God and Mammon.

[rivka]

Today was the budget meeting at church. Michael, in his role as church Treasurer, presented a proposed budget to the congregation for discussion of funding priorities. On Tuesday, the Board of Trustees will be hammering out a final budget that they all agree upon, and then the congregation will vote on it at the congregational meeting in two weeks. All in all, it's been a process that has had Michael tearing his hair out for at least the past month.

The big issue comes to this: people want more program funding than we have member donations to support. (That's always the case.) The church has substantial investment and endowment funds; right now we've got about $1.2 million in both funds combined, plus a couple hundred thousand dollars in specialized funds like a capital fund and a fund for "perpetual maintenance" of our buildings. Everyone agrees that some percentage of the interest yielded by our investment and endowment funds can be applied to funding current programs. There is substantial debate, however, about how much of the investment yield ought to be spent. Take more than about half the expected yield out, and certain members of the old guard start screaming that you're robbing the church's capital.

Today, at the budget meeting, one of our relatively new members raised her hand when Michael got to the part of his presentation where he reviewed our account balances.

"Why do we have so much money in the bank?" she asked.

I saw eyes blinking in confusion all around the parish hall. I don't think that's a question that's ever been asked in our church before. I don't think anyone has ever spoken up in a meeting and asked whether it makes sense for us to be storing up as much money in the bank as we possibly can.

And, you know, it's a damned good question. Why do we have so much money in the bank? Is "having a lot of money" part of our church's mission? If there are programs and building improvements that would make the church a better place, or social justice projects that would make the world a better place, does it make sense to put so much emphasis on maintaining or increasing the balance of our investments instead?

There have been some awfully lean years in our church's history. I suspect that some of the fiscal ultraconservatives remember the darkest days of the 1970s, when weekly attendance was down to a score or so of people and the church was dependent on welfare from the rest of the denomination to maintain our historically important building. Maybe they want to keep our belts tightened for that. But it ain't just that. One of the mainstays of the scrimp-and-savers actually told Michael, at a Board meeting, that we ought to be adding as much as we can to the investment fund because we need to save for the church's 200th anniversary in 2017. So some of it's definitely about looking backward. Some of it's just about holding on - keeping the church on a narrow path so that we can say "it didn't go down on our watch."

We have the same argument when it comes to "staffing for growth." It's pretty much a truism, in church circles, that if you want to increase the size of your program you have to increase your staff first. You can't have a plan like, "We'll wait until a whole bunch of families with young children join the church, and then we'll take that increase in pledge income and use it to hire a religious education director." Families with young children generally won't join a church without a good RE program, so if you wait for them to do so before you develop a program, you'll be waiting forever. Instead, you put money into the RE program first, and then more families join the church and pledge money. That's what our church has been doing, and it's been paying off in a huge way - half the kids in my class are from families who joined this year, and we've gone from a complaint of "sometimes we don't have enough kids to really hold class" to "sometimes we don't have enough chairs for all the kids."

Staffing for growth is obviously working. The strategy is supported by the experience of hundreds of other churches. But you still see the fiscal ultraconservatives complaining that "these new programs need to wait until we have the membership to support them." Meanwhile? We have $1.2 million in the bank.

After the meeting, I e-mailed the woman who asked why we had so much money. Among other things, I said, "It's too bad that, at a Unitarian-Universalist budget meeting, you probably can't get away with saying 'Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.'" I'm not really advocating spending down the endowment - in fact, we can't; the investment fund is technically spendable, but the principal of the endowment fund is required by our bylaws, and by the terms under which most of the money was donated, to be inviolate.

But I would like to see more thoughtful, in-depth discussion of what our savings and investment goals should be, and whether our philosophy of church finance supports the mission of our church. I think that previously the discussion has been framed as "are we going to be responsible or irresponsible about making sure that our budgets don't ever impinge on the investment fund?" More and more, I'm becoming aware that that is completely the wrong question.

Comments

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I was hoping you'd weigh in. (Not exclusively, but I don't know whether I have any other LJ friends who are in church leadership positions.)

Do you know about what your membership is, and about how many people attend church on an average Sunday? How many paid staff members do you have? Are members expected to tithe?

(Feel free to ignore those questions. I'm just intensely interested in how things compare.)

