Remember the Future

Financial Leadership and Asset Management for Congregations

Gerald W. Keucher

• Publisher: Church Publishing
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780898695182
• eBook ISBN: 9780898697926
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

A roadmap for church leaders to break the model of "managing" their parish to setting a foundation for growth and hope.

This practical, no-nonsense guide challenges church leaders to get out of "survival mode" and start imagining—and living out—a future filled with growth and hope. In his years of work with congregations in the Episcopal Diocese of New York, Gerald Keucher discovered that the shrinkage in numbers in many congregations of mainline churches "has deeply affected the psyches of those who lead our congregations. In many cases, they've been 'managing decline' for so long that they've forgotten to look to the future." Keucher outlines a method for sound leadership and asset management in clear, easy-to-follow chapters.

Chapter 1

Leadership for the Long Haul

For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope

—Jeremiah 29:11

Many congregational leaders may feel that it is a big enough job to deal with the demands and the crises of the present moment. A boiler breakdown, the unexpected loss of a major pledge, getting the bills paid and the fair organized — if we deal with all of those things, isn’t that enough?

Well, no, it’s not enough. It’s not enough just to react to whatever happens and keep the normal round of things going. Leaders also must lead. You may think you lack training to be a leader, but being a leader isn’t primarily a matter of skills. Leadership is more an attitude than a technique. It’s more of an approach to situations than a skill. For a congregation, leadership means things like the following:

♦ taking the long view

♦ having a vision on the horizon and working toward it

♦ causing something to happen that would not have happened in the normal course of events

♦ preparing to leave your successors an institution stronger than it was when you began to lead it

What these things have in common is a concern for the future. Leadership points toward the future. When there is a lack of leadership it is always because those who run your congregation have forgotten (or don’t believe) this crucial truth: your congregation has a future. When money is tight, and there don’t seem to be enough people, and you can’t keep up with the maintenance of the buildings, it’s easy to forget this simple truth: your congregation has a future. When your congregation’s past seems brighter and more prosperous than its present state, it easy to lose sight of this important truth: your congregation has a future.

Why do leaders forget about the future of the institutions they lead? Those most likely to forget are those who are consumed with anxiety about the problems of the present, and this is too bad, because decisions made in anxiety are likely to be shortsighted decisions. Shortsighted decisions make the situation worse, which in turn makes people more anxious. Anxiety is contagious, and it feeds on itself.

You can always tell when you’re meeting with people who are used to being anxious. Two things happen during the meeting. First, the group spends the most time talking about the least important items. The discussion of the financial report may take forty-five minutes to an hour, but the discussion focuses on the least important numbers. Second, there are likely to be a fair number of complaints and negative comments.

Both of these dynamics are signs of anxious people looking for safety. It’s much safer to talk about why the AA group is contributing only $12 a meeting this year instead of the $15 they gave last year than it is to talk about the decrease in the number of pledgers or the $30,000 budget deficit. It’s also safer to be negative when everyone is anxious: when people are anxious and depressed, the negative voice is likely to be right that the fair won’t raise as much money as the organizers dare to hope.

Anxiety is nearsighted. Anxiety focuses our attention on the concerns and the crises of the present moment, and we lose the long view. It’s as if we were looking so closely at the ground where our feet are standing that we can no longer see where we are going. Indeed, we lose sight of the fact that we’re going anywhere at all, so we just stop moving at all and let things move at us.

Anxiety is lonesome. Anxiety makes us feel that we are isolated, that no one else has a situation like ours, and that no one can help. The congregations that feel the most defeated, the least hopeful that anything can change or get better, are the ones that are the most strongly convinced that their problems are theirs alone, that no one else shares similar ones, and that no one cares about theirs. Of course every congregation is to some extent different from every other one — no two groups of people are exactly alike — but the little ways in which congregations differ are far less important than the ways they are alike.

Anxiety makes us vulnerable to negative dynamics, makes us forget that we have a future, and makes us feel that we’re all alone. So the more space anxiety occupies in the organization, the less room there is for leadership.

Lack of leadership is a lack of faith in the future. But if we don’t have it, how do we get that faith? Well, most of us started to attend church regularly before we had received the gift of faith in Christ. We received the gift of faith because we were already acting as if we believed. I think it’s the same with the gift of faith in the future. There is only one way out of the debilitating anxiety that saps leaders’ strength and shortens their vision. The only way out of anxiety is to lead. Begin acting as if you have a future, and God may very well give you one.

