Flags and Lost Causes

I own a Scottish flag, as well as three kilts and related accoutrements -- all part of showing off a Scottish heritage that I didn't know I had until 15 years ago.   My great-grandfather Harry Cummins had been in the United States so long that none of HIS descendants even know their name was Scottish. 

So it's not like I grew up hearing bagpipe music in my cradle; although the Scottish heritage may be baked a bit into my DNA.   It's a fun culture with which to identify -- unique music, games, clothing; and stereotypical cultural traits like being independent, fearless, industrious, and inventive (which I like to think describes me) as well as thrifty and rebellious (which really doesn't).


I've been thinking about my Scottish flag the last couple weeks, as the controversy over the so-called Confederate flag has swelled in the aftermath of the shooting in Charleston.   Many of my friends seem to identify with the southern cross in a way that sounds similar to the way I feel about my Scottish connections -- it's a symbol of a way of life and an ideal, not of racist intent.   They think that being charged with racism for owning and displaying one is unfair to them, and the suggestion that it is a symbol that American society needs to remove from the public square and retire to a museum feels like an attack on them.

So I've been thinking about some comparisons.

Scotland and England were separate countries -- and frequently at war -- for hundreds of years before the vagaries of royal bloodlines made them one country, Great Britain, in 1603 -- with a Scotsman as king!    The British flag that we know today, the Union Jack, was a combination of the red-on-white horizontal English Cross of St. George, an the white-on-blue diagonal Scottish Cross of St. Andrew.

Of course the Scotsman, King James, moved to London, commissioned a Bible to be translated to English, and pretty much became an Englishman.   Within a few decades the Scots were bucking for independence again.   The last of the Scottish insurrections came in 1745 when "Bonnie Prince Charlie" returned from exile, raised an army in the Scottish Highlands, and not only seized Edinburgh but began to march on London.

The English had had enough.  They brought troops home from their never-ending meddling on the continent and forced the rebels all the way north to Inverness, where Charles ordered a disastrous counter-attack at Culloden that was the last battle fought on British soil

Today British as well as Scottish history treats Culloden as a tragic and epic tale of heroism and patriotism.   There remains a desire for Scottish independence -- just last year, the British government agreed to hold a referendum on the issue, and presumably would have honored the results if a majority of Scots had voted to secede!   But I also think that for 270 years, British culture has done a better job of merging English and Scottish, than American culture has done of merging Northern and Southern.

And it didn't happen right away.  In fact, in the immediate aftermath of Culloden, the British treatment of the Scots was far worse than anything that happened in America's Reconstruction period.   Scots were disarmed, of swords as well as guns.   Wearing kilts or anything in the traditional clan tartans was banned -- upon penalty of jail for a first offense, and deportation for a second.   Landowners who kept their land lost many of their traditional property rights.    And other became so impoverished that they sold their land to English speculators -- which led to "The Clearances."

It's not true that the English rounded up the Highlanders and shipped them all to North America and Australia.   But as the English turned the Scottish countryside from cattle- and cash-crop farming to sheep-grazing land for their burgeoning woollen mills, tenants were forced off their land with the crops still in the ground.   Thousands starved.  Hundreds of thousands chose to leave everything for a new start in the New World.

Now THAT'S losing a rebellion.   Talk about a Lost Cause.

But another difference between the 18th century rebellion in Britain and the 19th century rebellion in the United States was that there was no third ethnicity in Britain who remained an oppressed underclass.

It's not just that the remaining British Scots have spent three centuries making incredible contributions to the industrial might, the literature, and the military strength of the United Kingdom.  The same can be said for American Southernors over the past 150 years.   The difference is that in Britain, waving a Scottish flag is not waving a red flag at several million citizens who know that their permanent enslavement was one of the purposes of the government and army that flew that flag, and that many who fly it today openly call for their removal or death.

I would urge everyone to spend a few days looking at the world through their eyes.

And to my American friends who feel attacked by the calls to bury their Confederate flags, I would say:    give in on this one.   You're not being asked to give up your Faulkner, your motorcycle, your hunting gear, your Lynyrd Skynyrd, or your college football tickets.    I'll keep my kilt and sporran and haggis recipe.   I don't think it's fair that I should give up my Scottish flag, because it doesn't offend anyone; but I would do it if it would help retire a symbol that many millions of Americans see as hostile and painful.

Image compliments of Steve Pollock via Creative Commons:   https://www.flickr.com/photos/airbeagle/

Curating Lincoln: Another Look at "So Costly a Sacrifice"

reprinted by permission from The Urban Times  

Is the sesquicentennial of the Civil War is coming to a close with more of a whimper than a bang?

