected neighborhoods. They asked God to open their eyes and hearts, and invited staff and volunteers to see the problem up close. The campaign’s purpose became clear: not just to raise funds, but to inspire spiritual growth and collective dreaming.
• The vision is more important than the campaign. // Generosity campaigns aren’t about raising money for money’s sake. They’re about reaching more people with the gospel. Like past campaigns that helped Mosaic, this effort was merely a tool to advance the mission. Teaching from Jesus’ example, Mike explained that God could have provided everything miraculously—but He invites people to be part of the story through generosity.
• Corporate goals and individual goals. // Mosaic encouraged everyone to dream both corporately and personally. The church asked, “What dream has God placed in your life?” and “What blocks have you allowed in your life that you want God to open up?” As people considered giving, Mike challenged them to see their gifts as spiritual steps representing their faith in God to move in their lives, not just financial contributions.
• Results and reinvestment. // Though not tied to a building or campus expansion, Mosaic’s Unlimited campaign raised over $8.5 million in pledges—well above expectations. Just eight months into the 25-month campaign, the church had already received $4.4 million. Mosaic committed to giving 10% of all campaign donations to partner with 10:12 Sports, a Christian organization mentoring underprivileged youth in West Baltimore. The funds will help renovate space for them to further this work.
• A Generosity Guide to rally everyone. // To keep the whole church aligned, Mosaic created a comprehensive campaign guide integrating sermons, devotionals, small group resources, and personal reflection tools. The church paused all other ministries and aligned every group to journey together. The guide provided a day-by-day roadmap and gave group leaders materials to help people connect their personal timelines with the broader vision of the church.

Visit Mosaic Christian at mosaicchristian.org. Plus, check out their campaign website and download their generosity guide here.

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Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: Risepointe

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Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Hey friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. Really looking forward to today’s conversation – this is to be a great one. I know it’s going to be helpful and challenging. It’s the kind of thing we should be leaning in on. Excited to have Mike Winger with us. He is the executive pastor at a fantastic church in the Baltimore, Washington, D.C. area called Mosaic Christian. They were started in 2008, and it has consistently been one of the fastest growing churches in the country. Mike, super glad to have you on the show. Welcome.

Mike Winger — Thank you. It’s an honor to be here. Really pumped.

Rich Birch — Why don’t you kind of tell us a little bit about Mosaic and maybe the impact you’re experiencing as a church? And also, how does, ah you know, what’s the scale, the scope of executive pastor? I know it looks different at every church. And so it’s always good to kind of hear how different people have sliced up that role.

Mike Winger — Yeah, so like you said, we were started in 2008, so we’re like 16 going on 17. And like our vision statement is that we want to be a church for people who don’t go to church. So everything that we do needs to be contextualized for someone who has never stepped foot in a church before.

Mike Winger — And that’s really important to us. And so we like I said, we we we’ve kind of gone through the journey of like meeting in a movie theater, then going through different spaces. And now it’s just been awesome to see what God’s doing.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Mike Winger — My role has shifted every single year. I think being on staff from being like the junk drawer, I came on staff and I was the junk drawer person.

Rich Birch — The junk drawer.

Mike Winger — Yes, I had to do like facilities, students, missions, the office and all the things.

Rich Birch — That’s hilarious.

Mike Winger — So then I got more focused with creative arts.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Mike Winger — And now I’m back to the junk drawer position of like the executive pastor role because everything just kind of comes back to me. So I’ve seen God kind of use every single step on the chapter of my existence here at Mosaic and it’s all come full circle at this point.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s amazing. I love that. I’ve never heard the executive pastor role referred to as the junk drawer. I might steal that. I might steal that, Mike.

Mike Winger — It’s so true.

Rich Birch — That’s true. It’s true, yep.

Mike Winger — Because I’ll go from like a budget meeting to like a pastoral care to something else. I’m like, you got to switch your lines all the time.

Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s that’s true. I’ve served for years in that role and it it does have that feeling of like, it’s like constantly shifting gears and trying to think about, okay, you know and has a lot of that. Obviously, that’s why we call it stuff they didn’t teach in seminary because there’s lots of times you’re like, I never thought I’d be dealing with this in church world, but here it is.