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

Ooh, can I play? Urban congregation of United Church of Canada. Mixed demographics, lots of university people, lots of GLB people, lots of older people, very few families with children. Large old building, aggressive program of renting space to a semi-pro choral group for rehearsals, renting sanctuary as concert space, etc, amounting to 23% of our income. Membership maybe 150. Attendance less than 100. No Sunday school as of last fall. Paid staff members: 2 full time + 1 organist/music director who I think has some other work + 0.5 time secretary and about 0.5 time janitor. Members are asked to pledge but I guess from data available that almost nobody tithes. Congregational givings to local church last year about $125,000 CDN, to outreach things $65,000. I don't know what other sources of income there are besides the cong. givings and the rental, but I know we've been cutting into our savings lately.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Mixed demographics, lots of university people, lots of GLB people, lots of older people, very few families with children.

That would've been our church, when we joined. One of the major attractions of the congregation, for us, was that it had a relatively large and active population of childless people under 40. (Not, obviously, that we had a problem with people with kids - but it meant that we had an instant peer group, and a lot of opportunities to join in social activities like potlucks, brunch after church, movie outings, etc.)

The intentional building of an RE program has had a big effect on congregational demographics. We're getting a lot of GLB families with children - it turns out that those folks tend to be willing to go far out of their way to attend a church where they can put their kids in Sunday School without flinching.

Paid staff members: 2 full time + 1 organist/music director who I think has some other work + 0.5 time secretary and about 0.5 time janitor.

Is that 2 full-time ministers? That's an interesting staffing choice for such a small congregation. I wonder, is that a conscious decision that that's the level of ministerial support the congregation wants, or is it a matter of "we used to have two ministers when we were a bigger congregation, and we don't want to take a step back"?

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's a staffing choice that it wasn't diplomatic to re-examine until it was time for the non-ordained pastoral assistant to retire. Which she is, this year. So for the short term, she's going to be replaced by a 1/2 time pastoral assistant (probably not ordained) plus a 1/2 time clerical/admin person, and nobody too worried if we don't hire both right away.

We have been thinking short-term because we were trying to be open to the option of a merger with 1 or 2 other nearby churches, but since they don't seem to be jumping at the offer we need to look hard at long-term viability choices. Our denomination continues to have too many churches close together in old downtowns, a residual effect of the 1920s formation of the denomination from Congregational, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches. But for us, maintaining our "Affirming" status in a merger is a dealbreaker, and not having it may be a dealbreaker for one of the other churches.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

My sister belongs to a merged church (http://www.unitedparishbrookline.org/) - United Church of Christ (which itself is a merged denomination, much like the UCCanada), United Methodist, and American Baptist. They went from three struggling small congregations in the 1970s to one large, very active, vibrant, thriving congregation today. They've kept the separate denominations, which is interesting - my sister taught confirmation class, and her students had to choose which denomination they would be confirmed in.

But for us, maintaining our "Affirming" status in a merger is a dealbreaker, and not having it may be a dealbreaker for one of the other churches.

Good for you.

Interestingly, because my sister's church incorporates three different denominations, they can't just declare themselves "affirming" - they are simultaneously "welcoming and affirming, open and affirming, and reconciling." Hee.

[fairoriana.livejournal.com]

I'm chair of finance committee... I'd better know! :-) Our membership is I think about 120. We've been aggressive lately about trimming inactives from the rolls, since we pay a per capita to our denomination for them. Average Sunday attendance is about 80. (To put in perspective just how darn young we are, Sunday School enrollment is about 50...). We have 3 paid staff: minister, part time secretary (she gets a pretty paltry sum... $15 - 18k a year) and an organist (who gets less, $10k a year?). Members are sincerely invited to tithe, but it is not required. We're adamant, fierce, whatever you want to say about protecting donor privacy. I have no idea who the biggest donors to the church are (I only guess on one...). You could easily be a regular, give nothing, and even I wouldn't know. We are in the slightly scary position of having our top few donors give a heavily disproportionate amount of our income. I'd be happier with a larger group of medium givers.

Our annual budget is approx. $130k. We get very, very little from facilities fees (our biggest there is that commuters use our parking lot and about twice a year we hit them up for a contribution to help with plowing). We have practically no endowment. And we just had to take out a $40k loan for an emergency roof replacement. Sigh.

[brooksmoses]

That looks somewhat like my hometown church. Since I happen to have a newsletter handy, and it's got the budget information in it -- but not membership, so for that I'll have to go from memory. I think, last I knew, there were about 120 members, but I know I'm still on the rolls, and I've been across the country in grad school for almost a decade. I think average attendance is maybe 40-50, and Sunday School some fraction of that.

Annual budget is $80,975.00. As of February, the general fund balance was barely over $1100, with slightly over $10,000 in trustees and memorial funds. My guess is that the annual budget includes district apportionments, and I think that they're what gets cut when (sadly, I don't think it's been "if" in the last two decades) there's not enough.

