In this episode, I continue a series of episodes about my life of ministry in my local Catholic Church. We talk about the struggles of maintaining a budget in a Catholic parish in the various strategies we used to meet those challenges.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 40 of Contemplating Life.

This week I will continue my story of my many years of volunteer ministry for Saint Gabriel Church continuing with stories from my eight years serving on the finance committee.

Standard disclaimers: I’m not trying to evangelize or preach to anyone. I’m just telling my stories. Also, this is my best recollection of events from 40 years ago. I may have some of the details wrong or out of sequence but this is what I remember… the way I remember it.

It’s difficult to remember what happened in what order when you’re talking about things nearly 40 years ago. This week I have two different stories and I don’t recall when these events occurred or what order. Some of it could’ve been before events I’ve already described in previous episodes. I don’t remember the order of these two separate stories I want to tell this week.

Like last week’s episode, it’s a bit of a best-of-times and worst-of-times story. Let’s get the bad one out of the way first and try to end on a high note.

As I mentioned a couple of episodes ago, the plan to reinstate tuition for Catholic families was not well received but it did solve our immediate budget crisis and saved us from having to close the school.

Although tithing had worked wonders for us initially, there was a certain percentage of the population that just wouldn’t buy into it so the dramatic increases we had experienced tended to flatten out. I don’t think many people gave up on tithing but we just weren’t getting new converts.

There was pressure to do more fundraising. My belief was that any fundraising we did should be for particular projects and not for ordinary operating expenses. Part of the promise of tithing was that we wouldn’t do other fundraising. That promise eventually faded away. The school wanted to further subsidize its income and started something called “Market Day” where you could order frozen food from some service. They would deliver it to the school and you could pick it up once a month. They also sold trash bags after Mass. School volunteers handled all of the logistics of these programs.

I was a bit uncomfortable with it. I seem to recall Jesus got pretty pissed one time about all of the people selling things in the temple and he threw them out. At least this just took place in the school cafeteria and not the actual church sanctuary. All of this was mostly harmless but I would’ve preferred people do their shopping at the store probably at better prices and put the savings in the collection plate. But I didn’t feel strongly enough to raise a stink about it.

I did raise a stink about other things.

I was very upset about how aggressively we pushed people to increase their financial pledges. The standard philosophy of fundraising is that you put your efforts into the big donors because they are the only ones who are going to make or break your budget. You do a minor amount of effort courting smaller donors because they are not going to help anyway. That might work for some big fundraising organizations like a United Way agency where your corporate sponsors are your bread-and-butter and the five-dollar donors help a little. Or perhaps if you are trying to raise big dollars for a capital campaign I can see that is an appropriate strategy. It’s one we used many years later for capital campaigns when we raised money to renovate the church. More on that in future episodes.

But when it came to ordinary income in the Sunday collection, I STRONGLY objected to pushing the large donors and ignoring the little guys. The reason was, our big donors were already tithing. If we kept coming at them more and more, all we were going to do was alienate them.

I wanted to focus on the people who were not tithing. We would have people get up at Mass and give a witness talk about how using tithing and putting God first in their finances had really helped them. I wanted to see everyone have those benefits. We were supposed to be preaching Gospel values and not just fundraising.

I got so emotionally caught up in the arguments over fundraising philosophy that I nearly had a nervous breakdown. The politics and greed were too much for me. I needed to get back to more spiritually-based activities. I signed up to go back on the team for Christ Renews His Parish renewal retreat for a second time.

One of the lessons that I used to teach in my inquiry classes was about the Old Testament prophets. They weren’t just about predicting the future. Their primary responsibility was to be God’s spokesperson and to call people back to God when they went astray. They were almost always persecuted for that. I felt like I was being called to be a prophet. People needed to understand that we were drifting away from spiritually-based fundraising. I was failing at that job and I felt like I was being persecuted for my views.

My entire personality was changing. I was becoming extremely withdrawn and shutting people out. I was bitter and angry all the time. I knew that I was withdrawing. I knew that that was bad for me. I knew it was bad for the people around me. And I didn’t care. I was just too depressed.

The definition of a mortal sin is when you do something wrong, you know it is wrong, and you do it anyway. It also has to be a serious offense. I don’t think going into a deep emotional withdrawal in a self-destructive way necessarily rose to the level of mortal sin. I didn’t steal money or kill anybody or anything. But I certainly was aware that what I was doing was self-destructive and I didn’t care and I did it anyway. So it’s the closest I’ve ever come to a mortal sin.

The thing that brought me out of the self-destructive cycle was when I realized it was hurting the people around me. I was cutting myself off, isolating myself, and pushing people away. I thought about the end of the classic Pink Floyd album “The Wall”. It’s a semiautobiographical story by Roger Waters about how he shut the world out. The final song called “Outside the Wall” goes…

I could see people pounding on my wall trying to pull me out of that situation. And so I had to drag myself out. Like Roger Waters, I had to tear down the wall.

I suddenly realized that if I was in such a personal mess, I really didn’t have anything to give as a member of another CRHP renewal team. I had signed up for the wrong reasons. On the evening that I was supposed to be at a team meeting discerning what job I would take on in the team, I didn’t go to the meeting. Instead, I tracked down Monsignor Fred and I went to confession.

After confession, I joined the team meeting late and told them I was withdrawing from the team. I explained that I joined for all the wrong reasons and that I needed to take care of my personal demons before I could have anything to give of myself to the team or the people who would come to our renewal.

The team was understanding. Father Paul… not so much so. He was a bit upset with me. They barely had enough people to form the team. Without me, they were going to be a man short and someone would have to double up on duties. Trust me, if I had stayed… They still would’ve been a man short. I was not in a state where I could contribute in a positive way. My first trip through the renewal program was emotionally and physically draining on me. I never would’ve made it through a second one.

