This past Sunday I said some pretty damning things to my own congregation about its activities. Time in a sermon is always severely limited, and this topic deserves a full treatment, and this is it. Before I begin, a big thank you to everyone who has reached out to me this week. The outpouring of support and positive feedback has been nothing short of amazing.
The usual disclaimer applies: these are my own views, and they haven’t been endorsed by my church or any of its representatives.
To start, here’s what I said:
“At this moment, the most aggressive volunteer recruitment effort at Emerson is for the service auction. Members and friends are being asked to put on events so we can sell tickets to those events to raise money for the church.
“Now, I understand that the nature of these events is different and it’s not equivalent to running programs for a church, but I submit to you, that earlier this week I was faced with two different groups of people who told me, for completely opposing reasons but with totally straight faces that their voucher program wouldn’t take money away from public schools.“I was not born yesterday. I can see when a public system has been privatized, and much of the volunteer effort of this church has been privatized. We’re not building a better world. We’re engaging our hobbies. We’re throwing fancy parties for rich people.”
When we ask for donations from members and friends, we ask alliteratively for three things:
- Time
- Talent
- Treasure
It’s not just a nice triplet. We recognize that all three things are different. While it’s possible to trade one for another, doing so crosses a boundary and it’s really inefficient. When we say “treasure” we mostly mean cash but sometimes donations are in-kind, and that almost deserves to be its own category.
Of these three, time is the most precious, the most sacred, the one we must respect the most.
Sometimes, what someone has to offer that’s unique to them doesn’t fit neatly into any church ministry, but it’s still uniquely valuable and they still want to help. Perhaps someone’s gift is that they create works of art.
The obvious solution is to have the church commission art. It can become part of the church, or it could be displayed with a price tag until it sells; silent bidding could be open for a time, or until a reserve is met; my point is, there are many ways to handle this transaction that require very little volunteer effort, and we need to optimize for that. Selling something expensive isn’t worth the money if it took a dozen volunteer hours to sell it.
When this transaction happens, it crosses a boundary. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but crossing boundaries requires consent, and if it’s going to happen repeatedly, there needs to be an agreement in place to make sure the situation doesn’t become exploitative.
Event planning is sacred volunteer time. Volunteers who plan events are the most committed and their time is finite. Spending church volunteer time creating events that aren’t for the entire church or an adjoining community crosses a boundary.
So, we have a yearly themed auction. It’s a huge production, consumes a ton of volunteer effort, and it is inherently exclusionary. It’s for everyone, sure, but it’s more for the rich people than for everybody else.
One time when we cross this boundary and it’s OK is circle dinners. One dinner is “exclusive” to the group of people who got invited. But there are safeguards in place to make sure anyone in the congregation who wants to attend one can. If you want to go and something is stopping you, and you tell someone on the circle dinner committee, they will find a way to get you there. It’s always been that way, so they’ve never really been exclusive.
But this is a boundary that needs special attention right now because, as has been pointed out many times before, our church is not especially organized. At the risk of raising an indelicate metaphor, I think Emerson’s volunteer program is half-asleep right now, unable to think clearly enough to say “no.” Unable to consent. Committees organize whatever projects they can with whatever volunteer hours they can come up with. The boundary that’s being crossed is that of the church itself, and it’s being crossed frequently and carelessly.
Something we auction off sometimes is special parties or dinners people are good at throwing. That is a time when we cross the exclusivity boundary and I don’t think it’s okay. The criteria for whether you can attend is whether or not you can afford a ticket. Sure, there are things you can do to mitigate the unfairness of the structure like providing some tickets for members who are hard-up for cash, or we could just not create the unfair structure in the first place…
In previous years, party ticket prices were fixed, and if they sold out at that price, they sold out at that price. This year, tickets for events are allowed to increase in price without bound, but the supply is still limited. This is a value statement we must not make: This is saying, we are okay with not just excluding, but displacing people from an event our volunteers put on, because they couldn’t increase their bid.
Lastly, having a budget for buying things specifically to auction off crosses a boundary; we are now spending volunteer time looking for things that are likely to sell for a profit. THIS IS NOT THE WORK OF ANY LEGITIMATE MINISTRY OF ANY CHURCH.
Sorry–my niceness has limits and we’re past them. The moneychangers have taken over the temple and I’m flipping tables.
(I also skewered the musical pretty hard; that’s a topic for another blog post. That table doesn’t need to be flipped, but it does need to be turned around and moved closer to an electrical outlet. Metaphorically speaking.)
By my count, there are four boundaries we are crossing that need examining:
- Turning church volunteer time into money,
- Organizing events that are exclusive by whether people can pay or not,
- Allowing ticket prices to increase without bound, and
- Allocating volunteer bandwidth in a way that doesn’t respect the church’s core ministries
I’ve said nothing for years because hey, we’re good people, we wouldn’t be doing something bad, would we? But the auction has always made me feel icky. It makes us seem out of touch. It burns people out. It consumes all passing resources.
I submit to Emerson that it doesn’t need to have the auction at all; we could cancel it tomorrow and we’d be better off for it.