FAITHFUL BUDGETING

Our congregation spent most of its official meeting this afternoon discussing a budget that was prepared by our budget committee and preliminarily reviewed by our session. While the session retains ultimate power to vote on the final document, which it will do in January, of course we desire the congregation's input. And the most interesting discussion centered around our use of our endowment.

It is a wonderful thing to have an endowment; many churches have no such thing, and therefore find themselves in constant financial straits. But with the blessing comes responsibility, and we congregants and leaders take that responsibility seriously. What, then, is the faithful response to an endowment; to safeguard it from whittling away or to spend it down on the things God would be pleased for us to be doing?

Having been on session for five years now, I've voted aye on five straight budgets which reflected a net loss and therefore a dip into the endowment. Many of those years, the actual financials showed no net loss, since we tend to overbudget and underspend. But this year's version promises to be a definite loss, and perhaps a very large one. Large enough, indeed, to make many people nervous about passing it.

One side are those who say we must go by faith: God has not given us a lump of money to sit on, but to use for His glory. It is not as though we are stingy givers and wasteful spenders; on the contrary, we are a remarkably generous congregation (given that we are mixed in our income levels, and not all upper-income) and tend to be spartan in our expenditures and our salaries.

Therefore, let's trust that those who gave to our endowment through bequests and other large gifts would want us to use their money to plug the annual hole that we have between what we bring in and what we spend out. In fact, in the past ten years, we've seen little change in our endowment even as we've dipped into it, because of 1) the bull market of the roaring 1990's and 2) new bequests that add to the endowment principal.

All well and good, say some; but this year promises to be different. It is prudent, even required in some industries, to spend down between 2% and 7% of an endowment; any more and you deteriorate principal, any less and you're not using the endowment for what it's there for. And while we've been around 5% for the past few years, this year's budget is probably going to weigh in at about a 14% dip into the endowment.

So rather than saying it's OK to dip in, or to merely encourage people to give more, we must get our red pens out and slash some things in the budget. If the leaders are asking the congregants to sacrificially give offerings, the congregants ought to ask the leaders to sacrificially cut spendings.

Whichever side of this fascinating argument we find ourselves on, we all agree that what's most important is that we subordinate our desires and plans under the lordship of Christ the King. And so I pray, that whether we dip deeply into our endowment, raise our giving, and/or spend within our means, that we do so by God's leading and for the sake of His Name.