Mike Winger — Oh yeah.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s great.

Mike Winger — Oh yeah.

Rich Birch — Well, Mosaic’s a fantastic church, prevailing church over an extended period of time. It’s always been about making an impact. But I kind of want to bring us up to speed. You know, you’ve talked a little bit about something, there was something stirring in your team that you needed to, you know, realize, hey, we’ve got to maybe change some things, think about the next level, think about where we’re going next. Kind of bring us up to speed on that part of the conversation.

Mike Winger — Yeah, so back in ’22, we went through a pastoral lead change. So our founding pastor stepped down, went back to his home church. And then our new pastor, who was on staff with me for the previous 10 years, his name Jonathan Moynihan. So we were serving together for a long time and we’re both born and raised like in the area. So we’re from Baltimore. We didn’t parachute here. So like we know Baltimore because it’s in our DNA.

Mike Winger — And so we live in a very wealthy area, part of the country, sandwiched right in between Baltimore and DC, but like it’s the haves and the have nots. And it’s not even just the case that’s like the inner city of Baltimore is the have nots. It’s like in our backyard here, outside of the city as well. And so as we’ve continued to want to like make an impact in the lives of people spiritually, like that’s the main thing. The win is when someone gets in the tub and gets baptized.

Mike Winger — But we also didn’t want to turn a blind eye to like, the plight that was going on down the street where there’s hourly motels where human trafficking, sex trafficking, and everything is going on down there. So was like, we’ve started asking questions. What would it look like for Maryland to look like heaven?

Rich Birch — So good.

Mike Winger — And asking those questions, seeing our community with fresh eyes, what would it look like? How can we make a bigger impact? So that just started a lot of conversations between Jonathan and myself. And he did a staff retreat. This was all like one of his sessions.

Mike Winger — So then I come back to him and I’m like, hey, if you’re really about that, we need to have like some deeper conversations to make that possible because you have really big, grandiose ideas. But where I come into play is like, how can I make those happen? So he sets the vision and um my job is to figure how are we going to get there? And then that comes with dollar signs and all of that.

Mike Winger — So that kind of got us on this journey to say, Hey, if we have a vision, what’s the bottleneck to this vision? How can I open it up? And so that’s when I started pitching to him the idea of doing a financial campaign. But that was still two years in the making before we would even launch anything like this to accomplish what we want to do long-term in our community.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love that. I love the, well, there’s there’s a ton there to unpack, but I love this idea that, well, first of all, there’s a tool, a video that you guys have produced that caught my attention because right from the beginning, I think the opening line of the video is, you’ve probably all thought about leaving Maryland sometime, right?

Mike Winger — Oh yeah.

Rich Birch — And which I was like, what? Like, what a way to to lead out. Let’s kind of stick on this idea just for a little bit around, let’s make Maryland look like heaven. When you were casting that, like kind of before we got to the campaign, as that was kind of bubbling around, what was it that had you thinking like, oh my goodness, this is this is a big deal. This isn’t just like, oh, we’re going to rebrand some stuff. Like what what kind of led you to that thought?

Mike Winger — Yeah. So I would say a lot, Jonathan’s very passionate about leading our church and growing up spiritual muscle. That was definitely like atrophied, the spiritual muscle prayer. So we even just started doing like prayer walks and vision tours up and down what we call route one, where a lot of those hourly motels are. So just getting our people, our staff, our volunteers, people that call Mosaic home around, the what’s going on in our community to get them to see the problem.

Mike Winger — And we needed them to feel it, even before we even publicly talked about how can we be a part of the solution. So we just ask God to like open our eyes to these problems and just see them, and do what we could at the time, the best that we could to serve those within our own reach. But we just tried to say, God, what’s what open our eyes beyond just our own four walls.

Rich Birch — I love that. That’s good. You know, this idea of getting our people engaged, starting with prayer, I think this is fantastic. So then bring us a little bit farther along. You know, I think we’ve all been there or if you’re in the executive pastor seat, we’ve been in that conversation with our lead pastor where it’s like, Oh my goodness. Like that, like what you can just hear the dollar signs in your head start going off. But I think some people could at that moment try to pull back, but you’ve chosen to lean in and say, no, let’s actually look at that. Talk, take us through that conversation. What did that look like?

