Re-Thinking Re-Sources

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, January 31, 2010

 

What you see before you is an artifact I have had hanging on the wall in my office for some years now.  As you can see, it’s a piece of cloth stretched over a frame about 3 feet by five feet.  On the white background there’s some kind of writing in black, script pictographs in columns, recalling something Asian, Chinese perhaps.  In a few places, you see small figures in red.

I also have in my office a photograph of my wife Linda wearing this cloth as a beach wrap when we were on vacation a few years ago.  Soon after we got home from that vacation, she handed me the wrap, said she probably wouldn’t wear it again, and maybe I could think of something interesting to do with it.  Voila! wall art!

Can anybody read it?  Let me help…  (turn the frame over)   It hung on the wall for years before one day I went to a Chinese restaurant with some minister colleagues and saw a huge mural that included some of the red pictographs.  I took a couple of photos of the mural and then compared the mural to the cloth and lo and behold there were the same little red symbols on both the mural and the wrap.  Comparing the symbols, I realized that the wrap had been hanging upside down all that time.  So I turned it right side up and so it has been since then.

Lots of people have walked in my office over the years and looked up at this thing and asked me what it says.  And what I say is, I don’t know, but that’s what we do here at church:  together we look at the intriguing artifacts of life and see if we can figure out what they mean.

 

On the front cover of your order of service you’ll see another example of a white background with black writing across it.  It may look to you vaguely like some sort of a mathematical formula, and indeed it is.  It is the latest version so far of the Spendable Income Formula that has been put forward by your Endowment Committee to control how much money the Endowment Fund will disburse each year for use in the annual Operating Budget of the church. 

Rather than go through it symbol by symbol, suffice it to say that several of your church leaders understand such mathematical things very well and that it will be applied, with the oversight of both the Endowment and Finance committees each year, to determine how much of the income from the Endowment can be used for the church budget.  The formula averages endowment income over the previous thirty-year period and then multiplies by 4% (the average rate of return over time) to decide the amount for this year that will be disbursed.  There are other constraints that will be applied with the formula, having to do with the performance of the markets and the amounts of previous years’ budgets.  None of this is written in stone yet, you still have the opportunity to offer your comments to the Endowment Committee, and you’ll have a chance to vote on whether to institute the formula at the Annual Meeting in May. 

This is a good formula;  it’s been well thought out and researched by thoroughly trustworthy and competent people.  And I hope you’ll consider implementing it when you get the chance.

But now let’s back way up:  What is this Endowment we’re talking about?  Where did it come from?  What does it mean? 

Several years ago, as I understand it, some forward-thinking church leaders finally got tired of wringing their hands trying to figure out where the money was going to come from to pay the utility bills every month.  And so they asked for and received some major donations from long-time members who wrote the church into their estate plans.  And the Endowment was born:  money set aside to insure that the church would continue into future, which is a very worthy goal, if I do say so myself.  I’ve been told that the people who put the Endowment into place envisioned a time in the distant future when the Fund would have a million dollars in it and the members at that point - our children, our grandchildren, our great grandchildren - wouldn’t have to worry ever again about whether or not they’d be able to find the money to pay the utility bills.  Until the recent market crash, the Fund had increased in value to about a hundred and twenty thousand dollars;  it’s around a hundred thousand today.

Now, this Endowment Fund is a wonderful idea, selflessly put into action by thoroughly trustworthy and competent people.  And we all - the members and friends of this church in the present and anybody else that’s touched by the outreach of this church - all of us are the beneficiaries of this wonderful idea, as are our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren - those who will come here in the future. 

It’s a wonderful idea.  And I have trouble with the entire premise.

Please hear me:  It’s not that I think the Endowment’s a bad idea. It’s not that I think the Endowment formula’s a bad idea.  It’s not that I think we should scrap all the hard work that’s been done and just spend all the funds we can get our hands on.  Here’s my only point:  I think it’s imperative that we begin to think about church finances differently.

 

I think it’s pretty natural to consider our own personal finances and to believe that we have to save all we can in our younger years so that in our later years we can provide for ourselves.  Saving for the future and investing wisely is what we’ve all been taught.  That’s what I’m doing, maybe that’s what you’re doing or what you’ve done, maybe you’re fretting because you haven’t, but saving and investing is imbedded in the conventional wisdom of our secular culture.  The only problem is that this is not your home, it’s your church home.  And the church is not secular, our wisdom is not conventional, your church’s finances are not like your personal finances, and here’s why:  because we have a mission that’s clearly printed in black and white on the front of your order of service  If you read it, you’ll see that there’s nothing in there about saving as much as we can or about making sure the church will last into the far-flung future or about making sure everybody here is comfortable and has no worries. 

It says we are to be welcoming and inclusive, it says we are to nurture lifelong spiritual growth, it says we are to inspire lives of love and service which strive toward justice and compassion for all.  It says we should do the best we can with the resources we have to carry out the ministries of the church.

