Whiteboard: Narrative Budget and Worship

Wait, a pie chart?

On The Whiteboard?

What is going on here? I thought The Whiteboard always had something to do with worship.

Well, you see, this Sunday we are officially kicking off our 2015 Stewardship Campaign and we'll be doing things just a little bit different this year.

During the Stewardship Campaign we'll be presenting a Narrative Budget. Now, have no fear. In order to prepare a Narrative Budget you first have to go and do the faithful planning of a tradition line item budget. We know how much money we need ($260,834) and where those resources will be spent. But a Narrative Budget doesn't stop with the numbers. No, a Narrative Budget is a way for us to tell our story through our budgeting process!

Here is what you do. After preparing a full line-item budget (and we have copies of that available in the church office for anyone who wants to see one, just stop by!) you break down that budget even further by determining how those particular line-items fit into the specific categories of work that define what we do here at the church.

Sounds complicated, but really it isn't. Particularly when you have something that helps orient and organize our work here at the church like we do...our Mission Statement!

Every Sunday I begin the worship service by saying, "We are a Christ-centered Community Inviting Everyone to Seek and Celebrate God's Love through Joyful Worship, Mission, & Ministry!"

Did you catch those last three words (well, four if you count the ampersand)?

Worship.

Mission.

Ministry.

Those words define who we are as a church and help us categorize our work. The Finance Team and the Executive Team here at FCC Scottsdale have been working hard to take our line-item budget and break it out into those three key categories so that we can see just how we are putting your stewardship dollars to work for Worship, Mission & Ministry.

Thus the Pie Chart. It turns out that we allocate about 40% of our stewardship dollars for Worship here at FCC Scottsdale.

And I know what you are thinking: "Is the Worship Committees Budget really that large? Are we spending that much money on communion bread and grapejuice?"

No.

Remember we are reallocating our line-item budget to fit our understanding of who we are. If you want to have a weekly worship service you're gonna need lights and (particularly here in Arizona) you're gonna need air conditioning. So we did a time study and broke out the amount of electricity that we need use on a regular basis for the Sunday morning worship service and we put that percentage of the Property Budget into the "Worship" category. We did a similar thing with my salary (about 40% of my time goes to planning and leading worship, so 40% of my salary went into the "Worship" category) and Jane's salary (30%, representing her time each week printing the bulletin, creating the Song Show Presentation, sending out the liturgy, updating the Worship page on the website and more). Since the worship service wouldn't be complete with music we also included the full salaries of our Director of Music Ministries, our accompanist, and our percusionist. Once you add all those things together (and a couple of smaller categories too, like, well, communion bread and grape juice!) you end up with a total that is about 40% of our budget.

That it is what you see on the Pie Chart this week on The Whiteboard, and that is what we'll be talking about in worship this coming Sunday -- Worship. We'll be talking about what it means, why we do it, why it is important, and we need to continue to support the worship ministries at FCC Scottsdale.

Next week I'll be adding the next category to The Whiteboard (Mission) and on November 9 the service will be built around it. Then on the week after that I'll update The Whiteboard with our third category (Ministry) and on November 16 we'll be talking about that. Finally, on November 23 we'll have our Dedication Sunday as we wrap up our Stewardship Campaign and turn over pledges to the glory of God.

It is going to be a lot of fun in the next few weeks church, because here is what a Narrative Budget really lets us do: Celebrating the stories of our church. We'll be talking about the incredible things that happen here at FCC Scottsdale and the ways that your tithes, offerings, and pledges help to make all of that happen. You won't want to miss a minute of it!