My Dad’s Story: How Ordinary People Can Leave A Legacy With Their Everyday Lives

Why should anyone — an ordinary person or fundraiser — care about legacy giving?

Legacy giving can feel overwhelming and non-urgent for most people. So, understandably, legacy giving gets pushed to the back burner. But what if I told you that making a legacy gift might be one of the most joyful and life-giving decisions you make? It was for Dad and Mom.

This past weekend marks the seventh anniversary of my father’s passing. As the weight of his absence descended on me, I shed tears of great gratitude. My father modeled a life of legacy everyday he spent working on his farm. In today’s post I would like to share with you three things I learned from my dad about legacy living, and a short case study on my parents’ legacy giving.

What is a Legacy Gift?

What do you want others to say about you when you no longer walk the earth?

Your answer to that question is the legacy you want to leave. We can pass on legacies through our values and our finances. Planned giving, a term you are probably familiar with, describes the financial legacy someone makes through gifts of assets. 

When talking about planned gifts, I prefer the comparable term ‘legacy gift’ because it infers more about what planned gifts accomplish. I also think it’s important to point out that when we leave a legacy we’re passing something forward. It’s through legacy gifts that we play a role in passing on the legacy of faith to future generations. 

Making a legacy gift is significant in the life of a giver, but this moment is usually the last step in a three-step journey of faith. First we receive the legacy of faith, then we model the legacy of faith with the way we live, and finally, we pass on a legacy of faith by making a legacy gift. Here’s how these steps unfolded in my father’s life and may be reflected in your story.

Receiving the Legacy of Faith is Accepting God’s Best Gift to Us

“It’s such a gift to grow up in church,” my stylist marveled at my last appointment. “As an adult I’m watching many of my friends, who didn’t grow up in church and are going through hard things, search for something I took for granted as a child. The inheritance of faith my parents passed on to me gives me so much peace and strength.”

Can you relate? I can.

I grew up on a farm in the Red River Valley of Minnesota. Three generations before, my family immigrated to America and began farming. Before they built a home they built a church. To them, settling in a new place meant establishing a new faith community. I didn’t know it as a child, but, as I look back, my daily life on the farm mirrors our life of faith.

Spring on a farm sets us free to go till the soil and start planting crops just like we did last year. Summertime is hard on a farm; as a child I remember not seeing my dad unless we brought him lunch in the field or stayed up until 10pm when he finished for the day. But fall comes and so does the harvest. Finally, winter descends and not much can be done except look forward to spring and new life. 

In the life of faith “spring” aligns with Resurrection Sunday and sets us free for our renewed life in a living Christ.  “Summer” requires diligence in following through on what we have been called to. Finally one day the ‘harvest’ arrives when we hear the impact we’ve made on someone’s life or are financially able to make our best gift to churches and faith-based organizations. Then there are dark introspective times, spiritual winters, where not much can be done but look forward to new life. 

Gratefully, new life comes yearly on the farm and faithfully in the life of faith. Paul points out how secure God’s promise of new life is in Ephesians:

In [Christ] we have also received an inheritance, 

because we were predestined according to the plan of the one 

who works out everything in agreement with the purpose of his will, 

so that we who had already put our hope in Christ might bring praise to his glory. … 

The Holy Spirit is the down payment of our inheritance, 

until the redemption of the possession, to the praise of his glory.

Ephesians 1:11-14, CSB 

When was the last time you marveled over your coming-to-faith story? For people of faith, receiving the legacy of faith by accepting God’s greatest gift to us is the first step in making a legacy gift. Without Jesus’ sacrificial love and gracious abundance we would have nothing to give and very little reason to be generous.

Living a Legacy of Faith is Our Best Gift to Others

When my dad wasn’t in the field he was learning about becoming a better farmer. He was ahead of his peers in technology and applying resources that could create better outcomes. I thought he was obsessed with farm work until I started working with him in 10th grade. 

On a rained out harvest work day I was sitting with my dad in the Country Kitchen. This is where you could find him many mornings at 6 am with the local bankers and professors discussing business and ag research. But this afternoon it was just the two of us with pie and coffee. 

“Have you given any more thought to what you want to do after highschool,” he asked, “Are you starting to imagine the kind of work you could see yourself doing one day?”

During all of the thinking time I had while driving his grain truck, this question had in fact been haunting me. I turned the question around and asked, “I don’t know…What did you want to do at my age?”

“I always wanted to be a farmer,” he said simply. “But your grandma was hoping I’d go on to seminary after college and become a pastor. She kept encouraging me to go into the ministry until one day I told her  ‘Mom I have a ministry. I’m a farmer. I put food on the table of hungry people all over the world.’”

