Budgeting Homework
At the end of every session of premarital counseling, I give couples a homework assignment. Each time, the homework is designed to anticipate our next gathering, whether we are scheduled to discuss families of origin or the practicalities of living together or the intricacies of the wedding service. Before we meet to talk about career plans, having children, and household responsibilities, I ask couples to prepare a budget. As I explain to them, I am not interested in the content of that budget—how much or how little they have or how they will spend or save their money. Instead, I am interested in hearing them describe how the budgeting conversation went. Who did what? Was it an easy undertaking, or did it bring tensions to the surface? Did one person make all of the decisions while the other one went along with the flow, or was it a truly shared process?
At St. Paul’s, our budgeting process is a collaboration among dozens of people. It begins in September, when staff members and volunteers who oversee an area of our operations are asked to dream about how God is calling our parish to pursue ministry in their particular area for the coming year. Those individuals are encouraged to reach out to colleagues and partners with whom they share ministry to aid in the imagination process. They are not simply asked to dream about how much more or how much less money they need to do the same sort of ministry next year. Instead, they are asked to build from the ground up in a form of zero-based budgeting that begins not with last year’s amounts but with specific plans for next year. Everyone uses the same question as our starting point: what is God calling us to do next?
For staff salaries, the responsibility for dreaming falls primarily to me, but I ask everyone on staff to provide input. I ask every full-time member of our staff to participate in a 360-degree evaluation process, in which everyone is asked to do a self-evaluation, confidentially evaluate their peers, and receive an evaluation from me. The main focus of the evaluation process is goal-setting, and we spend considerable time one-on-one discussing what goals we set together for the current year, what goals we will set for the coming year, how those goals help further the mission and ministry of our parish, and what resources are needed to pursue those goals more fully. I also spend time with all of our part-time staff members in a less formal process that is also goal-focused. For my own evaluation, I complete the same self-evaluation and ask the staff to complete confidential evaluations of me, which are sent directly to the Wardens, who meet with me to review my own progress and make a salary recommendation for me.
After all of those dreams have been translated into financial requests, the Finance Committee of the Vestry is presented with a draft budget that contains them all. No one trims anything off behind the scenes. Instead, we look at what has been requested and discuss in what ways those requests reflect our priorities as a parish. We have a lot of priorities at St. Paul’s—outreach, formation, music, and our buildings and grounds, to name a few—and the Finance Committee begins the work of making sure that our draft budget reflects them. As they refine the budget, they share their work with the Vestry, who is ultimately responsible for adopting and presenting to the parish a plan that will govern how we spend the money that you entrust to us in the coming year.
You may have noticed that so far in the budgeting process the question of available funds has not come up. That is because we do not build a budget and then ask you to make your financial commitments around it, telling you how much more or less we need for next year. (That’s not stewardship; it’s fundraising.) Nor do we wait to see how much we will have at our disposal before beginning the dreaming process. (That’s not abundance; it’s scarcity.) Instead, we build a budget around our collective dreams for what God is calling us to do, and then we tailor that budget to reflect whatever is entrusted to us.
Inevitably, the Finance Committee will need to trim certain areas of the initial draft in order to produce a balanced budget, but, as a matter of faith, we believe that whatever is shared with the parish will be enough to do whatever God is calling us to do. As a growing parish with growing programs and a growing commitment to do God’s work in the world, we expect our budget to grow, but we will adopt a budget that reflects your generosity, and we recognize that many of us are facing a different financial situation than at this time last year. Whatever we share with each other and our parish, that is what we will devote to the mission and ministry of St. Paul’s, and it will always be enough.
Like couples who are asked to prepare a budget, I suspect that some of you do not much care for how your church’s budget is created and are more than happy to let others take the lead on it. A few of you may actually enjoy reading about the process, and those of you who do should consider running for Vestry next year! I hope that all of you are encouraged to know that the process for deciding how St. Paul’s will use the resources entrusted to us is shared, transparent, and faithful. All that we do together as a parish is about exploring and celebrating God’s infinite grace, acceptance, and love, and how we dream and plan and spend our money is a reflection of that mission, too.
Yours Faithfully,
Evan