Financing the Scout Council
I have some thoughts on financing our Scout Council which I want to share. But in order to do that better, I need to talk about church financing, in order to set up proper understandings of what might be called our “business model.”
What is the primary product/work output of the Church? Looking at a congregation’s budget will give you a false impression. The typical congregation spends well over half its available funds on STAFF: pastoral compensation, housing, business expenses, pension, etc; and (depending on congregational size) wages for other (often part-time) workers – youth directors, secretaries, custodians . . . It spends about a quarter to a third (depending on conditions) on maintaining its PROPERTIES: church plant, parking, parsonage, utilities for same. The remainder is spent on office expenses, program (a surprisingly small amount), and benevolences/missions. If you only look at the budget, you will get the impression that the primary product/work output of the Church is what the paid staff do on church property.
But the primary product/work output of the Church is what the New Testament calls “the righteous deeds of the saints.” Worship is a huge part of that, and the weekly gathering in which people offer themselves to God is called “liturgy,” from leitourgia, meaning “the work of the people.” But every day, people are praying, they are helping others, they are making peace between those in conflict, they are doing their devotions, they are providing a witness to the transforming love of God in Christ by how they live and what they say. That’s what the Church actually DOES. That’s what the Church IS.
The righteous deeds of the saints, of course, don’t cost much. Money doesn’t change hands, nor does it much help in the saints doing what they do. Making the saints more productive is a matter of training (formation, discipleship), but the best way to get more out of the saints is to make more of them. And making more saints is greatly aided by there being more people and places for them to cohere around. Here is where the local church and its budget come in. Enabling leadership that enables followers is why we have staff. St. Paul says the leaders “equip the saints to do the work of ministry.” What the leaders do is not the primary ministry of the Church, it is the equipping of the ordinary folks who do the primary ministry. But we need leaders, and if they are to be paid, we need to pay them adequately. Likewise, the congregation is greatly assisted in its work by having its own proper place, where it can gather people, store its stuff, and base its operations. And if we are to have real estate, then we need to keep it in repair. That’s being good stewards of what we have been entrusted with.
Now, it often happens that leaders at various levels lose sight of the fact that the primary product/work output of the Church is what the ordinary believers do. They tend to think of what the ordinary believers contribute, monetarily, as the important thing. And they try to figure out how to smooth out the vagaries of giving and doing in order to get a constant stream of support for what THEY want to do: start new stand-alone programs and staff them with well-paid leaders. But all the money that supports everything the congregations AND the conferences want to do comes out of the weekly offering plate. Trying to extract the maximum in value from the local church – getting your cut first, say – may look efficient, but it can hinder the main need of the Church as a whole, which is making new disciples to give and do as disciples are supposed to. Hiring “anti-racism” staff members who go about doing whatever it is they do from a big central office is not going to make more disciples. It might be seen as a good thing to have, but if the church is in fact SHRINKING, then constantly trying to add more bells and whistles – at any level of the church – is a distraction and a burden.
The United Methodist Church is dying – slowly, yes, but dying all the same. We have lost members every year of our existence. And the decline is accelerating. We need to focus, above all, on making more disciples – in more places – rather than on central office boondoggles. We have forgotten what business we are in. We think we can have the best circus in town without inducing new people to come to the show.
Now, I said I was going to talk about Scouting financial matters. So allow me to make the same case in terms of BSA programs and institutions. If you look at our Council budget, you will get the same false impression of what we are about as you get from looking at a church budget. The lion’s share of what we spend money on is STAFF. Secondarily, we have PROPERTIES to maintain. Most of the rest of what we do is office expense and program (slightly more on program shows up in a local Council budget than in a local church budget, I’m guessing). If you only look at the Council’s budget, you will think the primary thing the Council does is done by the people who work in our office or camps.
But the primary product/work output of Scouting is what the youth and volunteers are doing: going camping, doing good turns, having EXPERIENCES and reflecting upon them (“Growth comes as a reflection upon experience”). That’s the business we’re in. And it costs money to do that, so the units are all busy doing as many fundraisers as they have to to support their program. Some of them are doing quite a lot in that regard, though I maintain that you don’t have to operate your unit as a small business in order to deliver the program. One pair of related units I know raises $30,000 a year to support their program. (I sometimes question whether we enable our troops to actually get the most out of their program; they seem to think they have to buy so many things off the rack, including experiences, when they could do for themselves cheaper and better. But that’s just me.) In any case, the success of the local unit is not measured in how much money they raised, but in the good and fun things they DID. That’s what Scouting IS: an adventure in good company. And you can do it without obsessing about money.
