Gift Planners + A Dedicated Couple = Legacy

By Stephanie N. Grimoldby

In 2019, Holy Comforter Lutheran Church in Kingwood, Texas, set up an endowment fund to support hunger ministries in its area. As the endowment’s distribution has grown, so has the church’s outreach.

Seeing the success of the church endowment, Wade Wallinger, endowment chair at Holy Comforter, and his wife, Ruby, asked themselves, “Is there something else that we should possibly do?”

The Wallingers restructured their wills a few years ago to include the church endowment, but after meeting with a regional gift planner for the Lutheran Foundation of the Southwest (which partners with the ELCA Foundation), they realized they could do even more with their legacy gifts.

With the help of their gift planner, they decided to set up a testamentary charitable remainder unitrust as part of their planned giving efforts.

They found several benefits to this type of legacy gift. First, their agreement is much easier to adjust than a will: “You never know when things will change,” said Wade, “when there’s someone new you want to include or a new charity.”

They also appreciated that they could manage how funds were distributed. “The flexibility provided by the ELCA Foundation was attractive along with the way that we were able to structure it to not only take care of our heirs but also the charities that mean the most to us.”

“The church … has been a very important part of our lives, and we want others not to have to worry so much about finances,” Wade said. “I want more and more people to realize the church has invested in gift planners to help us all think about other ways of being generous, not only to ourselves but to our heirs.”

Leave Your Legacy

If you want to join with the Wallingers and discover beneficial ways to support the ELCA causes and ministries you care about deeply, contact Josh Kerney at 773-380-2774 or giftplanning@elca.org to speak to a gift planner today.