UP FRONT
Pastoral Planning and the Economic Meltdown
David B. Couturier  |  Fall 2009

For most Catholics, Wall Street is a long way from Main Street and should be a long way from the sanctuary as well. However, the global recession that broke last year is a tragic reality cutting across every nation, culture, institution, and society. We are in for difficult times for some time to come. States, for example, are now forecasting that they will not return to their ordinary spending levels until at least 2014. If leading indicators are to be believed, our economic situation is likely to get much worse in the coming months. We are in dangerous financial waters, and churches are at risk. This financial meltdown challenges the way we plan. Pastoral leaders need to understand the scope of the problem and engage its impact on our parishioners and pastoral institutions.

This economic downturn reveals what most Americans already knew in their guts. The average American worker has been working longer and harder and for less money. Americans have far less time to spend with their families and even less time for volunteering in their churches. The average worker now spends 200 more hours per year on the job than he or she did in the 1970s, an extra five weeks per year. The reason Americans are working harder is not greed or misplaced family priorities. Driving this cycle of overwork is simply the desire to maintain what families now have. The fact is that wages, adjusted for inflation, have remained distressingly stagnant for the past two decades, while the costs for food, housing, energy, college, day care, and health care have soared well beyond the rate of inflation. As one person recently put it, the modern economy is no longer an escalator that carries people up and out of disadvantage. Today it is more like a treadmill whose settings are gradually increased. People have to run faster just to stay in place.

Americans are also drowning in debt and losing their homes in record numbers. In 2005, the personal savings rate dipped below zero percent for the first time since the Great Depression. In 1985, the personal savings rate was nine percent. Not so today. It’s estimated that the average American household consumer debt in 2004 was between $9,000 and $13,000. Between 1990 and 2004, America’s total credit card debt increased from $243 billion to $735 billion. It is clear that more and more people have been using their credit cards to buy groceries, fill prescriptions, and pay for their medical care. The sad fact is that we have decided to burden the next several generations with economic obligations (e.g., for bailouts and military expenditures) that we have been unwilling to bear ourselves. This will put pressure on our congregations for years to come.

We know that the financial crisis is hurting two groups immediately: young people and the elderly. Unemployment across the country is rising precipitously. The Bureau of Labor Statistics provided the data for February 2009. The number of unemployed persons increased by 851,000 to 12.5 million in February, and the unemployment rate rose to 8.1 percent. Over the past twelve months, the number of unemployed has increased by about 5 million, and the unemployment rate has risen by 3.3 percentage points. Young people are bearing a unique share of this burden. Unemployment among young people sixteen to nineteen now stands at 20.8 percent, and the prospects for employment after college graduation are dire. For African-American youth, the unemployment rate stands at a staggering 36.5 percent.

Elderly Americans have lost upward of three trillion dollars from their retirement accounts. Many of them are now trying to squeeze back into a job market they thought they had left behind for good. Relying on them for volunteer work in our religious programs may not be as possible as it once was.

What does all this have to say about the church’s ability to plan for the future? First, there will be higher levels of demand put on all communities that do outreach to people who are struggling. (The United Way, for example, recently reported a sixty-eight percent increase in the number of calls received this year for basic needs like food, shelter, and warm clothing.) Second, our churches will find themselves over time with depleted resources as local, state, and national funding for programs dries up and individual contributions decline.

A new report just published by the Barna Group found that, during the last four months of 2008, one out of every five households had cut their church giving. Among those who have reduced their giving, twenty-two percent have stopped giving altogether. As a result, churches stand to see a decline in their donations to the tune of three billion to five billion dollars in 2009. The Giving USA Foundation recently tracked charitable donations during past times of economic downturn to help forecast what we may be facing during this crisis. It found that during years with eight months or more of recession, charitable giving declined an average of 2.7 percent per year. The worst decline was the 9.2 percent drop (adjusted for inflation) during the 1972-1975 recessionary period.