A few years ago there was a flurry of all things Civil War and Abraham Lincoln, starting with two major new scholarly AND popular Lincoln biographies by Michael Burlingame and Doris Kearns Goodwin, and including a Spielberg film starring Daniel Day Lewis, all timed to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth and the 150th anniversary of his election and the outbreak of the War Between the States.  Are we burned out?

“Yes and no,” says Indiana State Museum Curator of American History and Fall Creek Place resident Dale Ogden.   “Re-enactments are as big as ever.  The books keep coming.  Civil War history has almost taken on a Lord-of-the-Rings life of its own.  I do think it will ebb a little here, though.”

Indiana played no small part in that opening whirlwind of historical attention, largely because the Lincoln Financial Corporation, headquartered now in Philadelphia but once based in Fort Wayne, decided to get out of the business of maintaining a Lincoln museum in northeastern Indiana and to get some exposure out of donating its substantial collection to more high-profile and high-traffic institutions.  The State of Indiana ended up participating in a rather spirited "bidding" war, and the collection ended up staying in the state that was Lincoln's Boyhood Home -- in an arrangement whereby the massive collection of Lincoln books and papers went to the Allen County Public Library, one of the premiere public genealogical and research libraries in the country; and the smaller collection of artifacts found a home at the Indiana State Museum in Indianapolis.

A handful of Lincoln items are on constant rotation through the State Museum's permanent history galleries, but a key to Indiana's success in maintaining the collection was the commitment to mount periodic special exhibitions based on the collection.  Right now, the fourth such exhibit is on display -- and while "So Costly a Sacrifice:  Lincoln and Loss" won't be the last Lincoln special exhibition to come to White River State Park, it is the most fitting coda to the national observance of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War that I've seen. 

The responsibility for this exhibition, like two major shows and one two-dimensional exhibit that proceeded it, fell to Ogden.

The role of curator can vary depending on the size, priorities, and program of the museum.  Some curators -- particularly paleontologists and archeologists -- can spend most of their careers building and documenting a collection, and publishing the knowledge they create in professional journals.   Ogden has always been a curator with a special gift for pulling together a room full of artifacts, arranging them in a particular order, and then telling stories about them in a way that conveys his own sense of wonder -- "this particular object was actually used by this particular person to do this remarkable thing right here -- in spite of the challenges posed by that last thing we looked at -- and now here it is right in front of us!   Isn't that amazing?" 

Ogden started working in what has become his milieu 31 years ago, when the museum was in the Old City Hall Building on Alabama Street.   In a six-year span he was curator of three of the most artifact-intensive exhibitions the museum has still done to date -- a military history exhibit based on the institution's own collection, and then two popular culture exhibits, on broadcasting history and sports history, based on collections that he and his colleagues built from scratch in two-year campaigns. 

Ogden's early exhibits were as colorful and riotous and sometimes uneven as the overly-ambitious production schedules and culture of the museum itself under its director in those days, Lee Scott Theisen.  The series of Lincoln exhibitions -- and especially "So Costly a Sacrifice," are the work of a mature craftsman.

The challenge to the museum staff of mounting biennial Lincoln exhibits has been that the number of three-dimensional objects in this collection is relatively small.   The inaugural installation in 2010 essentially showcased it all -- and, when coupled with a traveling exhibit from the National Archives in the adjoining gallery, was almost overwhelming in the sense of connection it gave to modern viewers of the life and legacy of the great President.   “We had an obligation to prove ourselves, to show that it was not a mistake that the collection stayed here,” Ogden says. 

“There are some really iconic things in the collection,” Ogden shares, and cites the ambertypes of Lincoln’s sons Willy and Tad that are being displayed again for the first time in five years.  “The thought of Lincoln sitting on his bed, in the midst of the Civil War, mourning his son – if that image doesn’t move you, you shouldn’t be a curator.

“It still moves me every time I talk about it. But you have to use them judiciously or they can lose their power.”

Three years later, in the midst of the Civil War sesquicentennial, Ogden zigged when the rest of the museum world was zagging.   While everyone else was borrowing and lending military artifacts and images to tell the story of the war, Ogden negotiated with institutions around the country to borrow objects that they weren't using, to supplement a smaller number of Indiana's own artifacts to tell the story of four generations of the Lincoln family.   It was an exhibit that engaged in some "log cabin" myth-busting -- pointing out with three-dimensional evidence that while Lincoln came from humble roots, he, his wife, and his surviving descendants were ambitious and successful far beyond the norm for nineteenth-century America.

"So Costly a Sacrifice" is built around a subtext of mortality in the way that Peter Sellers' last movies and Warren Zevon's last albums were.    The exhibit is not morbid, but it is about morbidity.   For this exhibit, Ogden supplemented the Lincoln collection objects with an abundance of materials from the museum's own collection -- and fully the first third of the gallery deals with ante-bellum American's familiarity with death.

