Loren Mead Participates in Executive Forumby Emett H. Over the weekend of October 24-28, 2002, Executive Presbyters from the Synod of Living Waters gathered at Orange Beach, Alabama for their semiannual executive roundtable. The highlight of the meeting was the participation of Loren Mead, distinguished author, congregational consultant, and founding director of The Alban Institute. The group discussed many issues of mutual concern, such as finance, restructure, goal setting, visioning, and redevelopment. Based on his broad experience, Mead shared with the group a number of significant insights. In the area of budgeting and finance, he spoke of what he terms “the financial meltdown in mainline churches,” i.e. the decline in giving in recent years. He noted the reticence of the church to think in terms of a positive positive balance at the completion of each fiscal year. Using an example from agriculture, he posed the question to those present, “Where is your seed corn?” He spoke of the fact that a farmer never considers the end of a year as breaking even if he does not have seed corn from this year’s crop for the next. For a $100,000 budget to be balanced at the end of a fiscal year, it must have $103,000 to offset a three percent rate of inflation. The seed corn is kept for the incoming year. He observed that in his experience many budgets are balanced either at the sacrifice of staff salaries or the neglect of maintenance to the properties. In Mead’s opinion there is little if any “seed corn” for the coming year. He suggested a number of remedies, such as better annual giving programs, a major fund drive every four or five years, planned “after death” giving programs, and wiser stewardship of the endowments the church may already have. In his opinion “Restructure is generally never better than where you started.” Mead challenged the group to think outside the box. He called for experimentation experimentation in all areas, and declared: “Success is anything you do that you can learn from irrespective of the outcome.” The participants left the meeting with new objectives and renewed energies for work within their own presbyteries and the Synod of Living Waters.
Loren Mead, at right, talks with Phil Leftwich,
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