[Auto-Generated Transcript of the Podcast Audio with Edits] Welcome to Faithful and Flourishing Christian Schools. Today I want to talk about money, mission, and faithful and flourishing Christian schools, because I think that money is sometimes seen as a dirty word in ministry settings and in para-ministry settings like Christian school settings. And money’s a subject that people often seem to apologize for bringing up, and you can hear it in how the topic gets introduced sometimes. Somebody prefaces the budget discussion. Somebody says, “I hate to talk about money, but...” and then they go into the conversation. Or somebody moves the finance report to the end of the agenda so it doesn’t set the tone for the meeting. Underneath this is something that I think is good. We don’t want some kind of financial matter or money to undermine our mission or to detract or distract from our mission. And so I think these are people who believe that the school exists for something other than money, and it does, and they’re protecting that, and that’s a really wonderful instinct. If some people begin to think that the financial model is the core of the school, then that becomes problematic. Practically speaking, you need to have some kind of financial margin in order to live out your mission in a school setting. There needs to be some source of funding. And so this really requires our best thinking. And I appreciate the fact that people are trying to protect against letting financial matters drive and dictate things. And I will say that even in my own church body, those conversations happen all the time on a school level, even in the entire denominational level, where there are people that can make decisions, and they take action, and the actions are framed as being primarily about finance. But we all know that financial matters have implications for ministry matters and other matters. Imagine you’re in a congregation, and imagine that there’s some board of members who are really smart, gifted businesspeople. And so there’s a committee that’s formed, and that committee’s job is all things related to the legal matters and related to the property matters and the financial matters and all of those kinds of matters about the financial strength and stability to support the mission. And then the pastor, and maybe there’s an associate pastor, and maybe there’s a school, the principal, and others, they’re in charge of the ministry components of what happens. You can say it that way, and you can separate it that way, but it’s not as clean and distinct as that in the real world. Let’s imagine, for example, that committee that’s in charge of all of the property. Imagine that they do some research, and they find out that property value is skyrocketing. It’s amazing in that community. And so they realize that the property the church sits on is worth a ton. And so they put the church up for sale and the church building up for sale, and they sell it, and they sell it for several million dollars. And the pastor goes up to the committee and says, “What are you doing?” And they respond, and they say, “Well, it’s our job to deal with the financial matters. It’s your job to deal with the ministry matters.” And the pastor said, “Well, I kind of need to have a church where we’re gonna worship, and where our church is located has implications for the people that we serve and we care for.” And maybe the people at that committee say, “Well, we found a place about 20 miles away. It’s a third the price, and we’re gonna move over there, and it will be great.” And the pastor, of course, would be right to say, “Why didn’t we sit down and talk about this together? Let’s figure this out together.” Because those financial matters have an impact on what the pastor does, and what the pastor does has an impact on the financial matters as well. So there is this distinction, and I come from a confessional Lutheran background where we often talk about the two kingdoms, and there’s this kingdom of grace, and then there’s a kingdom of the left that deals with what people might think of as earthly matters. That’s an overly simplified distinction. The reality, though, is in the world, these financial matters have implications. They have consequences and implications upon how we go about our work in a Christian church and in a Christian school, whether it’s an independent Christian school or it’s one that’s attached to a congregation. So that’s why I want to talk about this. And the main purpose of this podcast episode is about how we can take these financial matters seriously, how we can deepen our thinking about these financial matters, not so that we can just be the most financially strong school around, but so that the financial resources help amplify and support and bolster living out that Christian mission of the school each and every day. That’s really what we want to talk about here. I think that sometimes schools avoid designing a real thoughtful financial model because they don’t want money to be the driving mission. I think it’s sometimes also because maybe they haven’t taken the time to build the education of what options exist and what are available as well. But I think sometimes it’s this idea that they wanna put the big rocks, the big priorities in first, and there’s just not a lot of room for the financial conversations after they’ve dealt with those other matters, and they just don’t want that money to drive the decisions and the mission. But the issue is that when you don’t attend to the financial model, the money ends up driving the mission anyway. It’s in a much harder way later, and oftentimes it ends up being at the worst possible moment when it’s a crisis and a difficult situation. And even well-planned-out financial models for schools can fail. God makes no guarantees of earthly success as we’re going about good, noble missions in our schools. And we can make really great decisions and still find ourselves in a difficult position. I know that many of my listeners are not necessarily big poker fans, but there’s actually an interesting book by Annie Duke, who was, I believe, the first woman to win the National Poker Championship, and she wrote a book about leadership called Making the Bets. And I heard her speak one time. I was invited to this invitation-only event about next-generation computing hosted by IBM in this nice place down in Florida, and she said one thing that really caught my attention. She said, “A lot of leaders think that leading is akin to a game of chess. And if you think ahead enough and you play all the right moves, you’re just pretty much guaranteed to win, or statistically, your chances are incredibly high.” And she said, but the reality is that leadership is probably more akin to the game of poker, where sometimes you’re dealt a hand and it’s not a very good hand, and you have to play the hand to the best of your ability. But even if you play your hand as perfectly as you can, you may still lose. And I certainly don’t want to suggest, especially in a Christian school world, that this is all just a matter of chance and making bets and playing a game of poker. I’m simply pointing out the fact that we live in a sin-stained world, and there’s a measure of unpredictability about running and leading and serving in schools, and sometimes you can make the best possible decisions given the circumstances that you’re in, and the outcome isn’t always what we had hoped and dreamt and prayed would happen. And I just want to acknowledge that. I don’t want to set things up to say, “If you do these things, your school will be financially strong and stable no matter what,” because that is a myth in a sin-stained world. I think schools that never built a model, though, it’s a school that then hits a really rough year or a rough sequence of years, and there’s really no way to go back, and there’s really no plan, and you have weeks or months to make a decision. You can just put yourself in a really tough situation. Again, I can’t say that anything in this episode will guarantee that we won’t ever end up in this situation. But we can think about it and do our best thinking and put our best planning into it. So let’s talk about some common myths, because I think that can lead into talking about the model. So we’ll talk about myths, and then we’ll talk about some different ways of thinking about financial modeling. One myth is that if our ministry is faithful, God will somehow provide. As I just said, that’s not how life works in a sin-stained world. God will provide. We have clear Scripture that God will provide grace through faith in Christ. We are saved by grace through faith in Christ, not by works so that no one may boast. That is a provision of God. The Scriptures say if we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just, He will forgive us and purify us from all unrighteousness. So we have a God who promises to forgive. We have promises where God says, “I will never leave you or forsake you. I’m with you to the end of the age.” A promise, “Come to me when you’re weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” We have lots of incredible promises, so yes, God provides in that sense. But never in the Scriptures does it promise that we will be free from disease or disaster or tragedy or financial challenge or difficulty at times. We have promises. We have the promise of consider the sparrow, and there’s even passages about how God does hear and answer prayer. What father, if his son asks for a loaf of bread, will give him a stone, or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in hea