The foundation of leadership is remembering that the congregation has a future and that the congregation is not alone. If, in every deliberation, you remember that you have a future, your highest priority will be leaving to the next group of leaders a parish that is stronger than it was when you became a leader. If, in every deliberation, you remember that you are not alone, you will constantly call on the experiences of other clergy and congregations, the agencies in your community, and the resources of your judicatory and national organization.

Congregational leaders must certainly act to meet current needs, but they must always balance the needs of the present with the long-term interests and health of the congregation. Too often leaders take actions that seem expedient or pastoral or mission-minded at the time, but down the road it becomes sadly apparent to your successors that these decisions seriously compromised the long-term ability of the congregation to carry out its mission.

When leaders sell or lease property unwisely, or make the cheapest, rather than the most appropriate, building improvements, or pull too much out of their long-term investments for capital improvements or operating expenses, they are forgetting that they have a future.

Congregational leaders must think of the congregations they lead as perpetual institutions. “Perpetual” here does not mean that the congregation will last forever; it means that the leaders of the congregation must act as if it will last forever. In perpetual institutions, a short-term solution is no solution at all. The leaders of perpetual institutions must always take the long view, even when meeting current needs.

If the congregation’s leaders cultivate the proper attitude of making the best decisions for the long-term health of the congregation, that attitude itself may also begin to clear away other common impediments to effective leadership.

For example, in congregations large and small, one person sometimes dominates the leadership group. All too often the dominant person — especially if he or she has been in power for many years — does not exercise good leadership, but uses the position either to work out a personal agenda or to control others. If the rest of the leadership takes the long view and constantly brings the conversation back to the merits of the case, there will be less chance of descending into a power struggle or a mere squabble.

My aim is to help leaders of congregations make decisions that are in the long-term best interests of their congregations. In order to make such decisions, the leaders need to believe that the congregation has a future, but that’s not all they need. A few other things get in the way of leaders making good decisions about the assets their congregations have. When we consider that so much property has been sold, so many long-term investments dissipated, and so many buildings allowed to deteriorate, we must ask why we have made such shortsighted decisions so often. I think there are several reasons that so many congregations and judicatories have done a less than exemplary job of good asset management over the years. These are different ways of forgetting either the future or the context in which we’re operating.

The Difficulty and Expense of Managing Assets

It isn’t easy to own something and to take care of it. Nothing — not property, nor buildings, nor investments, nor a congregation — takes care of itself. The resources needed to manage property or an investment portfolio generally don’t exist in-house. A well-led and well-managed institution like a hospital or college would find appropriate arms-length professional assistance to help with property or investment management, but congregations opt again and again either (1) to do without proper guidance in the management of their assets, or (2) to put themselves at the mercy of someone who agrees to do it for free, or (3) to allow themselves to be vastly overcharged by someone personally connected to a leader.

After a time of unsatisfactory results and constant headaches, the leaders decide they would be better off if they disposed of the asset. If it’s a piece of property, the leaders are often so frustrated that they agree to sell the property for less than market value, just to get the problem off the agenda every month. If it’s money, the decision to dispose of the asset may be less explicit. When meeting with a vestry that’s overspending its endowment, I’ve sometimes had the impression that they’re almost trying to spend it down so they won’t have to deal with the responsibility of getting proper management for the investments.

If you don’t want to be a slave to what you own, you need to pay attention to your assets, think long-term about them, and get the appropriate assistance you need to take care of them. We’re stewards of the gifts and talents God has entrusted to us in our generation. Not only, as I truly believe, will we be called to give an account of our stewardship to God, but, believe me, our successors will be able to tell whether or not we’ve done a good job. For good or ill, they’ll live with the long-term consequences of our decisions.