Mike Winger — Yeah. So as we were like praying through it, we’re like, what would it look like for us to buy one of these hotels and turn it into like a dream center? And in my head, I’m like, dollar signs are just going up and up and up. But I’m in the position where I’m not trying to like stifle vision. Like the how can totally stifle the wow. So I’m just like embracing this wow mindset.

Mike Winger — And I’m thinking, man, wouldn’t it be awesome if we did have a dream center where we can start empowering people with job job training? and teaching people how to manage money and to bring families together instead of splitting them apart. Like, what would it look like for this building that was cause for division and actually have it be used to bring unity instead?

Rich Birch — Wow.

Mike Winger — And so just asking, having that long term vision, what would what would need to be true of us in order to make that happen? And so if we just started with the end in mind, with that clear vision of what could be, then we could reverse engineer and say, well, this needs happen and that needs to happen and that needs to happen.

Mike Winger — So then our, Jonathan and I, the lead pastor, we just started asking the questions. Well, this needs to be true. This needs to be… And we started reverse engineering. And this isn’t like six months of like what needs to be true in six months. This might be what needs to be true in 25 years.

Rich Birch — Right. That’s good. Now what, what, so love that. I think we can jump so quickly to the, the campaign. We can jump to like, okay, let’s get into the tactics…

Mike Winger — Yeah.

Rich Birch — …and there’s, we feel that rush, but I like that you slowed down and say, no, like, let’s, we gotta be really, it’s what the vision is more important than the campaign.

Mike Winger — Yeah.

Rich Birch — And it’s really easy for those to get confused. How did you keep the campaign from becoming preeminent rather than the vision being preeminent? What did that look like for you?

Mike Winger — Yeah. So we’ve done many campaigns in our history. And so when I started gathering a team of people, the campaign team, I just called it quick timeout when we started like, giving out the task and the roles and all of that. And I did a reverse, I said, what was Greater for? And they said, oh, that was to get us into a building. And I said, what was whatever the other campaign name was?

Mike Winger — And it was, oh, it’s to get us out of the movie theater. And so then I I called the timeout. I said, we need to readjust our mindset around those. Those were all tools. All of these campaigns were to reach more people. It wasn’t to get a building. It wasn’t to get out of the theater. We wanted to reach more people. We thought that getting out of the theater…

Rich Birch — Right.

Mike Winger — …or we thought that a permanent 24 seven space would be the best tool for us to reach people. So I said from the jump with this campaign, we need to teach people that we want to continue to reach more people. And so we’re going to do the campaign in order to reach people.

Mike Winger — And so we we kind told the story of like Jesus, has he’s all powerful. He has everything at his fingertips. He could have looked at the dirt or sand and said, become money. And he had some money to go do his ministry…

Rich Birch — Right.

Mike Winger — …but he didn’t. He actually included women to fund his ministry, his gospel preaching tour that him and his buddies were going to go on. And he invited people to go in through generosity in order to enable him to go preach the gospel and do his ministry. He didn’t just say, “sand become money”.

Mike Winger — So we would try to, how can we position ourselves to say, hey, we want to continue our ministry and ask God to do more. And we’re going to show him that we mean what we say through our actions, through a campaign.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. Why I love that focus of, you know, the engaging people is a part of what he wants to do. It’s actually, you know, he could just write in your case an $8 million dollar check and just give it to you. Or he could engage a whole bunch of people to be involved. And I remember and last year, I got a call from a donor who had a very large sum of money and they could just solve a problem for their church.

Rich Birch — And he was like, well, do you think I should give that money to church? I was like, well, you got to wrestle that with the Lord. But I said, if you’re asking me, I would say no, like, don’t just solve the problem.

Rich Birch — Come alongside the church, find a way to like, what if, what if there was a maybe God’s got an even bigger dream for the church and you’re just one piece of that puzzle. And, you know, ask this bigger question to stay focused on, Hey, what is the vision of the church? Not just like, Hey, we were trying to do this tactic.

Rich Birch — What practical steps did you take to kind of, to both craft and then clearly communicate this narrative to keep your people focused on the bigger thing rather than just giving, what did that look like?

