How One Meeting Re-Infused its Financial Connections with Spirit

February 2010 Issue
By Jill Hoyenga

When my term as Presiding Clerk had ended, I expected a quiet retirement for a few years until I had recharged by spiritual batteries and then planned to dive back into committee work. However, the incoming Presiding Clerk had attended a workshop on non-profit organization governance and brought back some ideas on changes in our financial reporting to Meeting for Worship for Business. She came to me with a sparkle in her eye and asked if I would clerk a committee to season these ideas. As often happens with leadings, I said “Yes,” without knowing quite what I was getting into. It will be four years in February 2010 since Eugene Friends Meeting in Eugene, Oregon, formed our first Finance Committee.

Our membership roles record about 110 members. Each First Day twelve to twenty persons attend early morning worship; 25–50 persons attend adult and children’s meeting at eleven o’clock worship. We own our Meetinghouse without a mortgage. About eight years ago we began hiring part time employees and now employ three part-time employees, paying for bookkeeping services. Our fiscal year begins July 1 and ends June 30 each year. We do not have an endowment but are just beginning to explore establishing one. These bare facts may explain why our Meeting, established in the late 1940’s, only recently formed a Finance Committee.

Invitation, enlightenment, intention: These are three basic elements of any spiritual endeavor. Why should these elements be any different when we use the language of numbers? When we speak of financial matters we often use the language of religion. Financial reporters write about “faith” in the market. Goods are said to have market “value”. Commercialism may have tried to make money into a religion, but religion isn’t Spirit.

Just as we can re-infuse our religious community with Spirit, we may re-infuse our financial connections with Spirit. “The Market” was once a marketplace, a barter exchange of spirit-led labor and handiwork. Today’s monetized society has distanced us from this marketplace of origin. The fruit of our spirit-led labor is now expressed in the language of numbers that we commonly call money.

We cannot go back to the barter exchange for all that we need to sustain ourselves and the Meeting. But we can examine our financial condition through a worship sharing clearness process. This allows us to be guided by the Light as we consider intentional budgeting and spending.

Grounded in Spirit
Finances tend to be task and number oriented. As such, it can be easy to fall into worldly facilitation and reporting habits, since finances are rarely considered to be a spirit-led activity. The Finance Committee of Eugene Friends Meeting operates essentially as a Worship Group focused on Meeting finances. Our financial policies and procedures are framed as advices and queries to enhance our intention that our deliberations be led by the Spirit.

For many members of the Finance Committee, the more we have explored the spiritual wellspring of the financial life of the Meeting, the deeper our spiritual connection to the Meeting community has become. It is helpful for members to prepare for committee meetings by worshiping deeply. On First Days, our Meeting provides a three hour block of time available for Meeting for Worship, and on occasion, some members have used all three hours to prepare for a committee meeting. Several times a message from Meeting for Worship has become the spiritual touchstone for Meeting financial deliberations.

The Importance of Plain Speaking
The members and attenders most likely to volunteer to serve on the Finance Committee are often those who are fluent in what I call “Financese”. Financese is a specific dialect of the language of numbers that can be very intimidating to people who are not comfortable with numbers. When these well-intentioned volunteers bring a financial report to the membership it is sometimes received as if it were delivered in Japanese (when no-one in the room speaks Japanese.) At best, the report is received with glazed eyes and sympathetic nods. At worst, the financial reporter is asked several questions that make it clear that the listener does not understand the report.

Those attending Meeting for Worship for Business are the equivalent of the Board of Directors of a Friends Meeting. Attenders may have a wide range of experience with or even interest in financial matters. This range, along with changes in attendance from month to month, can make it challenging for a Finance Committee to successfully convey information to the Meeting. Therefore when reporting the financial condition of the Meeting, a key task for our Finance Committee is to translate fairly intimidating QuickBooks reports to what could be called a modern form of plain speech. We have also come to rely on “plain pictures” for presenting certain types of financial information. At our Business Meetings, as a general rule, all information is available as a resource for questions and archived for later questions, but only a text summary of those reports is presented to the membership.

Creating Clear Reports
The initial need for the Finance Committee was to clarify financial reporting to the membership. Once the Committee was formed, other financial tasks were added to the scope: supervise a paid Treasurer; educate the membership about financial matters (this expands the scope of financial reporting); prepare the annual budget; and long term financial planning. Finance Committee members also serve on other committees in an advisory capacity, such as Personnel Committee. We have six members on our committee and need every single one!

Statements of cash flow—income and expenditures for a given period—are the easiest financial reports for most members of the Meeting to comprehend. Income statements, statements of retained earnings, and balance sheets are virtually incomprehensible to people who have not been educated in the finer points of accounting. Though these reports are often provided by bookkeepers, these business-oriented reports may not at first feel relevant to the financial condition of a small to mid-size Meeting. However, these reports are designed to provide specific information that may be important to understanding the context of cash flows of the Meeting. Our Finance Committee has focused on reporting cash flows.

Diversity on the Finance Committee is very helpful for seasoning of spreadsheet reports and for the task of translating into a text report. Though each committee member is not considered to be representing a constituency, the diversity of our committee reflects the diversity of our membership. As Finance Committee membership has changed these last years we have been blessed with perspectives ranging from a Friend who is very comfortable with numbers and has an eye for detail developed over years of correcting math homework and tests but knows very little about financial reporting conventions, to another who is an investment consultant, and even someone new to the Meeting that does not yet speak fluent “Quakerese”, who helps to ensure that our cliquish terms are removed or explained sufficiently.