There are two things churches can do. The first is to get people working together on their economic concerns and challenges. The second is to use our theological resources to develop more secure economic relationships at all levels of the church.

Parish Discussions on Economic Challenges

Noticing the difficulty people have talking about the economic challenges facing them, the Boston office of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) has developed a format for people to come together to talk about what impact the current economic crisis is having on them. Gathered in what are being called “Common Security Clubs,” people discuss what’s happening to them economically, learn the root causes of the economic crisis, and work on helping one another.

The IPS provides a simple three-step model. The first step is to learn and reflect on what’s happening economically. The second step is to provide mutual aid and local action. The third step is to engage in social action together.

Using videos, Bible study questions, and resources supplied by the IPS, parishioners see their financial struggles as part of a larger, indeed a global, problem that we can help solve, if we work together. Three questions guide the early discussions:

• What are the economic signs of the times that we see?

• How is the economic crisis touching you personally? How is it impacting your friends and those you talk to?

• How is the economic crisis touching our parish?

One member of a Common Security Club summed up the goal of this hands-on initiative when she said, “Let us pray together that our private pain now becomes our shared concern, that together we find ways to overcome our fear and anxiety, and be present to one another. Let us not be afraid, but take action together.”

Pastoral Planning and the Five Principles of a Fraternal Economy

Holding parish discussions on economic challenges will be counterproductive if the whole system of parish financial decision-making is based on models of domination and deprivation. We need a robust theological analysis of economics, so that Catholics can see that present financial strategies emphasize privacy over common good, the material over the spirit, and aggression over compassion. We need a more relational kind of pastoral economics for the twenty-first century. It is the church that can provide the theological principles to develop it.

In my book on “the fraternal economy,” I outlined five principles that can get us beyond the “pick yourself up by your own bootstrap” idiom of aggressive capitalism. The five principles are the following:

1. Transparency–We need to develop and maintain an authentic and mature transparency at all times and at every level of church life. We should adhere to the proposition that all the goods, economic activities, and ministerial decisions of the church are at the service of the whole. There should be no hidden schemes by leadership or membership in any of our pastoral organizations. In 2006, the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management presented the Archdiocese of Boston its Best Practices Award for its recently completed Financial Transparency Project, commending it for the comprehensive, consolidated, audited, and reader-friendly financial reporting that the Leadership Roundtable believes is needed in all dioceses and churches.

Parishes need to be models of transparency. Clearly, as this economic crisis demonstrates, our American financial system is riddled with secret deals and shady practices. The excessive bonus compensation packages that accompanied even the rescue and recovery plan made us aware of just how deep the lack of transparency goes in today’s corporate culture. It cannot be that way in the Christian community. Churches must lead the way in terms of institutional transparency.

2. Equity–In an equitable system, individuals and communities get what they need and contribute what they have for the common good and the building up of communion. With a gospel mission focus, service replaces entitlement in church management. In the past, power and privilege were often the keys to pastoral goods and services. For far too long, an ontology of clerical privileges and lay subordination were seen as normative in the practice of church administration. Clearly, this has to change and be replaced by a new and more vibrant collaboration in mission based on each person’s unique role in the church. We promote equity by initiating and maintaining robust methods of mission-based planning and budgeting.

3. Participation–We need new mechanisms of cooperation and learning in our church communities, virtual spaces where pastors and pastoral ministers can address their pastoral problems and learn how to do their ministries better. We need online networks where pastoral ministers can share tips, tools, resources, and stories about how to increase excellence in ministry. As pastoral planners we should develop online “communities of practice” in areas such as budgeting, human resources, and financial management across our dioceses and parish communities. They can be places where ministers go to find specific answers to their nagging pastoral problems from people who have been there and found answers to their questions and tools for their needs.