Mike Winger — Yeah. So there’s the aspect of like the corporate goal, but also the individual goal. So the individual goal is going to feed into the corporate goal.

Mike Winger — And so we really try to say like, we have a problem as a church. We want to reach more people, but we have this debt that’s on our hand that we’re going to apply the campaigns for. But then we try to twist the story and make it like…let me start over.

Mike Winger — We were saying like, what would it look like for us to dream again as a church? We kept on going to the dream analogy. And so we’re trying to open up, but then we went back to the individual: what would look for you to dream in your own life? Like what is being, what, what blocks have you allowed in your life that you want God to open up?

Rich Birch —That’s good. That’s good.

Mike Winger — And so we started hearing stories like on the individual level what people sacrifice would be. And it’s not just a dollar amount that they’re giving to so the church can accomplish a goal or reach a vision. But it’s saying, Hey, God, I’m asking for you to do something in my own life. And I’m showing you with my hands, with my wallet that I want you to do something through it. So there’s tons of stories of people sacrifice that really hit. And that is like the culmination, the collaboration of, of, of the corporate campaign.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. Well, let’s jump ahead to ah the results side. How are you, you know, so where are we at in the process? How are you feeling that’s gone, um you know, on both sides, both the ability to raise the resources that you’re hoping to raise and then also the engagement with individuals, you know, people actually taking this more than, hey, this is a financial thing. It’s like, this is ah an opportunity to dream of what God wants to do in my life.

Mike Winger — Yeah, so ah the people responded so well to this, we were really kind of blown away. The campaign that we did, ah our coach called it the phantom campaign because we weren’t doing a campus. We weren’t doing a new building. We already had that. We had enough space. But we weren’t we felt like we were running a marathon with a weighted vest. And we were like, what if we could run this marathon without this weighted vest? And our weighted vest was the debt.

Mike Winger — And we could continue to ministry as a way we knew how to do it and keep going. But we said, what if God wants to do something a little bit more, but the thing that’s standing in the way is our own selfishness and not doing a campaign. So I just wanted to ask the church, what would it look like for all of us to sacrifice and see how they responded.

Mike Winger — And they coached us through, like they were saying for a 25-month campaign, you could probably expect 3 to 6 million above and beyond like normal giving. And so we did the campaign series and at the end, our church committed almost $8.5 million dollars.

Rich Birch — Wow. That’s amazing. Praise God. That’s incredible.

Mike Winger — So that was in October. It was unbelievable.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s incredible.

Mike Winger — Like we were really, really, really, really shocked. And so that was October. So we’re about um seven or eight months into the 25 months. And so we’ve, people have already given 4.4 million.

Rich Birch — Wow. Wow.

Mike Winger — It’s unbelievable.

Rich Birch — That’s amazing.

Mike Winger — And so to really to show that we wanted to because we didn’t want the campaign even to just be about what’s coming in to like pay off debt.

Rich Birch — Right.

Mike Winger — Like we really fought hard, because we’re not like anti-debt. Like we may need to go into debt in the future. But to really say like, hey, we want to make a difference in our community in the future, but we want to make a difference in the community now. So we are taking 10% of what’s coming into this campaign and we’re partnering with an organization called 10:12 Sports.

Mike Winger — It’s a Christian organization that serves underprivileged youth in West Baltimore, primarily men who grow up in like fatherless situations and they use sports to reach out to this community, whether it be football, basketball, whatever. And they do memory verses, they do sports, all the things.

Mike Winger — And so we’re coming alongside of them because they were operating out of the the the president of that organization they were operating out of his basement.

Rich Birch — Oh, wow.

Mike Winger — And so they were actually able to buy three row homes across from where they do ministry because there’s so many vacant row homes in Baltimore, so you can buy them for like a thousand bucks. But they didn’t have the money to do any renovations. So we committed to give 10% of the overall of the campaign to them. So we’re going to renovate and just come alongside and help them run further and faster than what they could do on their own. And we want to prop them up to be the heroes in the community and make a difference. And so, like I said, we want to make a difference in 25 years, but we also want to make a difference this year.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s amazing. What do you have a sense of, and this may be unfair. I didn’t tell I was going to ask you this question, a percentage of the church that participated or like any of that to get a sense of the, the depth of the, you know, the engagement.

