Theological Business Studies

It is a cast-iron fact that 108% of all people who come forward for ordination are former youth-workers. A further 79% are teachers with the residue being called by God from the partners of existing ordained people. It's a fact I tell you. 

One or two, and not many more, once did the filthy and grubby thing of working in business of some sort or another, or worse still, dedicated years of life to turning a profit. 

Now the thing about being a Vicar in particular is, whether you like it or not, is that you become a business manager. You are responsible in larger part for the paying of bills, the raising of that wonga, the chasing of the mammon, the balancing of the books and the general legal and financial well-being of a small and wonderful conglomerate of lovely donors we call Christians. 

I sat in theological college with some of these lovely former Youth Lurkers and Teacher-types as we were gifted the insights of entire minutes of business-style education for when we are Vicars. The psychology of why you must never go near a human female of child-bearing age without a chaperone or eight - hours of that was crammed into us. Business focussed advice? Blink and thou shalt miss it, my friend. One of my esteemed class mates, shuddering at the prospect of going near this filthy lucre, and simply stated that he would 'leave that sort of things to others'. If you want a target for a simple fraud, I'll pass you his address. Maybe he needs a Treasurer from the Dark Side. 

The thing is, so few priests have had cause to handle money, consider financial strategy, how to counter problems or avoid them in the first place, would know how to induct a new Parish Treasurer themselves, let alone the pre-payment and accruals systems or the basics of fund management. Yet these things form part of our core duties after Level III God Bothering. 

In business, a poor business manager would become the cause of his/her business's failure and eventual collapse. If a priest is lucky, he/she may have a gifted Treasurer who can hide all this inconvenient administration work away so that Reverend Cloud-Nine doesn't have to regard it with naive eyes. Not all Vicars are that fortunate, and some Vicars are - this very day - being defrauded. Yes, dear readers, it happens and has happened to friends of mine. 

I say to Theological Colleges this: train priests not just in the art of pastoral self-protection, but of business self-preservation. A church that grows is a church that finds the resources to grow. A church that discovers the resources to grow has normally come about much of them by acute stewardship and a businesslike approach to raising those funds. Shrinking churches do often do so in the hazy reverie that God will provide. 

As my mother says: "God will provide, but expects you to do the hustling".

Here endeth the Lesson. 

PS, I am not for a second saying that teachers and YoofUrkers can't manage accounts - it is simply a matter of direct exposure in former lives and the experiences and insights they bring

What They Will Never Say at Your Funeral

I don't know, but you may be reading this at work. The lull in traffic would suggest that blogs are read more during employed hours than during private home time. Anyway, you will undoubtedly be reading these words mid-toil at some coal face or other, be that work, home or play.

Apart from Funeral Directors and crematorium chapel attendants, I can safely say that I have been to more funerals than you. Bold, I know - but unless you are the modern day Crippen with a heart for full closure, I have been to many many more funerals that you, old friend. Which means I can state in some certainty that I know what I am talking about on the subject of what is said in funerals. So there. 

At funerals, many words are said. Most are spoken 'off script' these days and reflect the mood of the gathering in regards to your past presence. Someone once said : "Live so that people don't have to lie about you at your funeral", or words to that effect, and I am the geezer with the rictus grin who will be there to witness that truth or lie. 

Seriously though, we bust our buns most of our lives to excel and improve. We are acquisitive, desirous of status, pursuers of success, image conscious, try hard to be the best or demonstrate ability, and regard failure to be an offense in these spheres. I am the same, don't worry. And then we die! Drop down dead, stone cold stiff. Then the words start. 

Without exception, in the millions of funerals I have lead or attended, the subject of bank balance has not arisen. In those services, the rank or grade attained in employment was never raised verbally. Perhaps if the deceased were gifted, that may have been mentioned. The number of bedrooms in their former home was never uttered, nor was the cubic capacity of the former big car. Musculature or the smoothness of the skin upon their face - never mentioned. The shaping of the eyebrows or the neat little flick of the fringe - nope. None of these things are ever mentioned at a funeral, and won't be at yours.

What will be discussed is the quality of your person. Your good works or faithfulness will reach the surface. Your smile, your care, you love and your example - they will be the meat on this particular plate. Whether you did every thing you could to raise your family properly and with out the interference of career laddering; whether you gave without counting the cost; whether you were gracious, straightforward, humorous, genuine, gentle, witty, intelligent or brave; what you leave in your wake by way of example - all of these things will be said at your funeral. 

When it comes down to the summary of your life, the material stuff will be forgotten. The emotional and spiritual will finds its way out every time. The ones missed at funerals most are the ones who knew how to exhibit love in abundance.

Just a thought for a middle of a working week!

Church and The Value of Time

I have been thinking about, and talking about the whole 'giving' thing. It is something that I have to take seriously as a Vicar, as a broke church is a fairly closed one. 

When we talk about 'giving' in church life, we are more often than not talking about dosh / wonga / cash. Entire campaigns are planned and orchestrated so that we may pursue the Mighty Dollar, at times (in my opinion) with a sense that God is a coin-operated fairground ride. In other words, you pop your coin in the slot and God will whir into action like a celestial automaton. 

This said, bankruptcy is a sure blanket to mission - just so you know that I can be balanced!

The goal, often, is to secure financial resource. In doing this, I believe very strongly that we massively de-value a resource that we already have - the time and talents of our people. 

If we think about church life, in many cases we have the wheezy cleric somewhere there, surrounded by a panoply of willing volunteers. Stewardship drives often centre around paying the bills, central to which (in the Church of England) is Parish Share / Common Fund. It is in many ways our mortgage payment. It is the means that we pay people like me and house people like me, so I have to defend it! But I cannot, do not and should not run a church alone.