4. Solidarity–This principle suggests that those who have more must give more to those who are deprived. Solidarity continually addresses the question of voice in pastoral planning, by asking whose issues, concerns, fears, and needs are included and whose are systematically absent from our pastoral discussions. Pastoral planning must set a place at its table for those whose pastoral concerns never seem to matter much or who are drowned out by more powerful and privileged voices.

5. Austerity–Perhaps the most difficult of the principles of a relational economy is austerity. It suggests that some may have to trim their desires so that others can have a fundamental shot at opportunity. This economic crisis demonstrates that opportunity cannot be presumed. Our economic playing fields are not level. Austerity is a shared ministerial discipline that makes the other pastoral virtues of transparency, equity, etc., achievable. In Capuchin life, we call austerity “the minimum necessary, not the maximum allowed” principle. It recommends that we live and work simply, so that others can simply live and work. I strongly believe that the competitive age of gross excess that we have just lived through emerges from an Enlightenment view that sees God as ultimately distant and stingy. Pastoral planning should not get trapped in these theologies of scarcity, but be immersed in an enlivening theology of God’s good and gracious abundance.

Implications for Pastoral Planning

Americans are increasingly worried about their economic future. They have been trained to privatize their economic worries and isolate themselves in their financial pain. We need to bring these concerns out into the open and use our churches as safe places to help one another in our mutual economic recovery. Priests, pastoral ministers, and seminarians need specific training in how to engage financial concerns and economic decisions in a more theologically mature and holistic way. As pastoral planners, we should lobby directors of ongoing formation for clergy and seminary rectors to develop these training seminars with us.

Church donations are likely to go down significantly as the economic crisis deepens. Social defenses against corporate economic worries can split communities and deepen the forces of polarization that already exist in the church. Pastoral planners should provide appropriate tools that parishioners and ministers can use to discuss the rational and emotional sides of the financial crisis we are in. These tools should take advantage of the platforms for “communities of practice” available on the Internet.

This global economic meltdown provides Catholics with an opportunity to lobby for a more relational and less aggressively private economy. Our methods of pastoral planning will easily be dismissed as fads if they are not well grounded in good theology. We can help in the transformation of our economic systems by working from within the tradition and from the ground up. Our trinitarian theology is the key to this development.

We should encourage all our parishioners to use the five principles of the fraternal economy as benchmarks for financial excellence. Parishes should be educated on ways they can track their fidelity to a relational form of economic decision-making by scoring their performance on transparency, equity, participation, solidarity, and austerity. I would encourage the development of “financial excellence scorecards” that could be distributed to parishes.

Conclusion

Recently I heard a community organizer in Boston describe the situation this way. Even in the more plentiful years, it was always difficult for community organizers to secure funding for neighborhood projects. The poor are always left to glean what is left behind. But in good times the gleaning provided resources that were sufficient to get by. Now that we are facing very lean times, leaders have to be prepared to decide what is truly important and what is absolutely necessary. We have to name, in the words of this community organizer, what is the “holiest of holies.”

We know that church budgets will be cut, and some projects will be trimmed. We, like others, will want to defend what we have built. But, we must do more than repeat budgets or rehearse ideological mantras. We must engage in serious theological and prayerful community discernment of changing local conditions and help root the community in our deepest values and most cherished hopes.

Far too often in the recent past, Catholics, when anxious, have turned to a decidedly un-Catholic habit of questioning one another’s loyalty and fidelity. As the world struggles mightily with its issues of poverty and justice, we are in danger of losing ourselves in these intramural ecclesial battles and ecclesiastical turf wars. If we continue in this line, the world will lose interest, and Catholics will not only no longer be at the table when the great issues are discussed and decided. We may not even be in the room. Pastoral planners must keep all of us attuned and on task with our deepest and holiest of holy desires!

David B. Couturier, OFM Cap is the Director of the Office of Pastoral Planning for the Archdiocese of Boston and author of The Fraternal Economy: A Pastoral Psychology of Franciscan Economics.