Mike Winger — Oh yeah. So it’s all written down. I’m so bad remembering the stats off the top of my head, but it’s it’s it was…

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s fine. No, no, that’s fine.

Mike Winger —…it was pretty high. I’m gonna see if I can find it after keep talking.

Rich Birch — Yeah, no, that’s great. That’s…

Mike Winger — But it was it was a it was ah it was a large amount of people. Like I look at it in terms of family units that are giving.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Mike Winger — And so we had 557 family units commit.

Rich Birch — That’s great. That’s great. That’s amazing. Dude, that’s incredible. That’s, ah yeah, that’s that’s great to hear and great to see, you know, what God’s using to kind of push this forward. That’s that’s amazing.

Rich Birch — Now, I’m sure, so that’s all the good news, but, you know, campaigns do get resistance.

Mike Winger — Yeah.

Rich Birch — There is the like, why are we doing this? It’s not all just, you know, hear we love the punchline, but there’s always usually some stuff we’ve got to push through there. What were some of the objections you or fears you heard from people? How’d you address them? What does that look look like? You know, how did you deal with that side of the equation?

Mike Winger — Yeah. So when we were doing this for a year prior, we knew that we were doing this in October of going into November of 2024. So in our nation’s history, that’s election time.

Rich Birch — Yes. Yes.

Mike Winger — And we live in like Washington, DC.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Mike Winger — Like it’s like the world news is our local news.

Rich Birch — It is going to be it. Love it.

Mike Winger — And so we, we, we had some people advise like, you don’t know, like we, maybe we shouldn’t do it. You probably not a wise time to do a campaign. And we heard that. And we just said, what if we want to tell a better story than the typical narrative of people being anxious about something that really can’t control outside of their one vote. But what if we can actually cast the vision to our church that doing it during the campaign to actually make a bigger difference is going to be the perfect time to do it. And people responded to that.

Mike Winger — So that was kind of one early on. Should we do this campaign during an election season? And then there’s always people that are going to ask questions like, is this the best time to do it because, you know, the economy.

Rich Birch — Right, right.

Mike Winger — But like, what does that even mean?

Rich Birch — Yes.

Mike Winger — Who can actually really even say what the economy is anymore?

Rich Birch — Right.

Mike Winger — But like, so we kind of joked about that. We heard some people say, well, we just did one of these like eight years ago. Should we be doing it again? And I’m like, well, we’ve had so much turnover in our church.

Rich Birch — Right.

Mike Winger — There’s probably only 25% of our church who’ve actually even been through one.

Rich Birch — Right. Right.

Mike Winger — So we just coached a lot of people through it. And we had so many great conversations with people. And I could stand in front of people in integrity and say like, hey, if you and your spouse, because I would meet with people individually. And I was like, if you and spouse are at odds about like what the total amount should be, give the lesser amount.

Rich Birch — Wow.

Mike Winger — I’m not after your, I’m not after your money here.

Rich Birch — Right. Yes.

Mike Winger — Like, I want to know like, what’s the heart story? What’s the sacrifice story that the money is representative of?

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Mike Winger — And so we constantly had those conversations like what, okay, tell me the dollar amount, but I want to know what are you trusting God what is this number representing?

Mike Winger — And so we’d had constant conversations with people. There was one single woman who her husband left her many years ago and I had a conversation with her and she just wanted to like write a bigger check, but the man who helps with her finances to keep her organized was kind of, he’s not a Christian and was a little leery about like saying you should give X amount.

Mike Winger — I said, you know what? I’m going to tell you to give even lesser than what he said, because I don’t know what kind of influence you’re going to have in his life. But if he hears that a church said, take even less, maybe that’s going to be an in for him to trust the church.

Mike Winger — And so my mindset from the jump was just like, Hey, I’m going to trust God for the end results. And I’m just going to just tell people to like, act in integrity with what they’re going to do. And like, let’s hear the stories of trust that people are going to be building through this experience.

Rich Birch — I love that. I want to underline what you said there. I think, my experience has been when we come up against these opportunities that our mindset as leaders is so important and how we approach people is so important. And um if we say this isn’t about just trying to get money out of you, but then all the signals we give them are about just getting money out of them…

Mike Winger — Yeah.