A child's coffin, a death mask, and memorial "hair wreaths"
from a time when death was a frequent visitor.

The exhibit sets the stage with reminders that unexpected death was a frequent visitor in those days:  a child's coffin, a Victorian hair wreath woven from the locks of deceased relatives, and death masks that were created, in the years before photography, for portrait artists to use as models after the fact.    One compelling object is a portable, perforated “cooling table” for displaying the deceased.  “Most funerals were at home,” Ogden explains.  “People would put chunks of ice under these tables to keep the body from decomposing too quickly.”

“You died in bed, you were viewed in the parlor, you were buried in the churchyard.  It was kind of the ideal of the ‘good death,’ which the Civil War shattered.  But the Civil War also was the beginning of the modern funeral industry.  ”

A label makes the point that three in ten Americans born in the early 19th century died before adulthood, which led to a sobering math equation for my 14-year-old son to consider about his 35 classmates. 

The carnage of the Civil War is depicted with some of the earliest objects in the museum's collection -- battlefield souvenirs of whole trunks of trees riddled with shrapnel, and shells retrieved by soldiers who were able to describe the deaths of companions that they caused.

Still, Lincoln was the first American president to be assassinated.   Between the circumstances of his death just days after Lee's surrender, and the new technology of the telegraph allowing the nation to experience the news simultaneously, it was an unprecedented shock to the body politic.   One of Ogden's favorite components of the exhibit is a display of published versions of Easter Sunday sermons delivered two days after the assassination, from all over the country -- all of them drawing liberally on the parallels between Lincoln's death and that of Christ.

“From an intellectual standpoint, this is the most fun I’ve had in all the years I’ve been here,” Ogden confides.  “Part of it was an epiphany on my part – things that I knew, but that came together for me in doing this show.  I knew Lincoln was shot on Good Friday, and so the next Sunday was Easter.  But the fact that by the afternoon of the day he died, people in San Francisco knew it – it amplified the tragedy, made it more universal.  What a huge shift in the human condition.”

And by the next morning, Americans were pouring into churches for Easter services to hear the President eulogized in Messianic terms.

Nearby, one print shows George Washington welcoming Lincoln into heaven.  Another is a death-bed scene in which Washington himself, not God, is the face in the clouds, surrounded by angels, who is looking down on the martyred 16th President.

My family and I toured this exhibit two days after the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's death, and two weeks after a visit to Washington, DC, which included a trip to the Lincoln Memorial.   Inscribed on the north wall of that monument is Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, also delivered 150 years ago this spring.  It's the one containing the words, "with charity for all, with malice toward none."   But it also contains the haunting admonition that, "Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'"

The six-year national commemoration of Lincoln and the Civil War is drawing to a close, but Lincoln would no doubt agree that the work of reconciliation is on-going.  His modern-day Indiana curator is no doubt willing to engage you in a conversation on the subject.   "So Costly a Sacrifice" continues at the Indiana State Museum through July 5.   It is worth another trip. 

Times Union's Coverage of the Upcoming Valley 40th "Birthday" Party

 reprinted  by permission of the Warsaw Times Union

by David Sloan, Times Union Staff Writer

AKRON – Whether they were Talma Tigers, Burket Hawks, Mentone Bulldogs, Akron Flyers, Beaver Dam Beavers or Tippecanoe Valley Vikings, alumni of the Tippecanoe Valley School Corp. are invited back to the district for its 40th anniversary event.

The seventeen members of the Valley Hometown Advisory Board have been busy planning the Tippecanoe Valley High School 40th birthday celebration so its alumni can reconnect with each other and the school corporation.

The event is June 20 from 1 to 5 p.m. at TVHS. Graduates of Akron, Mentone, Beaver Dam, Burket and Talma high schools – all the schools that now make up TVSC – are invited as well as their families.

“The idea is to make it a family event,” said Angie Miller, advisory board member and Mentone principal.

Lunch will be served at 1 p.m. Miller said it will include pulled pork sandwiches, chips and a cookie.
A variety of activities is planned for adults and children, including inflatables for the kids, corn hole, a selfie station and the gym will be open.

Homemade ice cream will be provided. The local tractor club, Echoes of the Past, will make 10 gallons of ice cream with the use of a tractor, according to Adam Heckaman, TVHS Distinguished Alumni representative to the advisory board.

Miller said items from Valley’s past will be on display during the June 20 celebration.
TVSC Superintendent Brett Boggs said there will be a silent auction of two autographed basketballs signed by this year’s girls basketball state runner-up team as well as two plaques of the team.
The advisory board hopes to have technology in place in time for the celebration so alumni who can not attend can view it on Skype.

