It’s Budget Time:  How to Be Inflexibly Flexible

Orginally published on Thursday, November 02, 2006 at 3:50 PM
by Todd Rhoades

As we were leaving the house for school today, my daughter said, “daddy, today you’re taking me to school and tomorrow, mommy is taking me to school, right?” In the context of our family, that was my daughter’s way of planning ahead for tomorrow. She’s the kind of kid that inquires as to our plans for the next meal while we are sitting down, eating our current meal. She’s a planner…a schedule-keeper…she’s my wife in a little person’s body...

Were it not for daddy’s penchant for adding a little spontaneity coupled with my irritation at “life” being planned out, we’d have the tiniest of details scheduled out.  For example, when we were in college, my wife literally had timeslots on her calendar labeled, “spend time with Rick”.  I was an action-item on her daily to-do list.  I suppose we just wouldn’t have seen each other if she hadn’t put it on the schedule.

In our churches, I’ve noticed that we have defaulted many of our decisions to the “planners”…the people that need to have a schedule and plan for everything.  Honestly, you can get worn out fighting against the planners.  Therefore, church leaders have a tendency toward “giving in” in this key area.  One of the most obvious area this happens in the yearly budget planning (or as we call it, expenditure planning).

We’re engaged in our first ever (we’re a 6 month old church), full-year process for creating a spending plan.  To this point, we’re like many church-starts that pretty much play fast and loose with how/where we spend money.  We tend to ride a fine line between the need/dream of the day and the bottom line of what’s available in the church bank account.  Since we’re “growing up” as a church, we’re feeling the pull of having a more structured approach to our spending plan and how it will be executed.

Ok…so this is where things are starting to get interesting.  In my family, I’m the guy that fights against this and tries to keep us honest in the area of “flex”.  It is amazing how much a pastor’s role in his household mirrors that of his role in the church he leads (this shouldn’t amaze me at all, since the family is the key relational metaphor for how our churches operate relationally).

In this instance, my tendency would be to let the planners have the day and develop a nice, tight spending plan that accounts for all our spending so we can track every type of expenditure with an accountant’s precision.  Why do I feel a cold sweat beginning to break?

I’m starting to think that we’ve over-planned our budgets to the point of inflexibility.  Let’s say the music pastor comes up to the financial secretary at your church and says, “We’re getting a lot of local musicians coming to our church this year.  Many of them are aspiring artists, looking to record demos for local and national record companies.  I want to start building the infrastructure (read equipment) for a mini-studio that we can use as a ministry to local bands that don’t have the dough to get a good demo made.”

In a normal church setting, the financial secretary will look over her horn-rimmed glasses and promptly remind the well-meaning, naïve music pastor that there’s no line-item for what he’s talking about and that while it’s a good idea, he needs to plan it into a future budget.  Seriously, when was the last time you met an artist/musician that had much planned beyond his next meal?  Meanwhile, the financial secretary has her bathroom breaks planned.

As our church is in the middle of this process, I’m becoming more convinced that since there is a predisposition toward the planners and schedulers (because they’ve always controlled the processes in most churches), pastors have to be vigilant about protecting the spontaneous ministry ideas and opportunities from being squashed because it wasn’t “planned” into the spending plan 8 months ago.  While this isn’t always the case, I actually believe that spending plans are often used as an excuse to control and hold back those rascally idea-people in our churches.

Should every ministry idea be funded?  No.  Should every ministry idea be stiff-armed by the excuse “it’s not in the budget”?  No.  I would argue that we have a lot more stiff-arming going on in today’s churches.  Therefore, as shepherds of God’s people and as equippers of the saints (for ministry and mission), we have be creative in developing a spending plan that allows more flexibility than inflexibility.  This will drive our accountants and planners nuts…but it’s time to swing the pendulum back the other direction.

I had a friend email me a few months ago, asking if our church would be willing to contribute to his church re-plant.  A week ago, we received an email from our local community storehouse, asking for additional funds from local churches due to an increase of client requests.  Over the next year, our church wants to start a worship service in the downtown area of
Fort Worth.

In the case of the church re-plant, we have built some funding into our spending plan for 2007.  In the case of the community storehouse, we cut them a check that week, regardless of our spending plan.  In the case of the downtown service…well…since we have zero details as to how that would work, we’re doing absolutely nothing except spreading vision with our people.

Littered within these responses, you’ll find an element of planning…spontaneity and a little waiting on God to show us the next step.  Some things can be planned in a fairly certain way.  Some things are just going to come up and we need to be obedient to meet the needs of the moment.  Some of our dreams will be fuzzy—in these cases, we need to continue talking vision, keep our eyes open to opportunities and plan as best we can (after all, how on earth do you plan a downtown service when you have almost no details except the overriding dream?).

I’m concerned that churches have strapped themselves with too much red-tape and too-much planning.  Whether this is a result of letting the planners win every time or whether this is linked with our modern preference for applying business principles to church…I simply can’t say.  What I DO know is that the pendulum has swung too far toward planning in many churches.  Pastors need to do the hard work of leading their people away from this idol.

During this budget planning season (for many churches), I would encourage us to consider (and maybe re-read) the gospels, Acts and the Epistles to see the manner in which needs were addressed.  Was the early church more inclined toward a tight, planned approach to spending their shared resources…or did they have a loose structure that had high flexibility.  Please don’t hear me saying there should be NO structure!  That would be unwise (and illegal, in many cases).

However, we do need to consider how we can create breathing room and be more general and less specific.  We need more flex spending that goes beyond our benevolence accounts.  We need to be faithful to our call to be the equippers and not deny the needed “equipment” when a need arises.  Finally, we need to consider the birds of the air…does God not take care of them?  When God places a Kingdom opportunity in front of us…let us be faithful to seek His Kingdom in that moment.  I’m guessing that he will keep his promises (Luke 12:13-32).

FOR DISCUSSION: So… how is your budgeting process?  Tight and restricted; or built with a little flexibilty and give?  Share today on your budgeting gripes and moans; and also the things that you’ve found that really helps get through the budgeting process…

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Rick White is the lead pastor of CityView Church—a new church located in the Alliance-Texas Corridor, north of Fort Worth.  CityView is committed to keeping Jesus and His Gospel as the central focus of their mission and message.  CityView was planted by The Village Church and is a part of the Acts29 Network. Rick and his wife of 11 years are proud parents of three children.  You can read more of Rick’s writings at his blog, "The 20 Year Baton". He can be contacted via email at

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Hi... I'm Todd Rhoades. I'm a Christ-follower, husband, father and I love to connect leaders with other leaders. Hopefully you'll find something here at MMI you like and will return often. If you want, you can find out more about me or follow my every step on Twitter.

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