Postby Kathryn-in-Canada » Sat Feb 16, 2019 10:15 pm
I just finished the narrative budget. That was the first item on my list for today. Not my only item on the list!
I found it both fun (I love working with numbers) and depressing. I was hoping it would give me a different picture of the church. It didn't.
A narrative budget is a budget that shows how much an organization spends on its mission statement.
So if the mission is to be a community of faith whose focus is on celebrating God's presence in the world, seeking justice and providing a safe space for healing, then one would analyze how much of the money raised goes to worship (celebrating), justice mission work (food bank or homeless shelter) and pastoral care and counseling (for healing space.) So the building costs would be divided up among the uses based on hours of use and the other expenses would be assigned to each category. Minister's salaries are actually easy to divide up among tasks since their contract gives a split for how much time they are to put into different areas. At least ours is.
Our church is not a 'program church' (which is a nice way of saying it is only open on Sundays but seldom used other times of the week/month/year.) So I split out admin and building costs and they make up 37.5% of our expenses. For mission we spend 8% (and that will drop to 4% next year once the refugee expenses drop off.) I find that very depressing. The church is dying but I tried to get them to look at that and come up with an action plan. They tried a couple of things and then went back to the old ways.
Anyway, it was a good exercise for me to do, just for myself but I sent it to the minister and said he could spread it further if he wanted but I found it depressing so didn't recommend he do so.
If you did the same thing with volunteer hours, it would give you another narrative of the church. Unfortunately, I know no way to do that since people don't track the number of hours they work on things. For instance, the treasurer had to take time away from working with me on the books when the septic system froze a few weeks ago. That was hours of trying to thaw the line himself, then arranging a company to come in and dig out the septic tank (which meant finding an oldster who knew where the tank was!) and then being there while they did the repairs. That one week alone I'm guessing he spent 30 hours on church stuff. If I told him that, he'd disagree but adding up the things he talked about in emails to me that week, I'm sure I'm pretty close.
The thing about the narratives (monetary or volunteer) is they don't measure the return on investment. I think the same effort and money would be better spent by joining a larger congregation. At this point, it feels like we are dying from the plague and people are avoiding church.
Anyway, I got that done and we walked to church and back. I'm starting to get a sore ear so will dose up with vitamins and head to bed. Not sure if it is cold congestion or not but dh said I snored a lot last night.