Developing a financial sustainability plan for a presbytery requires good teams, solid planning

Stewardship Kaleidoscope workshop examines a sustainable model mid councils can follow

by Chuck Toney for the Presbyterian Foundation | Special to Presbyterian News Service

The Rev. Jeanne Radak

Facing a recurring $80,000 to $100,000 annual budget deficit, the Rev. Jeanne Radak knew her first task in 2013 as the new presbytery leader for the Presbytery of Newton was to create a more sustainable budget model and process.

“When I got there, the presbytery did have a new strategic plan,” she recalled during a workshop at Stewardship Kaleidoscope 2024 in Portland, Oregon, an annual conference on stewardship and financial matters. “I wanted to work on helping us become financially sustainable, but we had no idea what that meant.

Adding to her challenge was the fact that in 2021 the presbyteries in New Jersey transitioned from seven presbyteries to four and the Presbytery of Newton became part of the Presbytery of the Highlands. (Radak is now the Presbytery Leader for Highlands.) Uncertainty about a changed identity and the financial position were the backdrop for the financial sustainability process continuing.

“The first step — and an important one — was to acknowledge the issue and agree that we could not keep going budget to budget with deficits every year. We can’t just say, ‘We’ll figure it out next year.’ We also needed to learn who we were as a presbytery and get to know each other.”

As she talked with and listened to the pastors, staff, elders, and congregants in her presbytery, she realized that there was little clarity about “who was in charge of the money. We had lots of good people on teams doing good work, but there was little coordination among them.”

Radak proposed the following model to the presbytery leadership as a way to establish sustainable financial practices:

• Acknowledgement
• Gather a team
• Financial retreat
• Conversation and communication

Acknowledgement — Being honest about the existing process, and what works and what does not work, is a critical first step, she said. You can’t fix a problem that you don’t define.

Gather a team — The composition of the financial leadership team is crucial. “You need the financial people, of course, but you also need people with visioning ability,” Radak told attendees. “It’s important who is on the team. Don’t just go to the usual people who get on these committees.”

Financial retreat — “Who has a financial retreat?” she laughed, before adding that the retreat continued in subsequent years until the pandemic. She is planning to resume it in 2025.  “You have spiritual retreats and planning retreats. But not a financial retreat. Once we started, though, people wanted to keep doing them.”

Conversation and communication — “Even though this is the last item, it might be the most important,” she said. “We try to overcommunicate with our churches. They might get bored, but at least they’ve heard the accurate financial information from us.”

The result of this process was the creation of a map pointing the way toward financial sustainability and reducing that $100,000 deficit. The map defined the work that needed to be done; articulated a vocation statement (intentionally not, she said, a mission statement); established procedures for the various teams to communicate with each other; created a Funds Development Team; and developed a budget that matched the vision.

“The map has to be simple and understandable,” Radak explained. “It has to clarify the revenue streams, the fund policy, and the gift acceptance policy. It has to be built on our presbytery priorities over a 10-year timeline. And it has to have transparency.”

The map contained four concrete elements:

• Defined lines of financial responsibility within the presbytery committee structure
• A legacy giving program for pastors and senior leaders in honor of a beloved presbytery executive
• A clear connection between budgeting and vision
• An investment portfolio and strategy that provided a reliable income stream.

The deficit is now closer to $21,000 and the presbytery has added one full-time staff member.

And in a bold move that gave her some trepidation, she took on the 150-year-old practice of funding presbyteries through the per-capita assessment on congregation rolls.

“The Book of Order requires us to assess a per capita fee, but that is a declining model (as congregations grow older and membership declines),” she said. “It’s simply not a sustainable model for funding our operations.”

One of the key volunteers on the Funds Development Team began to ask questions about the funding model for presbyteries, especially the per capita assessment.

“I told him it was in the Book of Order,” Radak said. “’Can we change the Book of Order?’ he asked me. I told him that it could be changed, but that the process was not easy or quick. Honestly, I didn’t think it had a chance.”

But with the support of her finance team and presbytery, Radak drafted an overture that called for a thorough review of per capita as a funding model. That overture passed the General Assembly, and a report was made to the 225^th General Assembly (2022). The report recommended the appointment of a Funding Model Development Team to develop, recruit, implement, and provide oversight of possible funding model experiments. The FMDT has begun its work.

Radak points to an openness to collaboration, exhaustive communication, and clarity about financial authority and responsibility as keys to the success of this process.

“It is really important to know who your partners are,” Radak concluded. “We have never done this at the mid council level. Where can you share information and responsibility with other presbyteries? Can you do training together? What are the relationships that already exist? You have to have congregational buy-in or all of this will fail. The Presbyterian Foundation, New Covenant Trust Company, and the Lake Institute on Faith and Giving have been very helpful to us.”