Miller said the board is planning for 350 people to attend. People can RSVP by calling 574-353-7741 or online at surveymonkey.com/s/tvhs40 but Miller said they also can just show up the date of the event.

“But when the food is out, it’s out,” she cautioned.

Along with current and former students, some of the former teachers expected to be at the event will include Nancy Alspaugh, Charlie Smith, Kevin Campbell, Wayne Cumberland and Tom Roy.

The Valley Hometown Advisory Board is a 17-member group of TVHS graduates, current students and staff. The board administers the Valley Hometown Fund with the purpose of connecting TVSC alumni “with their schools and hometowns in support of education and community development.”

The Fund is an effort to raise awareness and money for community and educational needs in the TVSC, while recruiting alumni to re-engage in their hometowns. It is not a separate non-profit corporation with its own overhead expenses – the Northern Indiana Community Foundation serves as its fiscal agent so that all contributions to the effort are tax-deductible and go entirely to support projects in the community.

The fund is not an alumni association and does not charge membership dues or fees.
Ron Newlin, Tippecanoe Valley Alumni Association, graduated from TVHS in 1976. He said his family moved a lot when he was growing up, so when he came to Valley before his sophomore year he was able to make a fresh start.

He said he wasn’t forced into any clique and the school and community were very welcoming. He could get involved in everything, something that at larger schools is not always possible, he said.
Newlin earned degrees from Ball State and Indiana University, and they constantly are contacting him about speaking to students or donating money. But he said he feels a deeper obligation to the Valley community.

It wasn’t, however, until a few years ago that someone – Boggs – contacted him about giving back to his high school. If high schools like Valley can get their alumni involved, those graduates can not only make financial contributions but also provide other contributions like mentorships to students.

“The long game here is, my hometown and my high school are actually places I want to include in my will. My estate will likely make more of a difference here,” Newlin said.

Jordan Fraser just graduated from TVHS. He said he grew up just a mile away from the school so it’s been a part of his world “forever.” He said he uses what Valley has taught him every day.

As for what he’s looking forward to at the 40th anniversary celebration, Fraser said, “For me it’s reconnecting that bond.”

He said he hopes to build connections, and hopes that the event is a stepping stone to get the community involved.

“I want Valley to be a part of my future. I hope we have (this event) again. If not, I hope homecoming becomes a part of the community,” he said.

From working with the board on the 40th anniversary celebration, Fraser said he’s learned more about the other alumni. “I’ve built my connection pool a bit,” he said.

Donations to the Valley Fund can be made at the Northern Indiana Community Foundation, Rochester, with “Valley Hometown Fund” in the memo line. Donations for Valley’s 40th anniversary celebration should have “Valley 40th” in the memo line.

For more information on the fund, visit www.valleyhometownfund.org or visit its Facebook page at www.facebook.com/valleyhometownfund

Some thoughts on Iran

Man, can we hold a grudge.

We’ve been in a cold war with Iran for my entire adult life – since the American embassy was seized during the Iranian Revolution in 1979, my senior year of college.   That’s over 35 years now, coming up on as long as we were in a Cold War with the Soviet Union.   It hasn’t occupied central stage in our consciousness the whole  time like the conflict with the Russians did, but it’s never eased. 

This diplomatic crisis weighed heavily on me at the time – it inspired me to go to graduate school and study diplomatic history with Robert Ferrell and apply for the foreign service, instead of law school.  In fact, I passed the foreign service exam in November 1980; the Reagan hiring freeze cancelled my interview, and probably changed the course of my life.  I was young and patriotic and saw the foreign service as a way to participate in the protection and projection of American values.   I wasn’t a pacifist.  I would have supported a viable military response. 

But even then, even with a history degree, I didn’t fully appreciate the backstory on Iran, or Persia.

Persia is one of the great civilizations in world history.   The modern Iranians have a cohesive ethnic identity and a language, Farsi, which is at least as identifiable to its 2500-year-old predecessors as modern English is to Chaucer.   Persia had a religion – Zoroastrianism – that I’m going to get back to in a bit here.  They had cats and rugs.   The Western world would probably be entirely different if the Greeks had not turned the Persians back at famous battles like Marathon and Thermopylae in the 5^th century BC.

In fact, Persia is the dividing line between what we consider the Western World and the Eastern World.  More precisely, I suppose, that dividing line was the Fertile Crescent of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in modern Iraq.   Our most ancient oral literary and religious traditions date to Abraham, who came west from Ur of the Chaldees in the Fertile Crescent about 2000 BC and settled in Canaa.  At the same time, others carried the first trappings of civilization –  agriculture and the Code of Hammarabi, among others – a few hundred miles west of Ur.  Those were the Persians.