Nevertheless, a certain amount of money is necessary in order to get your child started. Annual registration isn’t cheap anymore. And uniforms are outrageously expensive. You need a handbook and at least some camping gear. The initial barrier to getting started as a new Scout can be prohibitive. The professional staff like to point out that the entry costs to Scouting compare quite favorably to the entry costs for, say, youth sports or band. Yes, but the social cachet – the status markers – of sports and band have significantly more market value to the general public than Scouting does. And that was true even back when BSA was at its peak c. 1970. We ain’t there anymore.
The fact is that BSA has been declining for years, and the decline has been accelerating. Even before the bankruptcy disruption, even before the LDS church pulled out of its association with us, even before Covid-19 hit. We have a fraction of the Scouts, in a fraction of the units, that we once did. This should be ringing alarm bells all over the place for us. The primary thing we do is local: kids from a particular place under leaders they know face-to-face, doing Scouty things. Yes, the Council supplies an essential service. The professional staff and our properties help our local units work better in doing what they do. And in a few cases, we provide things that local units would find difficult to do for themselves, like summer camp. But if we cannot reverse our decline in units and membership, enabling the Council to fund itself more efficiently is just polishing the brightwork on a sinking ship.
Comes now the leadership of our Council saying, we need to charge an annual Program Fee for every Scout in every unit, in order to smooth out the vagaries of funding ourselves by asking for donations and selling popcorn. It won’t be much, they say – we’ll still be a better buy than youth sports or band – and it will enable the Council to thrive. But “the Council” is not the people who work at the office; it is not even our properties. “The Council” is our various units and the Scouts and volunteers therein. And if they are to grow, to add new units and new members, we need to think about the best way to make that happen. Front-loading costs on new families to whom we have not demonstrated our value is a stupid way to go about it. We need to be giving new family discounts in various ways, to induce more people to try our product. We need to find ways to train our local volunteers in delivering the champagne program on the beer budget. Yes, we need money. We will always need money. But fantasizing about what you could do if you just had X more dollars to ease the Council budget does not increase the product/work output of Scouting. It is a diversion, a boondoggle.
The magic of Scouting is a kid going camping and encountering the stars. If what you want to do doesn’t directly lead to more kids in more groups doing more nights under the stars, it’s about you, not them. And they’re what we’re about.
What is the primary product/work output of the Church? Looking at a congregation’s budget will give you a false impression. The typical congregation spends well over half its available funds on STAFF: pastoral compensation, housing, business expenses, pension, etc; and (depending on congregational size) wages for other (often part-time) workers – youth directors, secretaries, custodians . . . It spends about a quarter to a third (depending on conditions) on maintaining its PROPERTIES: church plant, parking, parsonage, utilities for same. The remainder is spent on office expenses, program (a surprisingly small amount), and benevolences/missions. If you only look at the budget, you will get the impression that the primary product/work output of the Church is what the paid staff do on church property.
But the primary product/work output of the Church is what the New Testament calls “the righteous deeds of the saints.” Worship is a huge part of that, and the weekly gathering in which people offer themselves to God is called “liturgy,” from leitourgia, meaning “the work of the people.” But every day, people are praying, they are helping others, they are making peace between those in conflict, they are doing their devotions, they are providing a witness to the transforming love of God in Christ by how they live and what they say. That’s what the Church actually DOES. That’s what the Church IS.
The righteous deeds of the saints, of course, don’t cost much. Money doesn’t change hands, nor does it much help in the saints doing what they do. Making the saints more productive is a matter of training (formation, discipleship), but the best way to get more out of the saints is to make more of them. And making more saints is greatly aided by there being more people and places for them to cohere around. Here is where the local church and its budget come in. Enabling leadership that enables followers is why we have staff. St. Paul says the leaders “equip the saints to do the work of ministry.” What the leaders do is not the primary ministry of the Church, it is the equipping of the ordinary folks who do the primary ministry. But we need leaders, and if they are to be paid, we need to pay them adequately. Likewise, the congregation is greatly assisted in its work by having its own proper place, where it can gather people, store its stuff, and base its operations. And if we are to have real estate, then we need to keep it in repair. That’s being good stewards of what we have been entrusted with.