Taking but one example in a church where I used to be, there was a lady who helped do the flowers. She was a qualified woman and could (and did) demand hourly rates in three figures. She worked hard and then then spent four or five hours a months doing floral displays for the glory of the worship. Her efforts may have been recognised once in a while with a passing thanks, before she returned to the world of work to be paid hundreds of pounds an hour for her time. In actual terms, the 'value' she brings to the parish could be (and should be) valued in thousands of pounds per months. If she stopped doing the flowers but gave an extra twenty a month, we would regard it as a win. 

I use this example to illustrate a point, that in church life we de-value or undervalue the time given to us. If I priced up the time given freely in my present community, and were caused to buy it in, it would generate a bill of hundreds of thousands of pounds per year. 

When someone commits to giving us a hundred pounds a months, we celebrate and we play fanfares. When someone offers to mow the church lawn twice a month, it might generate a grateful grunt. Some church communities are hard-pressed for cash. I would argue that the value of the gift of time that they count on daily makes them rich beyond measure, but that when we don't see or smell the cash, we forget its value. We could usefully learn from the commercial world that appreciates skills and values them. We could usefully learn that lesson. 

Father Shylock: Vicar

No, I am not a Mafia cash collector - but I am no less a pain to have on your Fundraising Committee. 

Actually, I am harder nosed than a Mafia cash collector.

Like or not, churches need cash like I need haemoglobin. I wish I didn't need it, but I would not get far without it and its benefits. Churches are, I am given to understand, temples of prayer and devotion to God who no more wish to have to chase shekels than I do to eat my greens and keep my red stuff red. 

"God will provide" will not keep a church open - sadly. 

In a number of parishes where I have been involved, I have found myself as the Shylock character. I am from a background in sales, and know how turn over cash. More often than not, it is no harder than simply making a case and asking. 

And here I am in a new place who have done remarkably well at raising no small amounts of wonga, and actually seemed to have been more successful by dint of a lack of Vicar. It is to the credit of a modest team of those who simply agreed to help. The reason why this is something of a revelation to me is that it is the first of the parishes that I have worked with for some time that have taken an even remotely commercial view to raising funds. That I will ask them to be greedier and altogether more demanding may come as a shock to some, maybe not.

There are probably two ways of fundraising. The first is to send an annual invoice for a thousand quid to the willing people of the congregation, shut the doors, and get a poor turnover. The other is to give value to that donation and spread it over a period of time. This is before you shake the tin at grant makers and the filthy rich. There is a danger, when in the mindset of purely fundraising (in times of major projects etc), that we under-sell the need to get hard cash. There can be a confusion with 'social event' and 'fundraiser' - both are vital in churches, and that you over price social activity or under price fundraising events. Equally, under selling the value of an event can easily undervalue the event, if you know what I mean. 

What I think I am saying, is that churches that don't have international nurture courses need to think creatively and greedily about filling the coffers. Euphemism, diffidence, coyness or simple blindness to need - they all hamper the bank-balance. 

Ask, and ye shall receive! 

That Which Costs Nothing Has No Value

 Lord Jeremy Clarkson of Chipping Norton was writing about such things as photographs and the like in his book “How Hard Can it Be” (2006), and reflected on the advent of digital photography and how value-less our photographs seem to have become. I must sympathise with his prophetic words, in this regard and in others that I too have commented upon. In a recent post, I spoke of the way we spend so little time on things that demand so little time (see the post here). He muses on the times when we would go on holiday with our one roll of 24 exposure camera film, carefully pay the dividend for them to be developed and posted back, then to be enjoyed and filed in an album. Nowadays, he continues, we shoot thousands of images, keep them all and rarely look at them a second time (and, he continues, bore the rest of the world by putting them on Facebook before abandoning them for an eternity).

He assigns a simple cause: “And without a cost it has no value”. Now, even a cynic like me would have to draw a line. Some things in life are free and become of exceptional value. I was sat with some lovely clergy this morning talking about baptism (or ‘christening’, if you thought there was a difference) and having only read Lord Clarkson last night, pondered on why it is that so many people present little Johnny or Janine for a dunking only for them to vanish like the snow in summer afterwards. In fact, the invisibility cloak of baptism and confirmation was once the meat of a opening joke in one of my boss’s sermon – and he is right in so many cases. Perhaps a christening is one of those ‘must do’ things, like the conferring of an amulet to prolong life and health, I don’t know. The thing is, churches do not (quite rightly) charge for baptisms, and neither do we demand a cost in other things such as behaviour.  Easy come, easy go?

There is probably something of this in every stewardship campaign too. It is funny how the collecting plate has an amplifying effect on our cash. I remember a man once explain how ‘small’ a fiver was in a supermarket when we pop in for a bottle of wine, and how ‘big’ it becomes when being dangled over a collecting plate. I remember preaching on a number of occasions on the biblical phrase ‘where your treasure is your heart is also’, and I wonder how much motivation towards the church in question would ascend if its life and needs became a substantial call on the spare cash (rather than the present time when many use the collecting plate as an opportunity to rid themselves of brass pocket-wrecking shrapnel). There has to be a direct correlation between cost and worth. Indeed, in the former life, I would note that when certain things became too cheap, they would stop selling, believe it or not.

This not a post with an answer, but I ponder this a lot. Church feels at times like a disposable habit, demanding less per hour than a cheap cinema but offering so much more than the latest CGI.