The paid staff are, so far as I know, only the pastor -- and, last I had details, his pay was some fraction of a pittance. He does get to live in the church-maintained parsonage, however, which perhaps is worth something. (My recollection is that a fair fraction of those memorial funds are explicitly for parsonage upkeep, in answer to disputes over what constituted reasonable maintenance of parsonage appliances and the like.)

I guess, in some ways, it seems like the proverbial "rainy day" (against one saves up money) has come. I'm not sure how much having money banked up against it would help -- as far as I can tell, the real problem is that none of the church leadership have any vision for the future that they can get the congregation to follow, other than "do things pretty much the same as we always have", which is slowly becoming "fade away".

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I'll answer my own questions, too:

Membership: 260.
Average weekly attendance: 160.
Average number of children in RE each week: 40.

Paid staff members:
- Two ministers, a married couple who essentially job-share. They each work 3/4 time for 3/4 of the year (they take summers off), which I think works out to 1 FTE.
- Half-time director of Religious Education, whom we hope to bump up to 3/4 time next year.
- Half-time music director/organist.
- Full-time sexton.
- Office coordinator, 30 hours per week.
- Bookkeeper, 9-12 hours per week.

Do members tithe? Hahahahaha. No.

[em-h.livejournal.com]

Hi -- I'm not on your flist but I read sometimes ...

Urban church, Anglican Church of Canada. Membership in the range of 300 people. According to our diocesan statistics our average Sunday attendance is 291, but I think that's an overly high estimate. One full-time paid priest and two part-time paid ones. We also have five (yes, five) retired or otherwise unpaid priests who conduct services and do other pastoral things. One part-time paid music director. One full-time church secretary, without whom everything would grind to a halt. Sunday school teachers are volunteers, as are all other parish positions. Members are not expected to tithe necessarily, though it is suggested. Most don't, but some people do give a lot. Somewhat over 2/3 of our income is from congregational giving (not counting what people give to special fundraising appeals, or donations for specific programs -- we actually get a LOT of donations which are specifically for our outreach). We do have investment income (maybe 10-15% of our total income?), which is under some restrictions as is all based on one extremely large legacy from many, many years ago. We rent out part of the basement of the parish hall to a playschool, and sometimes rent space to outside choirs for rehearsals or performances.

We are now in our third year without a deficit, which we're pleased about, but we're always skating on the edge of deficit.

[journeywoman.livejournal.com]

These are numbers from last week's bulletin at the church where I play in the handbell choir:

Received last Sunday: $21,495
YTD offering: $184,413
YTD expenses: $215,339
Budget to date: $212,223 (I'm not sure what this figure means, exactly)

The average annual tithing for this denomination, nationwide, is $1,250 per attendee.

There is one senior pastor, who I believe is full-time, and four associate pastors. There is a facilities manager/custodian, office administrator, preschool director, and after-school program director. I think the staff is all some variety of part-time, though I don't really know. There is also an ASL interpreter at every service, and who runs a deaf Bible study, who I imagine gets paid something, though she isn't listed as staff on the bulletin.

There are a few hundred there on a typical Sunday. There are two services.

[journeywoman.livejournal.com]

A few hundred at each of the two services, I should say.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

They put that information in the bulletin?!

Man, is it ever interesting to see different churches' cultures around money.

[journeywoman.livejournal.com]

I think because there's always a shortfall between giving and expenses, it's a way to guilt people into giving more during the offering?

[curiousangel.livejournal.com]

Received last Sunday: $21,495
YTD offering: $184,413
YTD expenses: $215,339
Budget to date: $212,223 (I'm not sure what this figure means, exactly)

I'd guess that the "YTD" figures are shown as something separate from "budget" to demonstrate the actual expenses for whatever the fiscal year is as opposed to the straight-line extrapolation based on the budgeted figures. Not all expenses occur evenly throughout the year; it's also possible that the budget forecasts were off.

To give an example, our church uses steam heat, and we get billed a certain amount for each quantity of steam we use. Since we only have the steam turned on six months out of the year, looking at an "actual" year-to-date expense might show a zero for steam expense, whereas a straight-line extrapolation would show some amount set aside in anticipation of the expense. Since our fiscal year starts on May 1st (not long after we turn the steam off for the summer), looking at our "fiscal YTD expenses" doesn't show any steam expense until late October, whereupon we start spending $2,000 per month for steam. Our "budgeted YTD expense" includes an expense for steam in May of $1,000, even though the steam is shut off, and there isn't any actual expense.