Now, it often happens that leaders at various levels lose sight of the fact that the primary product/work output of the Church is what the ordinary believers do. They tend to think of what the ordinary believers contribute, monetarily, as the important thing. And they try to figure out how to smooth out the vagaries of giving and doing in order to get a constant stream of support for what THEY want to do: start new stand-alone programs and staff them with well-paid leaders. But all the money that supports everything the congregations AND the conferences want to do comes out of the weekly offering plate. Trying to extract the maximum in value from the local church – getting your cut first, say – may look efficient, but it can hinder the main need of the Church as a whole, which is making new disciples to give and do as disciples are supposed to. Hiring “anti-racism” staff members who go about doing whatever it is they do from a big central office is not going to make more disciples. It might be seen as a good thing to have, but if the church is in fact SHRINKING, then constantly trying to add more bells and whistles – at any level of the church – is a distraction and a burden.
The United Methodist Church is dying – slowly, yes, but dying all the same. We have lost members every year of our existence. And the decline is accelerating. We need to focus, above all, on making more disciples – in more places – rather than on central office boondoggles. We have forgotten what business we are in. We think we can have the best circus in town without inducing new people to come to the show.
Now, I said I was going to talk about Scouting financial matters. So allow me to make the same case in terms of BSA programs and institutions. If you look at our Council budget, you will get the same false impression of what we are about as you get from looking at a church budget. The lion’s share of what we spend money on is STAFF. Secondarily, we have PROPERTIES to maintain. Most of the rest of what we do is office expense and program (slightly more on program shows up in a local Council budget than in a local church budget, I’m guessing). If you only look at the Council’s budget, you will think the primary thing the Council does is done by the people who work in our office or camps.
But the primary product/work output of Scouting is what the youth and volunteers are doing: going camping, doing good turns, having EXPERIENCES and reflecting upon them (“Growth comes as a reflection upon experience”). That’s the business we’re in. And it costs money to do that, so the units are all busy doing as many fundraisers as they have to to support their program. Some of them are doing quite a lot in that regard, though I maintain that you don’t have to operate your unit as a small business in order to deliver the program. One pair of related units I know raises $30,000 a year to support their program. (I sometimes question whether we enable our troops to actually get the most out of their program; they seem to think they have to buy so many things off the rack, including experiences, when they could do for themselves cheaper and better. But that’s just me.) In any case, the success of the local unit is not measured in how much money they raised, but in the good and fun things they DID. That’s what Scouting IS: an adventure in good company. And you can do it without obsessing about money.
Nevertheless, a certain amount of money is necessary in order to get your child started. Annual registration isn’t cheap anymore. And uniforms are outrageously expensive. You need a handbook and at least some camping gear. The initial barrier to getting started as a new Scout can be prohibitive. The professional staff like to point out that the entry costs to Scouting compare quite favorably to the entry costs for, say, youth sports or band. Yes, but the social cachet – the status markers – of sports and band have significantly more market value to the general public than Scouting does. And that was true even back when BSA was at its peak c. 1970. We ain’t there anymore.
The fact is that BSA has been declining for years, and the decline has been accelerating. Even before the bankruptcy disruption, even before the LDS church pulled out of its association with us, even before Covid-19 hit. We have a fraction of the Scouts, in a fraction of the units, that we once did. This should be ringing alarm bells all over the place for us. The primary thing we do is local: kids from a particular place under leaders they know face-to-face, doing Scouty things. Yes, the Council supplies an essential service. The professional staff and our properties help our local units work better in doing what they do. And in a few cases, we provide things that local units would find difficult to do for themselves, like summer camp. But if we cannot reverse our decline in units and membership, enabling the Council to fund itself more efficiently is just polishing the brightwork on a sinking ship.
Comes now the leadership of our Council saying, we need to charge an annual Program Fee for every Scout in every unit, in order to smooth out the vagaries of funding ourselves by asking for donations and selling popcorn. It won’t be much, they say – we’ll still be a better buy than youth sports or band – and it will enable the Council to thrive. But “the Council” is not the people who work at the office; it is not even our properties. “The Council” is our various units and the Scouts and volunteers therein. And if they are to grow, to add new units and new members, we need to think about the best way to make that happen. Front-loading costs on new families to whom we have not demonstrated our value is a stupid way to go about it. We need to be giving new family discounts in various ways, to induce more people to try our product. We need to find ways to train our local volunteers in delivering the champagne program on the beer budget. Yes, we need money. We will always need money. But fantasizing about what you could do if you just had X more dollars to ease the Council budget does not increase the product/work output of Scouting. It is a diversion, a boondoggle.
The magic of Scouting is a kid going camping and encountering the stars. If what you want to do doesn’t directly lead to more kids in more groups doing more nights under the stars, it’s about you, not them. And they’re what we’re about.