Here are some examples of the ministries of the church that I think would excite anyone who ever gave money here.  First, we’ve taken groups of people from this church, including youth and children, to the Gulf Coast for the last three years to work on hurricane relief.  Lots of you have gone on these trips, and you know how hard we work and you know how much it costs, but you also know that we’ve helped a lot of people and you know that what we receive in return in almost immeasurable.  If we’d worried about the cost/benefit ratio in a purely financial fashion, we never would have bothered.

Second example:  the 4^th Saturday Lunch program.  Before we began that program, we sat around worrying about all kinds of things:  would we be able to find volunteers to cook the food and clean up afterwards, would we have anybody show up that needed help, would it all be just too much trouble.  And now, if you come to one of these lunches, I think you’d have to say that they’re a huge success in being able to feed adults and children who really need to eat, in being able to muster the resources of this community to help others in need, in connecting people from different walks of life who might not have met each other any other way.  This wonderful and successful ministry of the church is something we could have decided not to do, could have been too afraid or too timid to do, or we could have thought, well, we shouldn’t spend our money like that - better to save it so we’ll have it for something important.

A third example is one that hasn’t taken off quite yet, and that’s the mentoring program we’re still discussing with the Alton school district. We’re trying to figure out a way to provide tutoring to the kids who come here for the 4^th Saturday Lunch, who if you’ve met them, you know are a wonderful bunch of kids.

None of these examples costs a great deal of money, but all are - either now or potentially - worthwhile new ministries of this church.  What happens if and when we are presented with a worthwhile project idea that costs more than these examples?  Should we look at each other and think, well, none of us can afford to do this right now so we can’t get involved?  I hope not.

This is the rub with thinking that an Endowment Fund is there only to become bigger, only to be socked away for eternity, only to provide a small amount for the operating budget each year, and not to be thought of as a springboard for building and extending the ministry of the church.  Ministry is what we’re about, not banking. 

A couple of stories of congregations to illustrate my point:

First, a venerable old congregation located in the downtown area of an Eastern Seaboard city was offered the chance to purchase the high-rise office building located right next door to its beautiful little churchyard-on-the-green.  Purchase price:  $1, with the stipulation that the building be used for outreach that would help the many low-income and disadvantaged and displaced persons in the downtown neighborhood.  Answer from the Board of Trustees:  No.  We need to fulfill our responsibility to the people who gave this money saying we should use it for the church, and those low-income and disadvantaged and displaced people in the neighborhood are not part of our church.  We need to keep our endowment of $14M invested in stocks and bonds rather than extending the ministry of this church.  So, no building, no ministry to the neighborhood, Opportunity wasted.

A second story has a different ring.  A group of churches in a major metropolitan area in the South pooled their meager resources in the early 1970’s and grabbed the opportunity to purchase an older apartment building in a low-income section of their city.  They rehabbed the building, partly with labor from the congregations, and they hired a manager and rented the apartments at below-market rates to families that desperately needed help.  After helping people get back on their feet for three decades, the demographics around the apartment complex changed so that the churches were able to sell the property for a million dollars, and they divided the proceeds among the churches and their denomination to be used specifically for more outreach and more social justice projects.  If the churches hadn’t made the initial investment of time and money in what many thought was an iffy project, they wouldn’t have helped all those renters (some of whom became members of the churches), and they wouldn’t have had the million dollars to split up and keep using in new ministries.

 

When talking about Endowments, we want to be as sure as we can that we’re following the wishes of the people who gave the money to the church in the first place.  Michael Durall says if you read the fine print of what people want when they leave money to the church, they’re not really interested in perpetuity or eternity, they’re really interested in the church being here to do what the church is supposed to do, which is to fulfill the mission of the church - not to be a bank, but to be a church, to do ministry in the world.

You may not be able to read the words painted in black on a white background on this board that usually hangs on the wall in my office, but you probably could read the words painted in black on a white background over the door as you came in this morning:  “First Unitarian Church.” 

First Unitarian Church:  If all we were about was coming on Sundays to hang out with friends, then we could change the sign to First Unitarian Social Club.  If all we were about was babysitting children, then we could change the sign to First Unitarian Daycare Center.  If all we were about was discussing the latest political situation, then we could change the sign to First Unitarian Political Party Office.  But as a church, we have a mission that differentiates us from all those other entities - our mission may at times encompass those other functions and entities, but we go farther because we’re called to go farther;  we’re called to ministry in the world.

 

I hope you’ll vote for the Spendable Income Formula as suggested by the Endowment Committee even as you remember what Loren Mead of the Alban Institute says:  “The purpose of an endowment is to grow the church of tomorrow, not to embalm the church of today.”  And then when you’re doing your estate planning, I hope you’ll remember the church in your will.  If you do, you may rest assured that you will indeed be growing the church of tomorrow and not embalming the church of today. 

So may it be.