Over the entire fiscal year, they should both produce the same result. I find that you can sometimes get a false sense of urgency by looking at straight-line extrapolations, though. I think it's much more informative to evaluate in terms of "What was our actual YTD expense for this thing in the same period of last year, and have we properly anticipated any changes?"

Part 1: our money

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

I'm a member of the Parochial Church Council at my local Church of England (i.e. Anglican/Episcopalian) church. The PCC has various responsibilities, including most financial decisions and most decisions on the form of the liturgy.

Our membership and average adult attendance are both in the 50 - 60 range, although these are not necessarily the same 50 - 60 people; we have people who are registered members due to historical links with the church, but are no longer able to attend, and also people who attend, but prefer not to be "official". Child attendance is usually around 15 - 20. Our paid positions are a full-time priest, part-time organist and part-time cleaner. We have also recently paid a consultant (who is also a member of the congregation) a modest fee to review our use of our church hall and make recommendations for how we can improve it.

The Church of England recommends that people give 5% of their disposable income, but I think only a few do so. Last time I saw statistics, our area was officially the second most-deprived in the country, so donations are not high in absolute terms; I believe we average around £500/month (c. US$1,000) in standing orders and around £200/month (c. US$400) in cash. To the extent that the donors are identified, are UK taxpayers, and are willing to sign a form allowing us to declare their donation to the Inland Revenue, we also receive tax relief on these donations. In addition, we have modest amounts of income from hiring out our church hall to community groups and selling devotional items such as candles.

From memory, I think we have about £40,000 in investments, most of which is earmarked for specific purposes. A large chunk (about a quarter?) is for youth work, and another large chunk (about half?) is for a buildings improvement programme which is beginning next month (including such things as better disabled access, better meeting facilities for youth work and the like.) A small portion represents our priest's "discretionary fund", which is a fund out of which he can make payments to assist local people in cases of hardship and emergency. For instance, we have had several people who were in danger of becoming destitute after their asylum applications were refused. This fund could be used to help such people with living expenses while their asylum applications are pending. This is something we have recently set up and are hoping to increase via additional collections.

With the exception of the discretionary fund, our philosophy is to use our investments for large, identifiable, one-off projects. We pay our recurring expenses out of income wherever possible, although we keep enough in our investment account to provide a small safety net in case our income falls short. This is particularly important because Church of England parishes are obliged to make quite large payments to the diocese to cover clergy benefits, training etc, and these are calculated by reference to the numbers on our electoral roll rather than actual income. Exercising mission in a relatively deprived area can therefore lead to an increase in our financial commitments without a corresponding ability to increase our income. Our investments have remained fairly constant in the 12 years that I have been involved, largely because the funds set aside for youth work have been replenished via grant applications at about the same rate they have been spent, and the building works have been a long time in the planning; by the end of next financial year, I expect the total to have gone down considerably. We have recently made a commitment to give the sums we receive in tax relief to charity.

Part 2: our programmes

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

Our current youth programme consists of weekly sessions run by volunteers at the same time as the main service, with the young people joining the main service for Communion; occasional weekend activities around the major holidays and festivals, also run by volunteers; and annual confirmation classes run by our priest. Baptism preparation (for candidates of all ages, but mostly children and their parents) is run by volunteers. Last year, we also ran a series of drop-ins for mothers of teenagers. We have had a paid youth worker in the past and may do so again; we are currently in discussion with various other agencies, both secular and religious, about how we can best serve the local area in this respect. The recent murder of a teenager very near the church, which I have written about in my own journal, seems to have given the secular agencies in particular a new interest in this area (depressing though it is that matters had to come to such a pass before most of the powers-that-be would listen to us).

Our other main programme at the moment is a coffee morning that is open to all, but aimed primarily at people who live alone on the local housing estates.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

I haven't been in church in 20 years, but I was the treasurer when I left. It was a large independent Baptist church in Arlington, VA, almost all white, strongly conservative -- fundamentalist and evangelical.

We had about 1000 members, most of whom attended.

The staff was four pastors, two secretaries, two janitorial, one music director, one organist, one pianist. Large jobs, like Sunday School Superintendent, were still voluntary. The church buildings also served a Christian school that rented space.

The annual budget was $1.5M and at the time I left, we were starting to run tight on it. We were in an area that was becoming crowded with immigrants, but when I suggested things like food banks, English lessons, and services in other languages, the church board always turned them down. They believed strongly that their primary purpose was to bring people to Jesus as their savior. The problem with that was that the people who were "saved" and started coming to church had no background in church life and expected things (services, picnics, loans, etc.) without giving money. A number of the really big givers were dying off. So our budget was starting to strain a bit. I don't know what their situation is now, but the church still exists.