While the Persians were settling in modern-day Iran and the descendants of Abraham were migrating to Egypt and back, in Mesopotamia the city of Babylon emerged as the cultural center of the Fertile Crescent. For 1500 years, though, Babylon was ruled by Assyrians, from the west.   The Assyrians also battled with the ancient Hebrews, but it wasn’t until a resurgent Babylonian empire conquered the Assyrians and kept going, that ancient Israel actually fell, resulting  in the famous Babylonian captivity of the Hebrews under Nebuchadneezer.

The Babylonian captivity didn’t end until this Babylon was conquered by the Persians.  It was the Persians, under Cyrus, who allowed the Hebrews to return to Israel.   But it was at this time that our Bible first began to be put into writing; and the robust religions of Christianity and Islam that grew out of the Hebrew Bible and religion were deeply affected by the good-vs.-evil mentality of Persian Zoroastrianism. 

Persia (as well as Israel and everything else in the modern middle-East) was then conquered by the Macedonian Greeks and then the Romans, but Farsi and Zoroastrianism continued to flourish until 700 BC.   The Romans, of course, eventually destroyed Jerusalem and dispersed the troublesome Hebrews, and later adopted Christianity as their state religion.   They never really stamped out local religions or ethnicities, though.

It wasn’t until Mohammedism, or Islam, took root among the nomadic Arabs to the south of ancient Mesopotamia, that the middle east became predominately “Muslim.”   And here is where it gets interesting.   For all the Western rhetoric about persecution and forced conversion, the Islamic Arabs allowed Christian and Jewish enclaves to survive throughout their empire, because they were “people of the book.”   That’s one of the reasons the current ISIS is so problematic – they are killing and destroying 2000-year-old Christian communities – communities that “somehow” survived Mohammed and Saracen and the Seljuk Turks and Saddam Hussein.   The Arabic Muslim world has long had a practice of exacting a “tax” from the Christians and Jews in their states; but it started out as a means of having them pay for a government in which they were not allowed to participate.   Sort of like the British view of the American colonies in the years before the American Revolution.   It’s a bad policy that cost the British their most lucrative colonies; but it’s a long way from genocide. 

The early Arabic Muslims had no such teachings, however, about other religions; which is why in Persia, Zoroastrianism did die out.  It does seem that in Persia and points east, the locals may have been converted to Islam at the point of a sword. 

Most of what we Westerners now know about ancient Persian culture comes to us through Western filters, 

such as  Neitszche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.   Michael Crichton’s re-telling of the Beowulf legend, Eaters of the Dead, was conveyed through the eyes of a Persian official who had been kidnapped by Vikings in 10^th-century Russia.   Frank Miller’s bizarre version of the Persians in the popular 300 graphic novels and films demonized them as the ultimate “others.” 

Modern Iran dates from the dissolution of the (Islamic, but Turkish) Ottoman Empire after World War I.  It was one of several proxy states that the British and French created in their efforts to rebuild their own empires; but this one had a cohesive identity and culture.   Shah Reza tried to stay neutral in World War II, but the British invaded supposedly to prevent Iran from tilting toward Nazi Germany, and also to create a supply line to Russia.   After the war, the British and Americans replaced Shah Reza with his son, Reza Pahlavi, who was a more compliant ally in their rivalry with their new adversary, the Soviet Union.

For 25 years the “new” Shah of Iran was presented here as a progressive pro-Western ally, but he probably never had the support of the Iranian people.  But the Iranian Revolution of the late 1970s didn’t become violently anti-American until after Jimmy Carter reluctantly granted the deposed and dying Shah sanctuary on medical grounds.   Their government allowed radical groups to seize our embassy; we imposed sanctions and armed Iraq in a war against them, and we’ve been at odds ever since.

And frankly, there isn’t a good reason for Iran and Israel to be mortal enemies, beyond the fact that Islam became a uniting force for the Shah’s oppressed opponents.   The Arab world has always had reasons, real and imagined, to resent the creation of modern Israel in their midst, but strategically Israel doesn’t affect Iran except as a foothold for what they understandably see as Western imperialism.    They’ve not helped themselves by meddling in the affairs of Arab states and arming Hezbollah in Lebanon, but they are hardly the only guilty party in the region.

Iranians have every reason to see themselves as a strong and independent modern power, but a beleaguered and surrounded one.   The world would no doubt be safer if they didn’t have nuclear weapons, but the same is true of Pakistan, India, China, Russia, and NATO.   The United States didn’t prevent India from getting nuclear weapons because they were a counter to the Chinese.   We didn’t prevent Pakistan from getting nuclear weapons because they were a counter to the Soviets in Afghanistan.  It’s widely believed that we haven’t prevented Israel from getting nuclear weapons. 

