Money
03/01/14 05:26
We think about money a little bit at this time of the year. We have a budget to develop for our church that will go to the congregation at its annual meeting at the end of the month. The annual budget will be modest when compared to most businesses. We’ll have a financial plan just a little over $300,000 for operations. There are additional special mission projects and capital funds that raise the total significantly, but we handle well less than one million dollars each year.
Compared to most other organizations, our church budget is very simple. We have no debt. We pay no interest. We operate as a cash business, which means that we operate the church on the amount that people give each year. When gifts go up, we have more to spend. When gifts go down, we have less. People are amazingly generous. I’ve only experienced one downward year in my career as a pastor and that was 2009, after the majority of our families experienced losses in 2008. It is a tad more challenging that it might first appear because most of our budget is invested in people. Adjusting salaries downward is a real challenge and our staff is so small that layoffs would be traumatic.
The core business of the church, however, isn’t money. Even though we invest energy in making our financial plans as accurate as we are able, the election of officers is more critical to the shape of the year to come than the budget. Who we elect to monitor our expenses and income and to make the decisions in the month-to-month operation of our church is far more important than how well we are able to predict income.
Elections and budgets are opportunities to express our faith. When we are faithful to God’s call, the resources to do our work will be provided. That does not mean that we won’t have to worry about money, but that the money we have will go to the things that are most important when we proceed with faith. It has been my experience that God is less interested in institutional maintenance and more interested in mission and outreach than we might expect.
Being an employee of the church and caring deeply about its work, I, like many others, invest heavily in the church. I think that it is typical for leaders of organizations to invest heavily in their enterprises. The richest man in America, Bill Gates, has wealth that came from the company he held, Microsoft.
Other than a fair salary, I am not expecting any financial rewards from my investments in the church.
As a result, I prefer to paddle homemade canoes rather than cruise in luxury yachts. It fits into my lifestyle much better. I do, however, read articles about yachts in magazines and I follow the yachting news a little bit because of my interest in boats generally. So I did pay attention when Oracle Team USA won the America’s Cup. It certainly didn’t seem like the team was going to bring home the cup this year. They were behind 8 to 1. That meant that they had to win seven straight races just to tie and then an eighth in a row to win. The competition, New Zealand, seemed to have an advantage in tacks that were close to the wind. The big catamaran wasn’t doing well upwind. New Zealand was running as much as a knot and a half faster, which is significant in boats with 45 knot top speeds.
But they started to win. And they won again and again and then they were tied and the final race looked to be a real nail-biter. In the end it wasn’t even too close. The victory was convincing. It still is exciting to watch the races on YouTube.
The owner of the American team’s boat, Larry Ellison, wasn’t on board the boat. He was watching the races from his luxury motor yacht Musashi. I suppose that that particular boat was also a rather expensive purchase. No worries, Ellison can afford it.
Let me put it in a little perspective. The winning team was Oracle Team USA. The name Oracle is the name of Ellison’s software company, and Ellison was the sponsor of the team. Their opponents, Emirates Team New Zealand, while representing the country of new Zealand, was sponsored by the richest country in the world. Neither team seemed to have significant problems raising the cash for the race.
Larry Ellison isn’t the richest person in America. With a net worth estimated at 41 billion, he falls well behind Warren Buffet ($58.5 billion) and even farther behind Bill Gates ($72 billion). These people play ball in a league that is significantly different that the world in which I live. According to Forbes, Warren Buffet, for example, lost $530.88 million yesterday alone. Not that you should worry. He’ll make it up in days to come. It is just that he handles far more each day than our church handles in a decade.
Ernie Cassiday, a Canadian who plays with boats that are more in my league than Ellison’s explained it this way: “Let’s say I came to like you a whole lot, decided to give you one dollar per second and kept giving you one dollar per second indefinitely. [Don’t get distracted by reality. Cassiday doesn’t have enough money to give it away at that rate, no matter how much he might come to like you.] At that rate you would be receiving a handsome $86,400 per day. You would be a millionaire in no more than 12 days and by the end of the first year you would have accumulated $31,536,000. At this rate how long would it take for me to turn you into a billionaire? It would take another 31 years!
Of course Ellison isn’t just a billionaire. He is worth 41 billion. He can afford any boat he wants to buy and a crew to sail it well.
I sincerely hope that Ellison has a church where he feels at home and where he experiences Christian community, but, frankly, I am glad that he isn’t a member of the church I serve. I clearly am not capable of even understanding his world, let alone serving those who live there. It would be OK to stop by his yacht to toast the America’s Cup victory, though I probably don’t own the right clothes for such an event, but how do you console a guy that lost $487.79 million dollars yesterday?
It might not be as hard as it appears. He doesn’t seem worried.