MONEY MATTERS . . . IT REALLY DOES

With permission I am posting a slightly edited version of e-mail correspondence that went back and forth today between the Finance Chair and myself.

----- Original Message -----
From: finance chair
To: Pastor Hill ; Treasurer
Sent: Tuesday, August 28, 2007 11:05 AM
Subject: Our First Finance Committee Meeting

Hi Pastor Hill,

Hope you are doing well.
I had to run out Sunday so I didn't have a chance to chat with you but wanted to connect before the finance meeting. The team and I will chat before the meeting, but I wanted to hear any feedback you can share or advice on structuring the meeting.

I thought maybe kick off with a prayer, introduce the team to everyone (if anyone shows up) and discuss what is going well and what isn't. Also, with the current financial situation does it make sense to address the congregation and let them know the situation we are in and see if they can help out. And, is it appropriate to do some fundraising efforts....even just short term to help things along. Should I work with outeach and other council groups to help make that happen?

As always, thanks for all your help!!
All the best,
Teresa

Reply:

Hi Teresa,

Your agenda sounds good to me. I think that the enormous list of unpaid bills we have right now will dominate the discussion, so we need to talk about that. In the past we have had such lists, but this one seems rather large.

Providing information to members during worship services helps with a short term situation, but usually when the amount we need is so large, we need a stronger approach to addressing such matters with more specific information. Soon we will be sending out a financial update on giving from members. Usually I send out a letter with that report and let people know in general how things are going.

Technically, we are not supposed to use a specifically addressed report as a means for making a specific appeal for funds. Usually specifically addressed letters (or reports) are sent by 1st class mail. In those cases the USPS doesn't care what is sent. They allow specifically addressed financial reports to be sent out bulk mail at a lower cost to us, but in such cases, because the reports are addressed to specific individual givers, they say that we should not use bulk mailed financial statements as a means for soliciting donations.

A long time ago our congregation adopted a strict policy against what is referred to as "fund-raising." This was part of the overall emphasis in the Church that Christians should give to support the mission of the church and not rely upon fund-raising activities to come up with funds for ongoing budgeted expenses we are obligated to pay.

In reality, most of these activities require a lot of work and bring in very little actual money. They also tend to create a negative climate around the churches because people begin to believe they cannot "afford" to fund their own mission.

Also, they allow leaders to gracefully avoid taking responsibility for actually talking to members and ASKING people to make some sacrifices. It also eliminates the pressure on leaders to examine their own personal giving level on a weekly basis? (How much do we as the church's leaders actually contribute each week/month?).

In 1964, when our church began, the average weekly donation was $5 per family. Several gave more than that, but that was the average per family. FORTY YEARS LATER, in spite of inflation on the income side of family finances and increased incomes, the cash average per family is still about $5.

In 1964, $5 would buy about 20 loaves of bread or two tanks of gas. How far could someone drive today on $5 worth of gas? How much does it cost for a beer or a single hot dog at Yankee Stadium these days, anyway? Can you still get into a Mets game for $5? How many Big Macs can you buy with $5?

A Finance Committee might also want to take a serious look at giving patterns over the past few years and also a specific look at our members' giving patterns during the current year.

• Have there been any changes?
• Has giving decreased?
• Are some members giving less than they used to?
• Have larger giving members moved and caused a drop in income?
• How much are the actual givers actually giving? (For example, if there are 60 families that give regularly, what is the average donation per family, and what is the median donation?)

Also it might be interesting to ask how the giving of newer members compares with the giving of long-time members. I think we would be somewhat surprised by the result of such a comparison.

Additional questions can be asked about the spending side of the situation:

• Are we spending more?
• Are we spending money for things we don't need or that could be funded by other means such as the Memorial Fund?
• Are the members of Hope really aware of what it costs to run a church like ours?

Another simple fact is that at Hope we have not worked on a financial stewardship education program or stewardship giving appeal since 2003. In the years that I have served at Hope we have had FOUR intensive programs for capital giving, each of them led by highly paid consultants who flew in from other parts of the country. They helped us back then to build our sanctuary and to build the parking lot, and the consultants were somewhat successful in helping us to increase our regular giving as well.

We need to work on an approach to our ongoing problem with finances. We certainly are not any different from any other Lutheran church in the Northeastern U.S., and we are actually doing much better at Hope than in many other ELCA churches in this part of the country. Even our synod itself is in a very difficult financial situation.