Iran’s apocalyptic rhetoric is frightening and not helpful toward achieving peace.   But we don’t give them the benefit of the doubt that their leaders’ sabre-rattling is a matter of playing to their base in the same way that the sabre-rattling of American Republicans is. 

The Christian (and post-Christian) West has strong cultural ties to Israel, and part of that is still some reasonable guilt over complicity in a Western state’s near-genocide of the Jewish people  just 70 years ago.   But if you want to get cultural, you can argue that there may have been no Bible and maybe no Judaism if the Persians hadn’t rescued the Hebrews from the Babylonians 2500 years ago.  And we could probably stand some self-reflection over our role in Iran’s current isolation.

I think the nuclear limitations treaty that the U.S., along with Germany and the U.N. Security Council, is negotiating with Iran is worth seeing through on its own merits, but also as a next step in re-establishing relations and providing Iran with a path back into the community of nations.  

Pharoah's Dream

I've decided to name my next blog Pharoah's Dream.  (I'm just posting here for the time being.)

The purpose of this blog is to talk primarily and specifically about church finance, but also about non-profit finance in general.

My primary intended audience is the lay leadership of churches like the  Episcopalian congregation of which I'm a member; although much of this will also pertain to all non-profits. 

The central theme of this blog is reconsidering how to use one of our main pillars of financial support -- those larger sums of capital which usually come from people's estates, and which typically have been used to create perpetual endowments.   I'm going to argue that, unless such an endowment is the only thing the donor wants to do, a better way to use legacy gifts is to liquidate them and invest them in fulfilling your mission.  

The Bible, whether read as the sacred word of God or simply as one of the foundational historical documents of Western civilization, talks a lot about money and wealth -- depending on who's counting, perhaps more than any other subject.  

One of the earliest instructional episodes for institutions considering how to handle assets occurs way back in Genesis 47, in the story of Pharoah's Dream.

Joseph, the great-grandson of Abraham, had been sold into slavery in Egypt by his jealous brothers, but emerges as an advisor to Pharoah when he is able to interpret a troubling dream.  In Pharoah's dream seven fat, sleek cows are eaten by seven scrawny cows; and then seven full and heavy heads of grain are devoured by seven withered plants.   Joseph  indicates that the dream is a weather forecast of seven years of plenty, which is to be followed by seven years of famine.

Joseph offers a plan from God, which Pharoah empowers him to implement, to prepare Egypt for the coming disaster by setting aside 20% of the harvest from each of the seven years of plenty in great warehouses.   When the famine years begin, enough grain has been stored to feed the people of Egypt and their neighbors through the times of trouble.

For 3400 years, this story has been used to demonstrate the wisdom of prudence and thrift, of setting aside money for a rainy day.  It is, in fact, frequently cited in books and essays about the need to create endowments. 

I'm no Pharoah, but I am often troubled, sometimes in the middle of the night, by concerns that lean years may already be upon us.  I serve on the vestry of a church that is blessed (and challenged) with an endowment that can support more than half of our current operating budget -- if that's how we continue to choose to use it.  I've spent nearly 30 years working with dozens of non-profits that only aspire to having more assets than annual expenses.   (I'll probably break this into two posts at this point).

I decided to name this blog after the story in Genesis 47 because it is instructive in a way that we don't often consider, in our efforts to turn years of plenty into futures of plenty.    Pharoah was told to set aside 20% of the income from seven abundant years to use it, to spend it, over the next seven years -- to meet human need, not to produce interest income as an additional revenue stream for the palace. 

Most churches and most non-profits do a pretty good job (although we all can do better) at talking to their members and supporters about the importance of regularly supporting their annual operating budget with a recurring gift or pledge out of the member’s income. Churches have the extra advantage of a common language about giving back to God.

Very few churches or non-profits are anywhere near as systematic about talking to their supporters about ALSO supporting their mission with a significant one-time gift out of their estate.  Many endowments that do exist came as unexpected surprises, or as the result of extensive targeted cultivation of a few significant prospects.

And yet if churches – or non-profits in general – succeeded in making their case for the second kind of gift at the same conversation rate that they do in making their case for the annual kind, they could transform themselves within a generation.  

If every parishioner in your church would endow their pledge – would commit to a gift out of their estate of $20,000 or so for every $1000 they pledge on an annual basis – then within 60 years, your endowment would be producing as much as your current annual appeal does; you could double the resources available to pursue your mission.  And, probably two-thirds or more of your pledge revenue comes from people over age 50; so there is a chance that you could increase your budget by 70% in just a generation, even without increasing pledging.

Excited yet?  No, me either.  This is going to take too long, and the benefits are too far down the road.