Bringing these diverse views together in worship sharing centered on financial reports has resulted in creating quarterly reporting templates that are clear and concise. Admittedly our early efforts were challenging. I remember our committee’s second or third try at creating a quarterly report text summary. I was very discouraged and commented to our Presiding Clerk after Meeting for Worship for Business that even I didn’t understand what I had just said. The Clerk very gently encouraged our committee to keep trying and we would get it. Later that year, after much worship sharing to draft quarterly reports, at the rise of Business Meeting several attenders stopped me to express appreciation and some said that it was the first time they had understood a financial report to the membership. I received a few cards in the mail thanking our Finance Committee for our good work. Even these two years later, attenders remain very appreciative of our Spirit-led text reporting approach.

Financial Reporting
Several levels of financial reporting are helpful for keeping Friends informed about the financial condition of the Meeting. Budgeting, quarterly reports, special reports, and an annual report on finances are all useful tools, and ones which can be readily adapted to be Spirit-led, concise, and enjoyable to read.

Budgeting: The springboard of our spirit-led financial life is the budget process. Each cycle our Finance Committee focuses the spiritual lens on our budget through advices and queries that speak to the financial condition of the Meeting. Budgeting using advices and queries as a touchstone invites those present to enter into worship during deliberations. They allow the Presiding Clerk to refocus discussion by invoking the queries. They frame the conversation such that when the budget is approved there can be a feeling of spiritual fulfillment. These past few years are certainly the first times I have felt spiritually uplifted at the end of the budget process rather than just relieved.

Quarterly Reporting: Once the budget is approved, quarterly reports to the membership provide financial cash flow reports. The template we have developed follows this general pattern:
1) The first section reminds members and attenders of the time frame described in the report.
2) A summary of net cash flow for the quarter is followed by a bar graph comparing the quarter income, expenditures and the annual budgeted amount. The summary concludes with a reminder: “The Meeting’s commitment to the operations, maintenance and ministry reflected in this year’s budget remains dependent upon the continued financial commitment of our members and attenders.”
3) The third section is reserved for Committee comments or recommendations, an opportunity for educating the membership.
4) The first part of the second page is devoted to annual budget income and expenditure detail. It is particularly helpful to list quarterly net and total the net to date as the budget year progresses.
5) The second part of the second page outlines the income and expenditures in our unbudgeted accounts, called “Dedicated Funds”.
6) The entire report concludes with a total cash flow statement to date. Sample_4Q_Report

Special reports: Special reports are purpose driven. They usually focus on a specific aspect of the whole financial picture. Occasionally a Finance Committee member is approached to answer a question that merits special reporting. Sometimes questions during committee seasoning of financial reports prompt development of a special report. Typically pictures are worth a thousand words in a special report. Examples of special reports include a pie chart of types of income or a bar graph comparing first quarter income for the last three years. It is our practice to make each special report available to all members and attenders. A special report may eventually be incorporated into other reports.

Annual Report: Many non-profit organizations publish annual reports that not only fulfill their responsibility to reporting financial conditions, but include testimonials of how the donated money was spent. Eugene Friend Meeting Finance Committee has successfully implemented this style of annual reporting. The report is intended to create a dialog regarding the financial life of the Meeting.
We publish the annual report as an insert to the newsletter the month in which the budgeting cycle begins. It provides a wider financial context and foundation for the budget meditation. The annual report was especially helpful in educating members and attenders as it became clearer that our spending trends were exceeding our income. The Finance Committee felt that people who know about the operations, maintenance and ministry carried out by the Meeting are more likely to feel good about donating their hard-earned dollars. Sample_Annual_Report

Postcard Reporting

It is common for a fraction of the general Meeting membership to attend Monthly Meeting for Worship for Business, and our Meeting is no different. We typically host 30 to 70 people for worship each First Day and 20 or so people attend Business Meeting each month. Finance Committee felt it was important to reach out to the wider membership, particularly as it became clear that our expenditures were trending to exceed our income for the fourth year in a row. Our committee developed a “postcard” financial report to the membership that is given out at the rise of Meeting. (Sample_Postcard_Report)

The purpose of our first postcard report was to alert the Meeting of spending trends and to request reduced expenditures from committees, a 20% increase in monthly giving from members and attenders, and for Friends to consider a one-time donation. Our Meeting members and attenders responded quickly to this postcard alert, and we ended the budget year with our income slightly exceeding expenditures. The committee members felt that we should continue the practice of postcard reports.

“Hiding in Plain Sight”
Friends value transparency in all of our endeavors. To fulfill the expectation of full disclosure, well-meaning treasurers present the bookkeeping reports at Business Meeting. As the bookkeeping reports have become more complex, especially after the transition to QuickBooks reports, in many Meetings presenting unseasoned reports has amounted to “hiding in plain sight”. In Eugene Friends Meeting, attempting to season QuickBooks reports in Business Meeting became increasingly frustrating to those in attendance.

It may seem counter-intuitive that greater transparency in financial reporting resulted from sending the QuickBooks reports to a committee for thorough seasoning and then publishing a text summary for the membership. However, this new reporting style allows the community we serve to begin the conversation feeling that they have information they can understand.
This principle of transparency and of Spirit-guided financial consideration has transformed Eugene Friends’ Meeting into a community which is able to greet money issues in our community with clarity and openness–with a sense of invitation, enlightenment and intention.

Jill is a convinced Friend of 23 years who is a member of Eugene Friends Meeting in Oregon. She has been the clerk of her Meeting’s Finance Committee since its inception in February 2006. This committee has been the catalyst for Spirit-led Meeting-wide financial explorations.