Rich Birch — …people read that from a mile away, right?

Mike Winger — Yeah.

Rich Birch — And we’re asking them to take a faith step financially, but we’re also taking a faith step and we have to exercise exactly what the kind of thing you’re saying. Like, hey, maybe you should take, maybe give the lesser number like that. I just love that. I just want to honor you for that. I think that’s fantastic.

Rich Birch — The other part I want to underline for folks that you’ve just kind of rolled over, ah which makes sense because it’s it’s your lived experience, is the amount of time that this campaign has taken from like the initial conversation through to the kind of whatever the big pledge date was. That’s like, that was like a couple years of discussion, right?

Mike Winger — Yeah.

Rich Birch — Talk us through that piece of it. Cause I feel like sometimes there are churches that feel the pressure of like, we got to solve this now. But it’s like, that’s, if you’re feeling that pressure now, you’re probably too late. Like, you know, we you’ve got to start way out. Talk us through the kind of timeline, you know, how long did it take to work through it all? Get it put together, that kind of thing.

Mike Winger — Yeah, so I remember being on the golf course with John and we were probably on like hole four or five. And I said, hey, like you’re just coming back from your study break. I’ve been doing some planning, love forecasting three years in advance. But do you remember when you said that you want to make an impact on Route One? And what if we had a dream center? What if we could change lives and all that? I was like, if you’re really about it, here’s what I think we need to do. We had that conversation probably in like June of ’23.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Mike Winger — Actually, probably even before that…

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Mike Winger — …because we we pitched to our our board of, hey, we feel like this is where God’s leading us. Will you join us in prayer? So we pitched it to them in May of ’23. So John and I talked before that. We didn’t even make a decision as a board to move forward with this until September. So we gave our board of overseers…

Rich Birch — Yeah, lots of time.

Mike Winger — …a full summer to just pray and feel like, is this is the is the soil right? God, are you prompting, or is this just me coming up with an idea, saying that we should run after it? So we I did the due diligence to come up with a full outline of here’s the steps we would take. We’re going to pause and commit this to you. And if you we all come back together in September and say, yeah, we should move forward, then we will. That was still a year out from even executing the five week series.

Rich Birch — Right.

Mike Winger — So we were way far in advance of like prayers. We’re going to coat this thing in prayer. And then we’re going to start working in September through the next year to make that campaign actually happen.

Mike Winger — So this was a really like a two, two and half year process…

Rich Birch — Right.

Mike Winger — …before we even get to the 25 months…

Rich Birch — Right. Yeah.

Mike Winger — …of actually living in sacrifice.

Rich Birch — Yeah. That’s, that’s pre the 25-month countdown.

Mike Winger — Exactly.

Rich Birch — So yeah, in the end it’s a four or five year process, you know, but from, from that golf course all the way through. Yeah. And I, I highlight that, listeners, because um you know, this takes time. And you know, there are, you know, there’s a multiplicity of steps before the public phase and, you know, you know, they’re, they’re everything from, you know, all the private conversations all the way up through this. It takes time. You cannot, you know, had a friend of mine said the bigger the plane, you know, the longer the runway, it just takes time. It takes, it you know, you can’t just do it overnight. It’s not the kind of thing you can wake up tomorrow and say, Hey, let’s raise $8 million dollars. It’s not going to happen.

Mike Winger — Yeah.

Rich Birch — You’ve given us your generosity guide. This looks fantastic. In fact, I would, we’ll just link to this in the show notes, but this is a great kind of inside look to the campaign and to the at least the public facing side of it. Talk us through this. Give us a sense of of this document. How might it be helpful for someone else who who’s been thinking about these kinds of issues?

Mike Winger — Yeah. So from my experience of participating and leading other campaigns that we’ve gone through, one of my critiques has been, I hate handouts and getting so many different things at so many different dates.

Rich Birch — Yes. Yeah.

Mike Winger — And I was like, why don’t we just work ahead? Let’s work smarter, not harder.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Mike Winger — Let’s not overwhelm people and confuse them with, is it this handout? Is it that handout? It’s like, let’s just spend the four months before we go live and say, what is every single piece of paper document that we want and put it all into one spot?