But Pharoah’s Dream offers one other bit of advice for making a case for that legacy gift. Joseph didn’t tell Pharoah to store up seven years’ worth of surpluses to invest it at 8% so he could spin off 5% per year while reinvesting the other 3% as a hedge against inflation forever.  The plan was to use it over the course of a seven-year famine.

Maybe we need to change, or at least add a new dimension to, the paradigm of how to use estate gifts.  Maybe putting a million dollars into an “investment vehicle” that spins out $50,000 a year until the end of time isn’t the only or the best way to inspire giving or plan your organization’s long-term future.  Perhaps other donors – particularly those whose estate gifts will be four or five figures instead of six or seven – can better visualize the meals served, the people clothed, the lives changed if their gifts, pooled with others like them, were spent down over a given number of years – perhaps a generation, during which time the next generation of donors are cultivated to replace the gifts that preceded them.

There are and have been charitable foundations, such as the Herman Krannert Trust and the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust, designed to self-liquidate in this manner.  How many individual institutions are beginning to plan at least a part of their legacy giving and asset management programs in this way?  Trinity Episcopal Church in Indianapolis is at least exploring it.  In posts to come, I’ll share what we’ve experienced, and what I’ve found in talking to others across the country. 

We may survive this famine yet.  We may even come through stronger.

A Good Use for a Quarter Million Dollars

What’s the right way to use $250,000?

Saturday Sally and I took a behind the scenes tour of ProjectHome Indy, one of the neighborhood non-profits that Trinity Episcopal Church supports.

PHI rents from Trinity, for about a dollar a month, a home around the corner from the church that the organization has nicely restored and now maintains as a place that offers shelter and life-skills training to homeless pregnant teens and teenage moms.

Read that again.  Homes for pregnant teens have been around for generations.  This one fills a need for girls (yes, “girls,” we’re talking about children) who have no place to live.   Many of them are 15 or even younger; they are pregnant or raising a newborn; and they have no home.  Perhaps they’ve been kicked or driven out of a parent’s home.  Perhaps the one parent they have is homeless themselves.  Perhaps home is where a stepfather or relative or unrelated adult male impregnated them.

PHI’s lovely house has five bedrooms upstairs, so at any one time they are working with as many as five girls (and maybe their babies).   Sometimes they’re not full.  Some clients don’t like the structure and bolt at the first bad opportunity to sleep on a friend’s couch.   Some stay as long as 18 months, but the average is closer to six months.

 “Success” for PHI is when a client completes whatever is necessary to move out into a sustainable home life.  Sometimes that means that the original home has become viable again.   More often, it means completing high school or a GED, getting a job, perhaps sharing an apartment with another “graduate,” ideally having acquired the knowledge and the habits to build a life outside the cycle of poverty and abuse  that led them here in the first place.

Based on the numbers above, it would take an absolutely ideal set of circumstances for PHI to serve and graduate ten young women a year.  But probably, five is closer to the reality.

We didn’t talk about budget, but afterwards I looked PHI up on Guidestar.   The most recent numbers there show them as a $250,000/year operation.  Most of that is the cost of having 24/7 paid adult supervision in the home.  They also have an impressive part-time executive director who, like most part-time non-profit execs, is really just receiving part-time pay for full-time work.   In the year I looked at, less than a third of their revenue came from reimbursements from the state’s Department of Child Services.  Private donations made up the rest.

I have to admit to doing a mental calculus on return on investment.   $250,000 seems like a lot of cost to society to run an operation that serves five people a year.  $250,000 is four times the annual budget of each of the two feeding ministries – a food pantry and a kitchen – where I volunteer.  And those both serve hundreds of people a month.

  

On the other hand, our clients are hungry again within a week, or a day.

At PHI, that $250,000 helps five teenage girls who ideally learned the skills and disciplines to break the cycle.   Odds are, without intervention, they would have had another baby while they were still children themselves; maybe more.  Odds are, those babies would grow up in the same cycle of dysfunction and, in 15 to 18 years, have a couple of babies themselves.   And they would repeat the cycle. 

Ideally, this year’s quarter million dollars turns around the lives of five young people.   It avoids the need for ten such investments in 2030 and the couple of years thereafter, and twenty in 2045, and forty in 2060. That’s 70 future “broken” lives, in just the next fifty years, that hopefully won’t need interventions at the cost of $50,000 each.   That’s three and a half million dollars.

PHI’s inspirational CEO Lakshmi Hasanadka would love to build an endowment, and who can blame her?   We teach our non-profit leaders to use renewable revenues on operations, and one-time gifts like bequests for capital projects or to build endowments.  But would another $250,000 be better used if it was used as an endowment?    It could create $12,500 a year in spendable income.   How much of a difference would that make on this issue, in the lives of five people a year? 