We have a tremendous church with many wonderful, deeply committed people at Hope. I WOULD NOT ASK TO SERVE ANY OTHER CONGREGATION AS PASTOR. Yet we have fear and anxiety about asking people to examine how much and why they give, and we have not yet raised up enough of a vision of what it means to be a truly giving church.

Earlier this spring one church in the Bronx received an award at our Synod Assembly from the ELCA Churchwide office because of their giving. In spite of the fact that nearly evey member of that church earns minimum wage or welfare, the number of people who give at least 10% of their income to support the Lord's work there is very large. I hope that someday we might be able to say something like that about our church as well.

Some folks say, "The Lord will provide." The truth is that the Lord already has provided for us, The issue, I believe, is how we are personally willing to use what God has provided us with. None of us can fund our church's budget by ourselves. But what could 400 or 300 or 200 or even 100 families accomplish if we tried?

With love,
Pastor Hill

How does the Modernist-Fundamentalist Controversy appear when looked at from a Systems Perspective?

Pastor Andy Arnold sent me a question about what I wrote about Fundamentalism. "How does the Modernist-Fundamentalist Controversy appear when looked at from a Systems Perspective?"

First, for those unfamiliar with the term "Systems Perspective," let me describe briefly what this refers to.

A "Systems Perspective" is a way of thinking about something, e.g. a family, an institution, even a single human body, as a whole consisting of many interrelated and interconnected components or "systems," rather than as just an assortment of processes that co-exist within a single entity. For example, a human being is more than just flesh, bones, blood, organs, etc. as you would see laid out before you on a medical examiner's autopsy table. In order for a body to function most effectively the various "systems" (digestive, respiratory, nervous, auditory, optic, circulatory, excretory, etc.) not only co-exist but collaborate with each other. As the apostle Paul said, "the eye cannot say to the hand, 'I have no need of you . . .'" (I Cor. 12: 21a).

To view something from a systems perspective requires both some distance and much knowledge.

In a sense, Pastor Andy's question would be an excellent PhD dissertation topic.

But simply put, a few things can be said right here. The Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy was the result of the intergenerational transmission of anxiety and a crisis in leadership among the Christian community. After the development of "Higher Criticism" as a way of interpreting the scriptures, the exaltation of the doctrine of Evolution promulgated by Charles Darwin, the industrialization of Western society, the growing movement toward the Nation-State throughout Europe, the American Civil War and the struggle for Reconstruction in the U.S., the rise of Marxist thinking and Freudian psychology etc., the Protestant Christian community in the U.S. and the U.K., reached an impasse in its theological discussions.

Some anxious Christians wanted to resolve their anxiety by forcing the Church to adapt its approach to doctrine to the changes occurring all around it (Modernism). Other anxious Christians, whose constituency included many who were very conservative believed that the best way to resolve the crisis was to simply "hang onto" the "faith once delivered to all the saints." To them, "progress" meant re-investing their energy in re-discovering their spiritual and theological roots so they could effectively apply the wisdom of the scriptures to the changing world (Fundamentalism).

In the Roman Catholic tradition, this struggle was resolved by the First Vatican Council where the doctrine of Papal Infallibility was affirmed officially.

Post-Enlightenment Protestants had only the Bible as a source for faith and life, so as new techniques for interpreting the scriptures came into use, the future became uncertain and conflict erupted between biblical scholars of both parties. The extremely diverse and highly fragmented Protestant community lacked the leadership that could bring about a resolution, so the two styles of interpretation gradually became institutionalized and began to operate quite independently from each other. In denominations where battles were fought over these issues, the result was greater fragmentation and the hardening of positions. However, at the same time in the U.S., in other traditions such as the Lutheran tradition, a different "genetic history," certain liturgical traditions, and a historic reliance on the authority of the Lutheran confessions was at work, bringing immigrant denominations closer to each other and forming new bodies not by separation, but by merger.

Ironically, it is the history of this 19th and 20th century Protestant controversy and the coincidental failure of leadership in mainline church bodies such as the ELCA that makes current social crisis over the acceptance of homosexual persons as clergy arise with no clear solution in sight.

By "failure of leadership," I am not referring simply to current leadership at various levels in the ELCA. It actually goes much further back into each of the Lutheran family histories that contribute to the current crisis in North American Lutheranism. Again, at the risk of oversimplification, it seems to me that too much attention was given to the politicization of the "New Lutheran Church" (e.g. forcing membership quotas in forming the Committee for a New Lutheran Church etc.) at the expense of the "familiarization" of the merging families.

