Imagine I was asked to evaluate your parish on how well it makes disciples.

Now imagine there are only two things I would look at.

1. The budget - what your parish spends money on.

2. The calendar - what your staff and key volunteers spend time doing.

That's it. No survey. No interviews. No site visit. Just those two documents. 

How would your parish score?

I ask because the budget and the calendar are the two parish documents that never lie. A mission statement records what we intend. The budget and the calendar record what we decided. And when those disagree, the mission statement is the one lying.

Here is a mission statement I pulled from a parish website, lightly reworded so nobody can identify it:

"We are a strong Catholic community that accompanies people into a transformative relationship with Jesus Christ and his Church."

That is a pretty good mission statement for a Catholic parish. It is outward-facing. It talks about needed conversion. It would be a worthy thing to build a parish around.

Now hand that parish's budget and calendar to a stranger who has never seen the mission statement, and ask him what this organization exists to do. He is not going to say "accompany people into a transformative relationship with Jesus." He is going to say something closer to this: it provides religious services to people who already belong to it, and maintains the buildings where that happens.

That is not a cynical read. That is what those two documents say at the vast majority of parishes in this country.

So the question for parish leaders is not whether you have a good mission statement. You probably do. The question is whether you are willing to sit down with the two documents that tell the truth and read them honestly.

Most of us are not. So let us do it together.

THE MISSING LINE ITEMS

The Catholic Church was not founded for the people who go to church. It was founded for the ones who don't.

That may sound provocative, but it is what a parish is meant for. Canon law defines most parishes territorially, not by membership rolls. There are exceptions - personal parishes established for a particular community or rite - but the ordinary parish is a mapped out area with souls in it. Which means every soul living inside your parish boundaries is the responsibility of the pastor and those who assist him, including those who have ever walked into your parish. The unbaptized family a few blocks from the church is as much a part of your parish as the couple in the third pew who has been there forever.

So open your budget and find the money aimed at them.

For most parishes, the honest answer is zero. Not just a small number. 

$0.

What about staff and key volunteers - where are they spending their time? Most of it is spent managing what is already going on. Little is spent building new relationships or reaching out to the folks who never go to Mass.

Every dollar is aimed at people who already show up. It funds classes, programs, events, and sacramental preparation for those already coming. It keeps the lights on and the air conditioning running in the buildings where we gather. The calendar is built around these same things.

None of that is wrong. The sacramental life and formation of the parish has to be funded and scheduled. Buildings have to be usable and safe, and the bills do not stop because we would rather spend the money elsewhere. Planning takes time, which has to be set aside. These are real obligations, and a pastor & staff who neglected them would be failing their parish. Good management of existing obligations is part of our mission too.

But notice what happened. Every single obligation we named is an obligation to people who already show up.

Some will object that evangelization does not require a budget line or time on staff calendars, because it happens through parishioners in their own lives, at work, and in their neighborhoods. That would be a good answer if it were happening. But a parish serious about reaching those outside its doors would fund and schedule the formation and training that makes parishioners capable of it. It would pay for staff time spent on people who are not members, and for time invested in showing parishioners how to reach others. It would spend something, somewhere, on the souls in its territory who have no intention of ever showing up.

$0 is not neutral. A calendar aimed only at interior activities is not neutral. These are not accounting decisions or scheduling decisions. They are statements about what you believe the parish is for.

So here is the gap. A parish says it exists to accompany people into a transformative relationship with Jesus Christ and his Church. And it has allocated and scheduled nothing at all for the people who do not yet have one.

WHAT WE PAY PEOPLE TO DO

Personnel is the largest line item in most parish budgets. It is also where the budget and the calendar stop being two documents and become one.

When you hire, you are buying forty hours a week (probably more) and deciding in advance what those hours are for. The salary is the budget. The job description defines their calendar, and then the calendar of the parish. They are the same decision written down twice.

So look at what a parish has actually purchased.

Most lay staff positions, when you read the job description honestly, are administrative. They coordinate. They schedule. They register people. They order materials, book rooms, send emails, recruit volunteers, and run events. Some of them teach. Very few of them are paid to evangelize anyone, accompany anyone, or form a disciple.

This is not a criticism of the people in those roles. Most of them are faithful, hardworking, and underpaid. They are doing exactly what we hired them to do. The problem is what we hired them to do.

Here is the question worth sitting with. If you rewrote every job description in your parish around making disciples, how many people currently on your payroll would still be doing what they are doing on Monday morning?

For most parishes the answer is uncomfortable. We have staffed for managing our current systems and then wondered why nobody is on mission.

The usual response at this point is that we cannot afford anything different. And that response deserves a serious answer, because it is mostly true.

THE WAGE PROBLEM

Most lay parish salaries in this country would not qualify as just wages. That is not a complaint about our pastors, and I want to be clear about it. I am not arguing that priests should have less. Most priests I know work longer hours than most lay staff, carry burdens nobody sees, and are on call in ways the rest of us are not. I am not asking that anything be taken from our priests.