 

Such a gift to PHI, as an endowment, would spin out $12,500 a year … $125,000 a decade … $625,000 over fifty years. 

Coincidentally, $250,000 is also just about what it took PHI to rehab a sturdy but dilapidated house that our church made available to them four years ago.

 

I don’t want to oversimplify the situation, or make another organization’s decisions for them based on two hours of observation.  I just want to point out that sometimes, the best way to use $250,000 can be to spend it.

"But I'm Not Dead Yet." Another Response to Another Dying Church Story.

Bring out your dead!   The Episcopal Church has released the final tabulated results of the 2013 Parochial Reports.  I'm commenting primarily for my friends at Trinity Episcopal Church in Indianapolis, but there are points here that are relevant everywhere.  The trend lines in this report are mirrored not only in all the mainstream Protestant denominations; it's been an issue in the Catholic Church for two generations and now even the evangelical congregations that grew throughout the 1980s and 1990s are experiencing a decline in numbers.

Bring out your dead!  As a denomination, the Episcopal Church is down to 6,622 parishes in the US, a fifth straight year of losing 40 to 100 a year.  In many cases this is a matter of small parishes merging; but in some cases communities are simply losing their Episcopal churches.

The count of total active Baptized Members is 1,867,000, down 1.4% this year, down about 7% total over the past five years.  This number has been dwindling from a high of 4 million 40 years ago.  During the early ‘00’s it was common   to attribute our membership losses to people leaving over the then-divisive issue of ordaining gay clergy.  Now that decision has positioned us at the vanguard of the right side of history, but it is not translating into membership growth. Bring out your dead!   

The Average Sunday Attendance (ASA) in all 6600 parishes on a given weekend is 623,700 – down 2.6%.  The five-year trend is down by over 10%.  Attendance is dropping even faster than membership – indicating that normative expectations about what constitutes “participation” are changing.  So ... "but I'm not dead yet!"

Median parish membership  is 152.  (The mean, or average, is 281; a few very large churches drive up the average.)   The median means that half the Episcopal congregations in the US – 3311 of them – are smaller than 152 individual members.  Sixty percent have less than 200 members, and only 14% are larger than 500.  We at Trinity are well established within that top group, with more than 800 members.  So ... "really, I'm feeling much better."  

Median  ASA is 61, and the average or mean is 94.   Only 4% of Episcopal churches have a higher ASA than 300, and Trinity is just outside that group at 282.

The national Average Pledge $2553, up .8% … that number has increased by 60-70 dollars a year for five years.   Our average pledge at Trinity in 2013 was $2150, up by $150 after having hovered just under $2000 for several years.   Nationally, the average pledge has increased by almost $400, or 18%, over the past five years.   That’s a good thing, I believe, but I can’t help but think that that’s largely a function of small churches having no other revenue stream and no other alternative, in the face of inexorably-rising costs, than for every remaining member to give more to make up for the members who passed away each year.

I also have to think that Trinity’s average pledge is lower than it could be, because people don’t see that same desperate dynamic at play here, thanks to our endowment.    But certainly we are a more affluent-than-average Episcopalian congregation.  Considering how many of the 47 parishes in the Diocese of Indianapolis are in small rural towns where the median household income is three-quarters what it is in Marion County and half of what it is in Hamilton County, Trinity has to be above average in our capacity. 

And for all I know, we very well may be above average in our individual generosity.  We just are not, as a group, doing as much of our giving through the local church as the average Episcopalian congregation. 

But I didn’t write this just as a means of shaming us into giving more.  Rather, I’d like to suggest applying these numbers to a couple of different perspectives.  

A growing Average Sunday Attendance is likely a good indicator of a healthy congregation, but a declining ASA is not adequate evidence that a church is not healthy.  ASA is measuring changes in societal patterns that it is counter-productive to battle.  I would argue that a member who worships twice in a month, attends (or leads) an educational offering twice a month, and invests time on a committee and/or at an outreach mission twice a month, is a more engaged member than someone who attends worship four times a month but does none of the other.   I think Trinity is full – or at least half-full! – of people who fit that former profile.   Of course, I’m sure there are some smaller churches where the same thing is even more true.  But we at Trinity have the resources to demonstrate some leadership in tracking and promoting this kind of engagement measuring, and in that way changing the national narrative of what is and what is not a “dying” church.

I also think that there are some good conversations going on at Trinity about how we should cover the cost of our program with our giving, and use our endowment to maintain our physical plant and fund new initiatives.   What new initiatives?    That’s not been decided … in fact, I don’t think there’s even a list started.  

But every time I read a new analysis on the decline of the church, I have to think … we have at Trinity the resources – the talent, the imagination, and the venture capital and financial flexibility – to conceive and implement ideas that could change the world beyond our walls and our neighborhood.