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 39 of Contemplating Life.

This week I will continue my story of my many years of volunteer ministry for Saint Gabriel Church.

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. Now on with the story…

As I mentioned before, some of my volunteer activities for the church, especially regarding my computing skills, were before I made the decision to return to the church. In previous episodes, I chronicled how I drifted away from the church and what brought me back. Once I was back attending mass regularly and attempting to grow spiritually and deal with my remaining doubts, volunteering for the church became a huge part of that process.

One of the first spiritual growth opportunities I availed myself was attending the Christ Renews His Parish weekend retreat. We used the acronym CRHP but pronounced it “chirp”. The goal of that program is not only to renew spiritually but to motivate you to become actively involved in the church. After attending the weekend retreat, you begin attending a series of weekly meetings of discernment and formation. You try to discern what role you will play in the parish or as we called it “What is your ministry?” Although it isn’t mandatory, nearly everyone who goes through the process begins forming a team that will present the program to a new group of parishioners six months later.

I someday may do an episode about that experience but for now, I just bring it up to explain that the program worked on me because I felt a very strong motivation to become as involved in the parish as I possibly could. Of course, much of this was an extension of my sense of volunteerism which we have discussed extensively. It’s just that now I was spending my volunteer time for the church and not for other secular activities.

I believe it was about a year or so after I returned to the church that there was a vacancy on the Finance Committee and I lobbied hard to fill it. I was already heavily involved in the finance of the parish because I was helping train people how to use spreadsheets and accounting software. I was very happy when I received an appointment to the committee.

The committee consisted of about six or seven people. The chairman of the committee automatically was appointed to the Parish Council. We also had a Board of Education and they had a representative on the Finance Committee as well. Our pastor, Father Paul attended every meeting. The parish bookkeeper also attended as part of their job.

Shortly before I joined the committee, my friend Judy was hired as the parish bookkeeper. She was the one who had invited me to the Easter Vigil service which led me on my journey back to the church. Judy and I spent countless hours together working on budgets for many years.

The church and the entire archdiocese operated on a fiscal year that ran from July 1 through June 30. This was convenient because the largest item in the budget was our subsidy to our parish elementary school. They had a budget of their own that they prepared. Having the fiscal year start and stop in the summer worked well with the school year schedule.

One of the problems with the system was that we had these two entities – the church and the school, preparing budgets that were dependent upon one another. It was a question of who went first. Did the parish need to hear from the school how much money it needed as a subsidy? Or did the school need to know how much money the parish was going to give it? The parish could not determine what it could afford until it made its overall budget.

There was also a great tension between those who supported the school as being absolutely essential to our parish life versus those who thought that the school represented the tail wagging the dog. There was resentment that the school took too much of our resources that could’ve been used for other ministries. And there was resentment on the other side that not everyone felt that the school was our top priority.

Our pastor, Father Paul, hated having to stand in the pulpit and beg for money. That wasn’t what the pulpit was for. It was for preaching the Word of God. Then he heard about the program which promoted tithing. As I mentioned in a previous episode, that was the scripturally based principle that everything you have is a gift from God, and in thanksgiving for that blessing, you give 10% back to the church. Even if you have financial troubles of your own, we encourage people to put God first in their finances. You were encouraged to take a leap of faith. If 10% was completely out of the question, pick a percentage of your income as close to 10% as you could manage and stick to it.

Father brought in a priest from somewhere else that had already implemented the tithing program. He preached every Mass to start the process and then Father took it from there.

After the program had been running, he would recruit ordinary parishioners to speak at Mass to give witness testimony about how tithing and putting God first in their finances had worked wonders for them.

It did work. We worked on both the parish and the personal level.

Our parishioners told inspiring true stories of how putting God first in their finances had reaped its rewards in their lives. People who were facing serious financial difficulties took a leap of faith, adopted tithing, and saw many blessings come their way.

We saw a significant increase in our Sunday income. I think it was a combination of Father Paul preaching tithing and the renewed dedication of parishioners who had attended the CHRP program. At one point, we were able to put a much-needed new roof on the school at a cost of about $90,000 without having to add to our mortgage.

Because we were seeing steady increases in our income, we couldn’t resist the temptation to count on those increases. We would prepare our expense budget and then see how much money we needed to cover that. If it required an 8, 9, or 10% increase in our income, it was easier to just plug that number as a goal on the income side and hope that tithing and Parish renewal continued to produce those results.

Our finances were in such solid shape for a few years that we completely eliminated school tuition for active Catholic families. By the way, on several occasions, I’ve talked about tuition for active Catholic families. We also had a good number of students whose families paid full tuition because they were not Catholic at all. They just wanted their kids to go to a quality private school. Or perhaps they were inactive Catholics who were willing to pay full price.

About the second or third year of our tithing program, I did an extensive analysis of our income trends. I created a graph showing our 12-month rolling average of contributions. We had to use rolling averages in all of our estimates because our contributions were seasonal. People tended to give more during the winter months especially right before the end of the tax year and they gave less during the summer because they were often gone on vacation or not motivated to contribute when school was out.

My projections showed a clear trend of growth of approximately 10% per year. For once, we did the budget the way you’re supposed to. We made a credible estimate of our income and then built an expense budget based on it. This was in contrast to the previous way in which we computed our expenses and then plugged in a magic number to cover that and hoped and prayed we could meet that income target.

When we presented the budget to the parish council, many of the members were skeptical that we could meet such a goal. I tried to explain to them, supported by my graphs and spreadsheets, that for once we had done it the right way. When a council member named Craig questioned the projected income I tried to explain that if they wanted us to lower that projection, we would have to redo the budget to keep it a balance. That’s what I said. But I concluded with, “If that’s not our income number the budget won’t balance.”