Rich Birch — Love it. Love it.

Mike Winger — But this this guide isn’t just information about how to give or the tax implications and all this sort of thing. We wanted to integrate it with what the series was going to be about on Sunday. So on Sundays, we rarely even mentioned, like we talked about, hey, we have a financial goal, but the even the sermons were more about what’s God doing in you, and stirring up. And so then we made sure that all of our groups for the fall are all on the same thing.

Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s so good.

Mike Winger — We’re all we’re not doing a volleyball group. We’re not doing FPU. We’re not doing… We’re all doing these journey groups. We’re going to just come together and answer these questions so everybody’s pushing to it. And then we also created like a daily devotional.

Mike Winger — So everybody like page by page, like, you know, for the next five weeks, we’re going on a campaign, but it’s really a journey together. And so there’s questions. There’s everything is 100% in order of like day by day, what do I want people to see when and how. And there’s we’ve gave these we’ve printed them out. We wanted people to bring them back. And like this is where you would take notes in the sermon and then have your daily devotional, but then also bring it to group. Uh, ’cause we were talking about like timelines, like what’s mosaics timeline then, but what’s, what’s God been doing in your own life and then bring that conversation. So we even equipped our group leaders with like big rolls of, uh, paper.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Mike Winger — And we said, make a timeline and then go through and have a conversation for the group of like, just introduce yourself and you and your spouse and talk about your family timeline.

Rich Birch — So good.

Mike Winger — So this guide was just so important to get everybody rowing in the same direction.

Rich Birch — Yeah. Yeah. It’s a great piece. You know, I, I love the, like throughout it, there’s, um, you know, like a little testimonies sprinkled throughout.

Mike Winger — Yes.

Rich Birch — There’s lot of content right down to like, here are the special events we’re doing. Here’s everything all in one place. There’s a ton of work that’s been put in up there. Are you using that kind of throughout the campaign too? Cause a part of this, I would assume a part of this is also, um, you know, you used as people who are, might be coming to the church new now. And they’re like, Hey, what is this all about? This could be a tool you could give to them as well.

Mike Winger — Yeah, we could definitely dust it off and give it to them. We haven’t done a great job of like incorporating it since we’ve like gone live for the previous seven months.

Rich Birch — Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike Winger — But we do have a plan like midway through of this fall doing a three week series of like a halfway point…

Rich Birch — Yep.

Mike Winger — …encourage people to keep going, give them an update, and then inviting people in who and may have joined the church or started coming since then. But we haven’t necessarily, like it was really just like for the 35 days of this campaign journey how are we all going to be on the same page?

Rich Birch — Right. So good. Well, this is fantastic. Well, um there’s ah a lot here. There’s also a website we’ll link to, we’ll link to your, you know, the direct website, but then your church’s website, but then there’s also a campaign related website. It’s is’s super helpful. Lots of good. And that video I talked about earlier is on that ah site friends.

Rich Birch — Anything else you’d like to share just as we wrap up today’s conversation?

Mike Winger — I would say if I’m speaking to primarily executive pastors, I would say our excitement behind something like this is a lot of the how. I love executing. I love thinking of how to make a plan come to reality, but it has to come with vision first.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Mike Winger — So you have to make sure that you know why you’re doing something and like what the goal is. Like I said, our goal was not to just raise funds. Our goal is to change lives spiritually, but physically as well.

Mike Winger — And so that’s what I want to accomplish. It’d be like me going to the store, a construction store, go to Lowe’s and buying a hammer. The goal wasn’t to get the hammer. The goal is to use the hammer to build something.

Rich Birch — That’s good. That’s good.

Mike Winger — And so the campaign, I’m inviting people in to use a hammer, not go buy something.

Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s so good. It’s great. Super good. Well, I appreciate you being here, Mike. This is super great. Where do we want to send people online if they want to track with you or with the church?

Mike Winger — Yeah, so mosaicchristian.org is our website, mosaicmd on Instagram. And I’m kind of not that active on Instagram, but it’s just mwinger87. So I’m right there.

Rich Birch — Love it. Thanks so much, Mike. Appreciate being here today.

Mike Winger — Thank you.