Budgets, boards and sausages

[The following should make it obvious why I continue to keep my church and even my denomination anonymous. It is so I can be honest here and air my feelings and ask for feedback without being accused of bringing shame on my church. Which, for all of the following, are still a good group of people.]

"People who enjoy sausages and respect the law should never watch either being made."
- Otto von Bismark (apocryphal)

Let's add to that church budgets and board elections.

I admit it, the following will probably be amusing to the pastors and ex-pastors who read this blog, but I am a neophyte when it comes to the working side of a church; how it actually runs, who cleans the floors, how the light bill gets paid, what the yearly cost for offering envelopes are, how much car allowance the associate pastor gets. Until last night I kept myself purposefully in the dark about such things because I was afraid of what I would find out. And I was right to be.

I've only been on the human care ministry board for two months, placed there because I periodically bug the senior pastor about what can we do to be more mission-oriented, and now all of a sudden I am the board chair (picture me here with a combination deer-in-headlights/trout-faced look). Which would be more impressive if they'd drudged up anyone else willing to run so it would've been a contest, but as I said to both nominating committee people who approached me (I get the feeling they were being paid a bounty for each head brought in), "I guess I was too slow to get out of the way," and was the only one who said "Yes" for that position. That'll teach me.

Out of something like 15 positions being voted on last night, there was only one that was "contested", and that was because they had four names for the three "at large" seats on the church council. All the other slots on the ballot were one-position-with-one-name-by-it, and there was one that wasn't filled at all. Now I know how those prophets felt when an angel would show up and say, "Tag! You're it!"

And I knew better than to say yes because my wife's parents are heavily involved in their church (same "brand" as ours), he as an elder, she having sat on and chaired many boards and committees over the years. My mom has also been suckered into a few committees in the past. The stories I've heard from all of them was part of my reason for keeping my head in the sand, wanting to be part of the community but not necessarily wanting to be part of making that community work. I know that sounds cowardly, but honestly I have very visceral, negative reactions to most politics and find such wheelings and dealings to be anathema to following Christ. And yet politics, as I define it, is what happens when you gather more than two people together. So I knew that the church election meeting last night would be full of politics, as will the upcoming church council and human care ministry board meetings I will sit on or "lead". And it didn't disappoint my expectations. Or rather, it did, because it was as I expected...Oh, well - you get what I am trying to say. It was...political.

Honestly, this is the part of church I find the most unsettling. Not just because I saw and heard people being pains in the behinds last night as they pored over and questioned the minutiae of the church budget for this past year and next, and not because I saw how those same people were maneuvered around or even in a few cases blatantly and publicly put off. Nor because I think our budget is hopelessly out of whack with being a mission-oriented church, not that we are that anyway. Most of our members would define mission as either a short-term excursion somewhere to do something for "those people" once in a great while, or a check you put in the plate for someone who does such things full time. I mean, the human care budget is two whole tenths of one whole percent of the entire church budget (really), or to put it another way, one half of the senior pastor's mileage allowance for the year (really). Whew! I get dizzy thinking of all the good we'll be able to spread with that heady amount of money. See? This kind of thing bothers me because it doesn't bring out the worst in others - it brings out the worst in me!

But even though all of that is problematic there is a bigger problem, I think. Since when does being in fellowship and loving and following Christ require Robert's Rules of Order? Exactly where in Acts does it mention the need to put forth motions and second them and have formal resolutions? Where in Scripture does it talk about committees and board chairs and minutes and A/V system upgrades worth more than most people make in a year? Sure, we're talking about a lot of money, but maybe that's part of the problem. By the time we're done paying for all the things modern church structures and denominations say we need to pay for to be a "real" church, there's a lot of room for disagreement over priorities, long-running low-scale sniping about various programs, pet projects and so on and so forth, whereas I look at the budget and see very little of it aimed at actually reaching people who aren't already "in the club".

Getting back to last night. People asked question after question to just be nit-picky. Ultimately this caused the outgoing president to maneuver around them using parliamentary procedure, and while that worked to the relief of most of us (it's late, we're tired), it still felt...slimy somehow. There were other points that were simply dismissed either because "That's a church council matter, not something to be discussed in the voters meeting" (or to put it another way - members get to vote once a year, and that's only up or down - all "real" church business is otherwise ran by committees), or else because it was considered too small to count.

For example, there was one suggestion by the new facilities board chair to take some of the capital improvements budget and apply it toward debt reduction. His reasoning is that we've basically just upgraded our entire physical plant (he should know - he was in charge of the building expansion and refurb) and everything is now new again, so he didn't anticipate needing as much money in that bucket as budgeted. Whereas that project then put us in to debt by a sizable amount, and many congregants (myself included) are worried about having to pay it off over the next 15-20 years. But the outgoing president simply dismissed his idea as not being enough money to matter.

To put this in perspective, the amount being discussed was only 1.25% of the outstanding mortgage, but that was still in the five digit range (since we have a seven digit mortgage), and at the end of the day, 1.25% of the mortgage paid off early represents more like 3% of the total debt if we let it go, by the time we get it all paid off with interest. I remember sitting there and thinking, "What would Dan be able to do with that amount of money that is 'too small to make a difference'? I think he'd be horrified to hear the numbers being bandied about and shown on the spreadsheets," and I am too ashamed to put them here, even though my church is anonymous in all this, and even though we're small potatoes compared to other churches in town, and especially to "megachurches". Also bothersome was the fact that we ended up approving (there was no question it was going to be approved) a budget that projected being in the hole by about 7% for 2008. This is stewardship?

I would appreciate comments, especially from those who read this post who are of the pastoral profession or are long-term church officers, elders and the like. Because to do a good job as a board chair about a subject I truly care about (under human care ministry falls helping the poor, elderly, sick, etc.), I need to have some healthy thoughts to hang my hat on, at least for the next year. I can be as cynical and political as anybody...at work (and yes, I know I should be a better Christian on the job - I'm working on it). I don't want to be that way at church. From what I've already seen in two months on the board and from last night it appears there's a small group (the elders?) that make things march the way they want them to go, and everyone else can agree or be silent. I remember wondering, "Where is Christ in all this?" I am not sure I could tell you the answer to that even now.

But seriously, I don't know if I will ever go to another church election meeting again. I can see why we struggled and even had to call someone else to come to reach a quorum. At the end of the day it was a maddening combination of boredom, politics and pre-made decisions that added up to not being a very inviting scenario except for those die hards who "feed" on such things. And I don't. Harrumph.