After that conversation, I saw my dad as a completely different person. I understood why he was obsessed with being a great farmer— he was dedicated to serving others with his work. Farming was my dad’s ministry. And I felt that calling for the first time too.  Suddenly, sitting behind the wheel of a truck was purposeful.  I was a part of this enterprise - this farming ministry - of feeding the world. 

How to Live Your Own Legacy of Faith

My dad modeled his faith by being faithful in most everything he did as a father and farmer. Leaving a legacy didn’t start the day my dad signed a will, it started when he woke up every morning, pulled on his work boots, and headed to the field. It’s the same with us. The legacy of faith we’re passing on is being written right now. What do you want that legacy to be?

You may not leave a legacy through your occupation in the same way my father did. Perhaps you’ll leave a legacy through the way you serve at church, snuggle over bedtime prayers with your grandchildren, or welcome people to your dinner table. The most important thing you know is that passing on your legacy of faith has already begun.  

Passing on a Legacy of Faith is Our Best Gift to Future Generations

“Dad, when you think back on all your years, what experiences meant the most to you?” I asked on one of my last visits while he was coherent. Stringing words together in sentences didn’t come easy after his stroke, but I wanted to hear him talk about his legacy. We all knew the end was near.  “Boy, being a part of building our new church and watching it grow… now that was good…very good.”’  He was Scandinavian. Hyperbole wasn’t his style. I could see that it meant the world to him by the tear in his eye.

My dad always joked that he had been on different committees at five different times before the congregation was ready to give up on the old church and build a new one. Finally in the ‘90s I had the privilege of helping my dad and home congregation through a capital campaign that made a new church possible. We could never have imagined the impact this community of faith would have on future generations in our little Red River Valley town.

How to Pass On Your Own Legacy of Faith

My dad played an instrumental role in ushering in a new future for our congregation. This legacy of new life — both spiritually and physically — that my father passed on began with a deeply held belief that others should have the opportunity to know God. He had no flashy goal when advocating for a new church building; he just wanted others to be welcomed into a space where they could know Jesus.

What legacy of faith do you want to pass on? Answers to these questions are very rarely monumental, rather they’re personally meaningful. I have friends who invest their time and gifts in local community outreach, and others whose hearts are in global ministry. Some friends cherish and support the work of Christian summer camps, and others have a treasured family legacy at a church-related college. More and more friends spend their quiet moments praying that the children they raised in faith will finally ‘come back’, and they just want the church to be there one day when the kids finally realize how much they need it. 

Legacy Giving Case Study: Ron and Jean

For years my parents enjoyed relationships with fundraising professionals from several ministries they had long supported. Those friends planted some important ideas in their minds by inviting them to consider various types of planned gifts. These conversations stirred in them a desire to leave a financial legacy with organizations they had spent their lives supporting. They looked forward to blessing the seminary and the church college, but also other smaller organizations like their congregation, a Bible camp, and the local mission organization where there was no such thing as a gift planner to help. 

As they tried to navigate multiple charitable priorities, I became the right person – literally the in-house expert – to help them plan their charitable legacy. Over several conversations they concluded that they wanted to make their favorite ministries the “5th child” of their estate distribution. Specifically they hoped to support those ministries in perpetuity with annual gifts similar to those they were currently giving. 

As we reviewed the various tax implications of their assets, their IRA was the right asset for them to use.  They can establish endowments and make other significant gifts during their lifetimes. And when both of them had passed, the remaining IRA value would fund those endowments to their full intention, and provide for their annual gifts to continue forward. 

We spent the better part of two years working on their charitable plans off and on. Finally, the right time to put their gift plans into place came when my Dad received a cancer diagnosis. While he remained hopeful about his prognosis, he and mom knew that it was time to finalize their decisions. Neither of them wanted to take a chance on any unfinished business. 

As Dad approached his death, he often confirmed to us the real peace and contentment he experienced because there was no unfinished business, in matters of money and love. 

Make Your Own Legacy Gift

“How you do one thing is how you do everything.” This quote was very true in the life of my father and I have seen it be true in the lives of countless other makers of legacy gifts. Legacy gift makers make gifts because they cherish their faith and the impact they know the love of Jesus Christ will have on others. They echo what the Psalmist wrote years ago with their lives: 

“Listen, dear friends, to God’s truth, bend your ears to what I tell you. … Stories we heard from our fathers, counsel we learned at our mother’s knee. We’re not keeping this to ourselves, we’re passing it along to the next generation — God’s fame and fortune, the marvelous things he has done. … So the next generation would know, and all the generations to come — Know the truth and tell the stories so their children can trust in God, Never forget the works of God but keep his commands to the letter.    — Psalm 78:2-7, MSG (Emphasis added)

Whether you’re looking for a way to begin making a legacy gift or you’re a fundraiser who is interested in starting a legacy giving program we would love to help point you in the right direction. Schedule a call HERE.

Co-authored by Brenda Moore, CFRE and Sisi Roose.