Isn't that what often happens with young engaged couples who spend so much energy on making arrangements for the perfect wedding celebration that they have none left for building a healthy and resilient family system for future generations?

I might sum up by quoting a portion of the epilogue from Rabbi Ed Friedman's recently revised posthumous work, A Failure of Nerve. In addressing leaders he encourages leaders to spend time analyzing the "presence of the past" in order to find a way to provide leadership for the future. He says that there are at least four benefits to this analysis: "First, it puts leaders in touch with the nature and the power of emotional process. Second, it delineates both difficulties and capacities, offering a way of understanding how their own past supports the power of presence (differentitaion). Third, it enables them to understand why relationships and institutions do not change. Finally, and most important, it gives them an angle of entry into their own past, their differentiation, and their presence as leaders."

Listen to the Stars

Last Sunday's issue of USA WEEKEND had a cover article called "Watch the Night Sky," which focused on the meteor shower expected to occur this Sunday and Monday during the darkest hours of the evening. I plan to spend some time out there in my backyard those nights, enjoying the show, if there is one.

As a boy I always had a fascination with astronomy, studying the various constellations,gazing at planets, viewing eclipses, and, most of all, the great meteor showers that come from time to time throughout the year.

This meteor shower will be viewed in the northeastern sky. Little fragments of a comet that fell apart long ago will enter into our atmosphere at speeds like 37 miles per second. Way down here on earth we'll see those streaking stars, and they will teach us a lesson if we are willing to listen to it.

Listen to the stars? Well, yes. It's an exciting coincidence that this Sunday's first lesson from Genesis 15 is the famous story of how Abraham saw the stars and learned about the vastness of God's love and faithfulness. He saw the very same stars that we also can see any night when we look upwards towards the heavens. Imagine that! The stars we see are the very same stars Abraham saw some 4,000 years ago!

But the meteorites that will shower our sky this weekend are quite different from the stars we hear about in the lesson from Genesis. They, too, have been around since the creation of the universe, but they only appear for a moment, and then they vanish forever. Think about that. Unlike the stars which stay in the corses, the meteorites come into our world only for a moment and then disappear forever.

Can you see the difference between the stars and the meteor showers? The showers may be exciting, even magnificent, but they are the end of something that was and never will be again. The stars, however, remind me that God's promises are forever. We can cling to those and we can find hope in them if we will resist the tempatatiom tp focus on the ephemeral. Yet even the stars will not last forever. Only God who created them all endures. Listen to the stars/ Then give thanks to God!

The Five Fundamentals of the Faith

On Sunday, July 29th, I mentioned in my sermon the expression, "the five fundamentals" of the Christian faith, and I asked how many people could name them.

I wasn't surprised when no one volunteered the answer, but I was surprised that no one even seemed to know what I was talking about.

Back in one of my history courses (I was a History major in college)I became very interested in a controversy that split the Christian community right around the beginning of the 20th century. It was called the "Modernist-Fundamentalist Controvery."

Most people would have a sense of what I'm referring to if they saw the movie, "Inherit the Wind," the story of the Scopes trial that put the Darwinian doctrine of evolution on trial. It was a battle between two legendary figures, attorney Clarence Darrow for the defense, and three-time Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution.

The argument was about evolution, but at the center of the storm was the larger issue of whether the Bible was a reliable source for Christian teaching and practice. Bryan, a Presbyterian, was also a fundamentalist, and during the trial he was called as a witness for the defense. Ultimately all testimony for the defense was thrown out by the judge and Scopes was convicted.

Fundamentalists insist that it is wrong to "tamper with God's word," so they focus on five doctrines that they see as fundamental to the Christian faith:

(1)The literal inerrancy of the autographs (the originals of each scriptural book); (2) the virgin birth and deity of Christ; (3) the substitutionary view of the atonement; (4) the bodily resurrection of Christ; (5) The imminent return of Christ.

Great debates were held between fundamentalists and modernists during the early 20th century, but Lutherans were involved only peripherally. Why? Perhaps the fact that many Lutherans still did not speak English and retained their ethnic tradition. Also, Lutheran already had the Book of Concord which provided them with a solid theological basis for their faith-- the Formula of Concord, the Augsburg Confession, the Smalcald Articles, the Small and Large Catechisms, and of course, the Apostles', Nicene, and Athanasian creeds.

Lutherans did not see themselves as belonging among the American Protestant tradition (and still do not), so although they may be sympathetic to the viewpoints and concerns of Fundamentalist Protestant Christians, they are not easily tempted to get engaged in this sort of debate.

Any more questions?