Eventually, I simply resigned myself to the idea that I wasn’t getting through to the people I wanted to. I was powerless to do anything about it. They were making mistakes and they were going to have to deal with the consequences. It was going to be difficult not to say, “I told you so” when the strategy failed or backfired. I just kept thinking of how the prophets felt when they preached and no one listened to them. How sad it must’ve been to see the people they loved fail to heed warnings. There’s no pleasure in being right under such circumstances.

The policies I opposed did ultimately fail. There was negative backlash as I predicted. I took no pleasure in being right.

So, I think that was the lowest point in my many years of ministry. But there were other successes to celebrate. Here’s another story about the finance committee that’s a little more upbeat.

One day the finance committee was meeting on a Saturday afternoon to stuff envelopes for financial statements. It was that complicated procedure I described a couple of episodes ago where we had to send different letters to different groups of people based on whether or not they were a school family and whether or not they had met their pledge. While we were doing it we brainstormed about strategies for solving our financial difficulties.

As I explained a couple of episodes ago, my best efforts to project our income were unsuccessful. Trying to figure out how much money we could spend in a given year was a challenge we weren’t meeting. One of our members, a very dedicated and gregarious guy named Tom, said, “What we need is a sugar daddy who will come along and give us one year’s worth of income. Then we would know how much money we had to spend that year. The following year, we would have banked all of our income and we would know how much we had to spend for the following year.” Unfortunately, none of us knew any filthy rich people who could do that. Our annual ordinary income in those days needed to be about $600,000 per year.

It was several days later thinking about Tom’s proposal that I realized how brilliant it was. He had the right strategy but he overcomplicated the solution.

We didn’t need a sugar daddy to kickstart the process.

The core of the idea that Tom proposed was to base this year’s expenses on last year’s income. All we had to do was project a 0% increase. We could still do that. It would be tough the first year because we had been counting on those increases. But if we held the line and counted on a 0% increase, we could build the budget on that. We were already basing school budgets on the 12-month rolling average ending February 28. Let’s take that number with no projected increase and use it as our income for the following year.

There’s an old adage, I’m not sure if it’s actually in Scripture or not, but it goes, “Don’t tempt God to perform a miracle.” That’s what we were doing when we proposed budgets with income increases. Let’s say for example our rolling average through February was $600,000. That’s the amount of money that God gave us during a 12-month period. So that must be how much he expects us to spend during 12 months. So use that as the income figure for the following fiscal year. If by chance, we get more than that, wonderful. Spend it next year. The only problem will happen if our income decreases and if it does, we make some midyear adjustments to expenses. We were doing that anyway when we didn’t meet our targeted income.

I really liked the idea because it was theologically based and I thought I could sell Father Paul on it. That’s what he liked about tithing. It wasn’t purely a fundraising strategy. Tithing is a theological principle based on the idea that everything you have comes from God and you give back 10% in gratitude. My plan says it’s sacrilegious to say, “We don’t have enough money.” God gives you everything you need. So if the budget didn’t balance, it’s something we’re doing wrong. You can’t say, “We don’t have enough.” That’s saying, “God didn’t take care of us.”

So that means either our spending priorities were wrong or we weren’t working hard enough to explain to people the value they were receiving for their donations. It was our fault that the budget didn’t work– not God’s.

The committee bought my idea. Tom was a strong supporter because it was really his proposal, to begin with. I just had the insight that we didn’t need a rich person to kickstart the program.

For the last couple of years that I was on the finance committee, that was the principle that we used going forward. No projected increase in income. If it goes up, spend it next year.

There was a catch… One that I didn’t see. But fortunately, it was a catch in our favor.

I hate to bog you down with numbers especially since these are hypothetical and I don’t remember the real figures but I don’t know any other way to explain the hidden positive consequence of this plan.

Let’s say that our running income from 1985 was $600,000. We base our 1986 budget on that amount. Now presume it goes up $10,000. So in 1986 we actually took in $610,000 instead of the $600,000 the year before. So we base our 1987 budget on $610,000. Let’s say that in 1987, the income went up another 10K so our 1988 budget is based on $620,000.

In 1986 we spent 600,000 but took in 610,000. In 1987 we spent 610,000 but took in 620,000. We end up with $10,000 extra in the bank each time the income goes up. The original idea was, “If it goes up… we’ll spend it next year.” But we didn’t. We kept basing next year’s expenses on this year’s income and I didn’t realize we would be banking that extra money.

Probably what we should have done when it went up by $10,000 in 1986, Our 1987 budget should have been $620,000. That is the $610,000 that we expected to continue to get plus the $10,000 windfall that we got through the grace of God.

When the money finally started getting significant, and we realized we had this extra cash lying around we began to use it for some long overdue maintenance projects. We started talking about our capital needs. We formed a special committee. I think it was called something like the “capital planning committee” or something like that. Their goal was to look at all of our big-budget capital needs and try to prioritize them. As I mentioned previously, there were maintenance projects that had been deferred year after year and we were only doing the bare minimum.

Windows needed to be repaired and replaced. The parking lot needed resealed and restriped. My mother came up with an idea for remodeling part of one of the downstairs restrooms into a handicapped restroom. All of these projects were funded out of this unspent increase which was an unforeseen side effect of our zero increase budgeting.

The only problem would come if we reached a year if our income decreased year-over-year. So it probably would’ve been a good idea to keep a little of that cash in reserve especially if that income graph flattened out too much. Because we were keeping a 12-month running total continuously, I think we would have seen it starting to flatten out and could’ve held back some of that windfall in the event that it did actually decrease.

So Tom had a brilliant idea. We needed a sugar daddy.

It turns out we had one all along.

His name was Jesus.

Next week we will continue telling stories of my days serving on my parish finance committee.

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