Craig became irate and accused us of picking a number out of thin air just to make the budget balance. That’s what we had been doing for years. The one year that we didn’t do that, we got accused of doing that.

I don’t recall if they ended up accepting our projections or if we had to go back to the drawing board and recompute the budget based on a smaller number. What I do recall distinctly was that the projections that I had spent countless hours producing did not come true. The big bump that we had gained by introducing tithing had run its course. The inflation of the late 70s was putting pressure on everyone’s finances. Those who had brought into the concept of tithing were remaining faithful to it but we were getting no new converts to the concept. Almost immediately after approving the budget, that graph of the 12-month rolling average income began to flatten out.

So, if our income did not continue to grow at the rate it was growing, we would have to make cuts to expenses. But where? There was very little in our budget that was discretionary. The problem was similar to the problems faced by government budgets and I suppose any other large entity. A huge percentage of our expenses are fixed. Clergy salaries were set by the archdiocese. We had to pay other staff a reasonable wage. Healthcare costs seemed to go up disproportionately to everything else. Utilities, mortgage, and ordinary maintenance were fixed costs. Much of our maintenance had to be deferred which of course would be more costly down the road.

One of the few things that was discretionary was the liturgy budget. My mother was the chairman of the liturgy committee for about 10 years. The budget included the cost of sacramental bread and wine, flowers and decorations for the sanctuary, cleaning, and occasional replacement of vestments and robes used by the priest and altar servers. So we could do less decoration of the church for various seasons, and have fewer banners, flowers, or other displays. But our services would have been much less meaningful and enjoyable.

There is a hymn titled “Nothing but the Blood of Jesus” the theme of which is that that’s what’s necessary for salvation. Mom warned them that that was going to be our theme song if the budget cuts went too deep. The only thing we would have in the liturgy budget would be the bread and wine.

I wrote a bit of a parody…

I put a link to a Carrie Underwood version of the song. She does much better than me.

The problem was, that taking 10 or 20% out of the liturgy budget, which was only a few percent of the overall budget to begin with, wasn’t going to solve our financial problems. But it would have a dramatic, visible effect on our celebrations each Sunday. She rightly objected to having to make drastic cuts in her small budget that weren’t going to help our overall financial stability.

To deal with the crisis, we put together a special committee consisting of three members of the Parish Council, three members of the Finance Committee, and three members of the Board of Education. We had several meetings which I recall were a bit contentious, to say the least. The solution came at a meeting of the special committee around my dining room table. I don’t recall why we were meeting at my house rather than at church. I can only speculate that perhaps there was a nasty snowstorm that would’ve made it difficult for me to get out. So to accommodate me, we met here. But I don’t really remember what the reason was.

It was the chair of the school board, a wonderfully dedicated woman named Kathy who is a friend to this day, who brought in a proposal. We would have to resume charging Catholic families tuition to send their kids to school. We had eliminated the tuition when we first brought in tithing. But that just wasn’t sufficient anymore. The only other viable alternative would be to close the school.

To further attempt to put things on firmer financial grounds, we made a commitment that the school subsidy would be a percentage of our parish income. That would ease the tension that the school was consuming all activity and income from the parish. I seem to recall that in our previous year, the school subsidy was 28% of our income. Like I said at the top of this episode, this was over 30 years ago and some of these details may be wrong or out of order. Anyway, everyone agreed that this was a reasonable percentage. But then came the question, 28% of what? The previous calendar year? The previous fiscal year? Although the curve had flattened out, our income was still increasing gradually.

We came up with a solution that solved one of our other budget problems which was who would make their budget first? The parish or the school? Working backward from our June 30 deadline, we concluded that we would take the 12-month rolling average income through February. Take 28% of that and guarantee it to the school. That would give them time to prepare a budget during March and April. The finance committee could meet in April and May. We would present the budget to the Council in either May or June and be ready by the June 30 deadline.

The committee approved the proposal as did the full Parish Council and School Board. Naturally, it was not well received by the school families. When you had been getting your kids a Catholic education for free and now had to pay tuition–even at a reduced rate, you can imagine the turmoil. For some, it was proved that tithing didn’t work.

I remember a few years later talking to Kathy about the years we had served together on the finance and education committees. Shared our disappointment and how poorly our hard work and difficult choices were appreciated. She said to me, “I didn’t expect them to be happy about the idea that they were going to have to begin paying tuition again. But not once did anyone express gratitude for the fact that we saved the school from folding completely.” I totally agree.

Personally, I’ve never been a fan of Catholic schools. Yet I respect that it is important to many people. They were raised in an era when it was sacrilegious if not outright sinful to not send your kids to Catholic school.

My Mom was a vocal critic of our school. She was firmly in the camp of those who thought it was an overwhelming drain on our resources and an unnecessary luxury we couldn’t afford. She felt sorry for families who felt obligated to send their kids to Catholic school when they couldn’t afford it. Private school was for rich people. Let them pay their way and not burden the parish or Less wealthy families with the cost.

I seem to recall there was one proposal that suggested we should eliminate the school subsidy completely. Let the school be financially self-supporting through tuition and then we could use church money to give scholarships to those who had financial need. I might have supported that however it really would’ve almost been a divorce between the church and the school. It would’ve made them totally separate entities. While I didn’t see the school as a top priority, I recognized that it was an important part of the overall work of our church. I think such a divorce between the church and the school would’ve had disastrous effects on the church community as a whole.

Although we survived our immediate crisis by reinstituting tuition for Catholic families, it didn’t solve all of our problems. We still needed more strategies to deal with the difficulty of projecting income in wrestling with the fact that we had many more ways than means.

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

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