Our Response to Michael Durall’s Recommendations

Gary Lerude, Vice President

Since Michael Durall’s weekend with us last fall and his subsequent report and recommendations, the Executive Board has covered a lot of ground. During the next few minutes I’d like to retrace our steps and advise you of the vision for the church that is emerging.

One year ago this congregation made the difficult decision to approve a budget that cut our outreach grants and our fair-share contributions to the UUA and the New Hampshire/Vermont district. We asked our minister and staff to forgo any increase in salary, yet to continue serving us with energy and commitment. It was a painful choice for the Executive Board to recommend and was surely just as disheartening for you to approve.

I’m happy to report that the proposed budget for this coming year is not draconian and, presumably, will not keep us here late tonight. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

As you recall, Michael Durall, a UU consultant who specializes in church vitality, visited us last November and spent a weekend meeting with church members, staff, and our various committees. His primary assessment was that we have an unhealthy dependence upon our endowment, using it to fund our operating expenses. To address this issue, he recommended we first enter a period of discernment to build clarity about our core values, beliefs, roles, and purpose. Mike noted the need for us to define our view of being an “authentic community” and our expectations for “integrity of membership.”

The discernment process adopted by the Executive Board has been to discuss and draft a series of statements that articulate our vision and goals for the church. These complement and expand upon the church’s existing vision and mission statements, and they provide insight and clarity into the life of the congregation, creating a view of the authentic community we seek to be:

• Worship and Spiritual Development

• Religious Education

• Church Community and Fellowship

• Community Presence and Outreach

• Denominational Presence and Outreach

The Executive Board completed our initial draft of these goals at the end of March, and during April and May we invited members of the congregation to review and discuss them. Based upon the inputs we received, we’ve updated the goals and have approved a second draft, which is included in your material and is posted on the church’s web site (on the Governance page).

In parallel with the development of these goals statements, the Executive Board spent considerable time discussing how to wean ourselves from using the endowment for operating expenses. The feasibility of our discussions has been aided immensely by the terrific results from this year’s pledge drive – a testament to the efforts of Steve Ladew, Linda Donaldson-Guidi, all those who worked to make the pledge drive a success, and – most of all – each of you who contribute to the church and share in this objective.

As you’ll see in the budget proposal, we have made significant progress this year in increasing our pledge base. The Executive Board has come to recognize, however, that this is the first of several successful pledge drives we’ll need before we can achieve the goal that we have articulated. We want to use funds from the endowment for only two purposes:

1. Maintaining or improving our historic facilities; and

2. Supporting “major” outreach projects that will have significant and valuable impact in the community.

At the February Executive Board meeting, we passed a resolution drafted by Dan Murphy that expressed those two uses for the endowment and outlined a multi-year financial plan to eliminate the endowment’s subsidy of operating expenses. Since the February meeting, Dan, Mike Wilt, Jon Lasselle, and other members have refined the financial model. You will find more information about this in your material. Thanks to Ellen Barr, Fred Shirley, and several other “word smiths” on the Executive Board, a fairly complex financial model has been made lucid.

As you’ll see in the material, to redefine our relationship with the endowment, we’ll need to increase our pledges each year for the next three to five years. I believe this implies that we’ll also need to increase the size of our membership, which has been flat to slightly declining for the past few years. We also need to be prudent in managing our expenses, but I don’t believe we can become the church we seek to be simply by cutting expenses.

Looking toward the coming church year, the Executive Board intends to move forward in implementing the strategic goals and financial plan that have been outlined during this discernment process. Our first step in the fall will be to engage you, our members and friends, in a dialog about these critical issues and then to hold a congregational meeting to seek your endorsement.

While we are making this financial transition to the point where we can fund major outreach projects using endowment funds, the Executive Board has discussed how the church can best support and nurture our commitment to outreach. We plan to continue the Sunday collections, with all proceeds going to outreach projects. To facilitate congregational involvement in identifying worthy organizations, we have developed a simple process for recommending recipients and have a nominations form on our web site. We are also seeking outreach projects that will tap a broad range of congregational resources, particularly personal involvement. With this is mind, the Executive Board recently endorsed a project for one of our neighbors, the Dental Connection. This project has been recommended by Dave Golden and Adrian George. You’ll be hearing more about how we can help in the coming months.

This church has so much for which to be thankful: an empowering religious faith, dedicated and talented minister and staff, a strong commitment to outreach, recognition within the community, and a long and proud history. There’s no reason we can’t be an even more vital congregation within our local community and the denomination, turning what has become an unhealthy dependence on our endowment into an asset for our larger community. To be sure, it will require a strong commitment and confidence in what we can achieve.

It seems appropriate to end with the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, which are prophetic to the mission before us: “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”