Note to the clergy

The “professional staff” of a congregation often consists of only you. You probably didn’t come to ordination with either a background or a huge interest in finance and property management. And even though you have to spend a great deal of your time on these matters, you may remember that, in seminary, you received the explicit or implicit message that this isn’t your job. Seminaries pay little, if any, attention to these matters. I think this is very unfortunate. It may not be the job of seminaries to teach these things (on the other hand, perhaps it is part of the job of a professional school to prepare students for the profession), but this area of congregational life is definitely part of your responsibilities. You may have expected that others would deal with these things. Your lay leaders probably expected that you would. Since resentment stems from disappointed expectations, there may now be some resentment all around. No matter how hard volunteers work or how much time they have available, the “executive director” is going to have a major role in these matters — especially when you are probably the facilities manager and perhaps part of the janitorial staff as well. My very sympathetic advice is: don’t kick against the goad. Try considering that financial leadership and the good management of the institution’s assets are opportunities for ministry (they really are). Learn to be comfortable with the basic categories, get the outside help you need, and do a good job with it. Your ministry will be more effective, and your successor will thank you very much.

The Tyranny of the Present and the Local

We’re born and educated and formed in particular places at a particular moment in history. Those places and that moment have their own experiences, convictions, assumptions, and prejudices. These things fill our minds so that we’re not usually consciously aware of them. They’re just part of the way things are. Just remember this: things change over time. The things people took for granted a century ago are different from what we assume is “normal.” We may safely predict that future generations will not make the same assumptions we do.

So we are probably not the culmination of history. We are probably not the point to which the trajectory of the cosmos has been tending; we are more likely part of the trajectory. In other words, we must see our needs and our priorities in the context of the priorities and needs of the past and those of the future. It’s self-centered — but not uncommon — to imagine that the present crisis (there’s always at least one) is more important than anything that’s likely to follow, so we should spend all we have on meeting today’s needs. Sometimes this is the pathology of an egocentric (but usually charismatic) leader. In other cases this is an error into which earnest people who are concerned for others are prone to fall, but it is an error nevertheless. It’s a way of forgetting the future.

Related to this is the economist Herbert Stein’s memorable observation, “Unsustainable trends tend not to be sustained.” An examination of any past trend — think of the Dow Jones average that, it was said through the late 1990s, couldn’t go down — demonstrates the truth of Stein’s words. However, it’s very difficult for us to apply the words to any trend that we are currently experiencing because such a trend is part of the way things are. We may not even be aware of it as something that could change. As a boy in 1962, I heard a presentation on the unbelievable number of schools that would need to be constructed assuming, as everyone did, that the high birthrate that began in 1946 would simply continue. Of course, 1962 was about the time the birthrate began to fall.

When somebody says, “assuming that present trends continue,” allow yourself to spend at least a moment thinking, “Yeah, but what if they don’t?” Resist the tyranny of the present and the local. It’ll make you a bit of a contrarian, so be careful, but it’s a very useful corrective to whatever the received consensus of the group is at the moment. You’ll make better decisions for the future if you hang a little loose to the present and its apparently unchangeable trends.

The Thought That “Church Is Different”

A lot of congregational leaders and clergy know that the church is different from other institutions in society, but they may be less clear on where and how the church is different and whether there are any models that can help. Clergy and church people often think they should be suspicious of other models: how spiritual or theologically sound can secular models be? Because of this not always well-articulated sense that “church is different,” leaders can make unsound decisions that lack even basic common sense and tell themselves that they are decisions of faith and that God will provide.

I have already said that I think the business model is not where we ought to look, but there are some helpful models for church leadership and management.

We shouldn’t look to the private sector. Businesses don’t have endowments, for one thing, and there’s no concept of a perpetual institution in the for-profit world. If there are useful models for us, they exist in the enormous not-for-profit sector that’s grown up in the last half-century. It makes sense that not-for-profits have something to say to us because a huge number of not-for-profit institutions — schools, colleges and universities, museums and other cultural organizations, hospitals and agencies that provide social and community services — were originally church institutions or were begun by committed church people to meet some need. A church certainly differs in organizational dynamics because of the unique immediacy of a congregation’s membership — no college has an open meeting for all students and alumni every week! — but universities manage their investments for the long term and usually have old, historic buildings to take care of. And they’re not doing all that instead of concentrating on their primary mission; they’re doing it so that they can do a better job fulfilling their primary mission.

Of course, there are differences of scale. Only the very largest congregations have as many professional and support staff as the smallest college. Funding patterns are very different. The entire secular not-for-profit sector has grown because of government funding — subsidies for cultural institutions, contracts for services for social service agencies, and tuition grants and guaranteed loans for un...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• HalfTitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6