I am asking for what the Church herself asks of every Catholic employer, which is that workers be paid a just wage. We have numerous magisterial documents about this. We have Saints who wrote about this. And then we turn around and pay our own people wages that make it impossible to buy a house or raise a family, and we tell ourselves that ministry is its own reward.

It is not.

And the costs we pay for operating this way are predictable - we lose good people. They leave to start families, pay mortgages, get out of debt, or simply stop being anxious about money all the time (or they just burn out from it all). Then we complain that the talent pool in Catholic ministry is shallow, having done a great deal to make it shallow ourselves.

But there is a reason parishes cannot pay, and it is not that pastors are stingy.

WHY THE MONEY ISN'T THERE

Most parishes are hamstrung by budgets that simply do not have enough in them. And the reason is that parishioners do not tithe. They tip.

Some give nothing. Many give what feels reasonable after everything else has been paid. Very few give in a way that costs them anything or requires any faith at all.

That is not just a stewardship problem. More deeply, it is a discipleship problem.

Disciples give. They give out of faith, gratitude, and out of a conviction that the mission is worth their money. For instance - when someone donates to Catholic Missionary Disciples, the only reason they do it is because they believe in what we are doing. The same is true in a parish. People who have never been evangelized give the way customers tip - based on satisfaction with the service received. Which is exactly what we should expect, since that is the relationship we have formed them into.

So the annual appeal will not fix this. Neither will a stewardship campaign, a better giving app, or a homily about the deficit. Begging does not work. Complaining does not work. Pointing fingers at the people in the pews works least of all, since they are behaving precisely as we have taught them to behave.

The money follows the discipleship. It has never worked the other way around.

THE DECISION IN FRONT OF THE PASTOR

Which leaves most pastors with a hard choice.

You can pay low wages and have more people. Or you can pay just wages and have fewer.

I lean strongly toward the second. Hire only when you can pay well. If that means you have three staff instead of five, have three. If it means a small parish has none, then have none.

And when you cannot run a program because you do not have the staff for it, do not quietly let it limp along on guilt and volunteer recruitment. Tell your parish the truth. Tell them the parish will not pay someone poorly in order to keep an activity running, that you are grateful to those stepping up in the meantime, and that this is what integrity costs right now.

You may find that honesty does more for your culture than the program ever did.

WHAT THIS IS REALLY ABOUT

Notice how these problems keep collapsing into one another.

You cannot fund evangelization because the budget is tight. The budget is tight because people tip instead of tithe. People tip instead of tithe because they are consumers rather than disciples. They are consumers rather than disciples because nobody has evangelized them. And nobody has evangelized them because you cannot fund evangelization.

You can walk that circle forever. There is only one place to break it.

A parish that actually forms missionary disciples solves the problems it has been trying to solve directly for decades. Disciples give. Disciples volunteer without being drafted. Disciples take ownership rather than renting space. Disciples bring other people, and those people become disciples too. Every practical problem on a pastor's desk - money, volunteers, morale, attendance, vocations - is downstream of whether the parish is making disciples.

Changing a parish culture into one that makes disciples and turns around decades of what has been described above is no easy task. Nor is it a short one. But, it can happen. I am blessed to work with leaders who are making it happen. Who are bought in for the long-haul and changing things. Don’t settle. It really can change.

WHERE TO START

Start with two documents and the willingness to read them honestly.

Print the parish budget and the calendar and put them side by side. They are the same set of decisions in two currencies. Read them together, in one sitting, and do not let yourself explain anything away yet.

Do it with your leadership team, not alone. A pastor reading his own budget will rationalize. So will a business manager. A team reading it honestly together, provided the team is open and knows that honesty is what you actually want - can have a healthy and difficult conversation about these things.

Do it in prayer. This is discernment about the mission God has given your parish, not a line item review. Begin with real prayer and end with it.

Ask three questions of every budget line and every calendar item. 

1. What fruit did this produce in the last year? 

2. Would we start it today if it did not already exist? 

3. If we stopped it, who would be upset - and is that a good reason to keep doing it?

Find the hours. Take one normal week and count how many staff and key volunteer hours went to people who are not members of your parish. Not planning for them. Not hoping they come. Hours actually spent with them. Write the number down. Whatever it is, that is your parish's real commitment to the mission you have been talking about.

Put one thing on the calendar. One protected, recurring block of time - yours or a staff member's - given to people outside the parish. Not a program launch. A commitment that does not get moved when something urgent comes up, the way you would not move a funeral or a Confirmation Mass.

Take one thing off. Not five. One. Pick something the budget and the calendar both fund and neither justifies, and stop doing it. Prove to yourself and to the parish that something in this place can actually end.

Say why out loud. When you stop something, explain it. When you cannot hire, explain that. Parishes will forgive a pastor almost anything before they forgive being managed quietly. Most people have never been told the truth about what the parish is trying to do and why. Tell them, and you will be surprised who steps forward.

Your budget and your calendar are already telling the truth about your parish. They have been telling it for years. Which means they are not really about money and time at all.

They are about whether you have decided to do the one thing that fixes everything else.