Partners in the Gospel – Resources
As I dive into some of the reasons for Partners in the Gospel, I want to make sure you know where to find additional information. The main Archdiocese page for Partners is https://archseattle.org/partners/. This page is regularly updated and contains everything publicly announced about the process to-date.
At this point, I would specifically highlight the Current Reality Report Video (English, Spanish [subtitles], Vietnamese [subtitles]), which is what I am going to attempt to summarize over the next few weeks. You can flip through the slides they are using here, in English, Spanish, or Vietnamese.
Partners in the Gospel – Finances
The Problem
The Current Reality Report has a really striking statistic: 64% of our parishes are operating at a deficit (excluding extraordinary activity). Let me explain what that means and how a parish gets there, using our own parish as an example. (If you want a far more detailed analysis of what I am presenting below, please see my letters from January 2020 on parish budgeting and November 2020 on the sale of the Ellis St. property.)
When I was assigned to Assumption in July 2019, we had run a deficit of $11,446 (FY18) and $37,048 (FY19) in the two preceding years, and we ran a deficit of $61,215 (FY20) my first year here on the budget that I had inherited. Part of this is that we were carrying $1.3 million in debt, which we had recently combined and refinanced into an agreement that required us to pay $88,000/year through 2048.
However, the situation was much worse than those numbers let on. In an ideal parish budget, ordinary expenses like salaries, programs, and scheduled maintenance should be paid out of the Sunday collection, while extraordinary income like bequests or rental income should be used for extraordinary expenses (like one-time maintenance projects) or to support the source of that income (e.g. putting rental income towards maintaining the rental houses). Our parish, however, was not doing that. We were budgeting for a certain amount from bequests each year, in order to pay salaries, and we were only making the bare minimum necessary repairs to our rental houses so that we could use the majority of our rental income for the ordinary parish expenses.
As such, if you subtract out the extraordinary income that we used for ordinary expenses, then our deficits for those years would have been $51,612 (FY18), $116,615 (FY19), and $98,842 (FY20). These numbers represent the instability that was present in our parish budget, since we cannot actually rely on bequests or rental income. Today, we have a very strict separation between ordinary income/expenses and extraordinary income/expenses. When we get a windfall, like COVID money, land sales, or generous one-time gifts, we apply them to one-time expenses (like the gym roof or organ renovation). Looking only at ordinary income/expenses, we reported a $408 deficit in FY21 and a $50,500 surplus in FY22. I do not have numbers for FY23 as of writing, but we were looking at a $20,000 deficit near the end of May.
The Solution
One of the hopes for Partners in the Gospel is that we can right the financial ship at a lot of these parishes through the economies of scale that come from parish combinations. Even though we do not expect staff changes right away, you can imagine that over time, as parish staffs are combined into one office, there will be cost savings found in paying one receptionist instead of two or three, in having one parish administrator instead of two or three, and even in using one building rather than two or three. This assumes that giving will remain constant, which we know is not true in traumatic situations like parish combinations, but as these two trends extend over the years, it is reasonable to expect that giving will return to normal while the cost savings remain. There are a lot of parishes that only survive because they have rental properties they are not properly taking care of, or because a valued parishioner remembers the parish in their will at exactly the right moment. We want our parishes to be stronger than this. We want to make sure the people in the pews can support the parish expenses on Sunday giving alone, and that additional income can be used to build rather than just maintain.
Fr. Moore 