We Aren't Broke: Uncovering Hidden Resources for Mission and Ministry

By Mark Elsdon and Craig Dykstra

What if everything you need is already there? 

Many Christian churches and related institutions in the United States are struggling or, in some cases, facing imminent crisis, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Attendance is down. Funding is harder to come by. People are no longer drawn to traditional church services and programming in the ways that they once were. Often, we feel broke and powerless to do much about it. We settle for doing more with less: Less money. Fewer people. Fewer churches. 

But if we reexamine our perceived limits and our assumptions about how resources are supposed to be used, then something remarkable and beautiful comes into view: we aren’t broke at all but have enormous resources at our disposal. Church and missional organizations nationwide own billions of dollars of prime property and investment assets, which, when combined with social enterprise and new expressions of mission, can be put to work for innovation and transformation. And these resources are often available to us right now. 

This book is an invitation to envision a different way of putting God’s gifts to work in the world. It draws upon a remarkable story of rebirth at a Presbyterian affiliated campus ministry center at the University of Wisconsin, along with profiles of other creative social enterprises, to describe how church property and investment assets can be put to work for innovation, transformation, and financial sustainability. Theologically rooted but practically minded, it provides guidance and tools for church and nonprofit leaders, entrepreneurs, and investors of all kinds who are seeking new ways to fund and participate in God’s work in the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Jun 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781467462440

Mark Elsdon

Mark Elsdon lives and works at the intersection of money and meaning as an entrepreneur, nonprofit executive, and speaker. He is the author of We Aren’t Broke: Uncovering Hidden Resources for Mission and Ministry. Mark holds degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, Princeton Theological Seminary, and the University of Wisconsin School of Business. He is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with his family. 

Book preview

Dykstra

Preface

We can pinpoint the date when our denomination will cease to exist. People just aren’t coming to church on Sunday morning anymore.

How do we get young people to come to church?!?

The legacy of racial and economic injustice in our community is overwhelming. And our denomination has been a part of the problem in the past. What can we do about it now?

I’m not sure we will be open in ten years. There just isn’t enough money to keep going.

Look at all the needs in our community! We can barely keep our lights on. How are we supposed to meet those pressing needs?

We are closing five churches in our town. What are we going to do with the empty buildings?

These are all questions and worries I’ve heard raised over meals, in denominational meetings, at conferences, and on video conference calls in the past couple of years. You may have heard some of them yourself. You may have spoken some of them yourself. I know I have.

These are all very real concerns. Many Christian churches and related institutions in the United States are facing an imminent crisis, or are at least struggling. Attendance is down. Funding is harder to come by. Churches are closing, and buildings are being sold. Climate change, wealth inequality, and racial tension are massive problems facing our communities that the church is struggling to respond to. People are no longer drawn to traditional church services and programming in the ways they once were. We often feel broke and powerless to do much about it all. We continually try to do more with less. Fewer people. Fewer dollars. Fewer churches.

Just as I was finishing this book, the world was rocked by COVID-19, a virulent coronavirus that forced us to stay more than six feet away from anyone we didn’t live with, brought the economy to a standstill, and moved most church activity online. At the time of this writing, it remains unclear how long these restrictions will be in place and what the long-term impact will be on society and the church. But we can be sure that we will not emerge from this pandemic unchanged. The crisis of mission and money we are facing in the church has suddenly been amplified and accelerated by the virus and its social and economic implications. The questions of how we serve our community and how we fund our mission are more urgent and pressing than ever.

But there is hope.

This is a book about abundance, possibility, and hope; about what we have rather than what we don’t have. It is a book about how the wealth of creativity, perseverance, and resources that exists in church institutions can be put to work for mission in new ways. It invites us to think differently about the property and money God has entrusted to us. This is a book that I hope will spark new ways of thinking and being in the world so that together we can transform communities, address injustice and inequality, and sustain effective ministry during a time of major change.

Because we aren’t broke. We have much, and there is much to do.

Introduction: We Aren’t Broke

It was the second time he had relapsed in just a matter of months and one of countless times he had turned to heroin in the past few years. He had tried to quit for good. And tried. And tried. But the pull of a drug that takes the lives of more than fifteen thousand Americans each year was too much. It didn’t matter that he had almost died of an overdose in the past. It didn’t matter that his life had been derailed and he had hurt most of the people who loved him most. It didn’t matter that he had gone through two inpatient treatment programs and had already relapsed once in the sober housing program he was now enrolled in. It didn’t even matter that he was back in school as a student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for the second time with a chance to finish and graduate this time. The draw of the drug was too strong. The disease was too powerful. What more could he do? Was there any hope of escape? And what, if anything, could the church do to help?

A lot, it turns out. The church could do a lot.

Peter (whose name has been changed for this story) was living in the Pres House Apartments as part of a sober housing program called Next Step when this latest relapse happened. He had relapsed once in the program already. But this time, rather than write him off as a lost cause, the staff and other residents held him accountable to the recovery plan he had put in place for himself and supported him through this latest setback. This time it worked. With the help of his Next Step roommates and other resources, Peter moved deeper into his journey of recovery. He began to find success in school and make meaningful friendships on campus. He started emerging from the darkness into light. Hope was reborn.

By the time Peter had graduated from college with a 3.5 grade point average and a degree in computer engineering and taken a job at a well-known firm, he had run a marathon and mended relationships with many of those he had hurt while using heroin. He was a peer mentor in the Next Step program and an officer in the campus recovery student organization. And most importantly, he was sober. Peter’s life had been transformed by living in an apartment building that was built by a Presbyterian campus ministry, on church-owned land, financed with an impact investment from a denominational endowment.

And he is not the only one. Eighty percent of the participants in the Next Step sober housing program at Pres House Apartments over the years have either graduated from degree programs or remained sober or both. At a time when the opioid crisis is wreaking havoc on communities all over the country, this program has saved lives, and has saved Wisconsinites almost half a million dollars in costs associated with addiction. At a time when the church is struggling to figure out what role it is playing in our world—where fewer people attend worship services but more wicked problems need our attention—the church was there for Peter and his friends.¹

What may be most remarkable of all is that the building that changed Peter’s life was built on a parking lot owned by Presbyterian campus ministry. I know, because I parked in that lot on my first day as a pastor.

I first learned about Pres House through a phone call during my senior year of seminary. A pastor from the presbytery where my spouse, Erica, and I were candidates for ordination invited us to consider an opening for campus copastors at this place called Pres House in Madison, Wisconsin. He had been working with the board of directors as a consultant to help them update their strategic plan for the future. The plan was simple and ambitious: hire pastors, start a new campus ministry, and develop the property for long-term sustainability and ministry.

I don’t remember much about that initial conversation, because our lives were a blur at that point. We had just had our first child, and she was only a few days old. As Erica recalls, we really should not have been asked to make any reasonable decisions at that moment. But about a month after that first phone call with members of the search committee at Pres House, we found ourselves driving past the spectacular sight of the Wisconsin state capitol into Madison for the first time in our lives. And a few months later we changed our permanent address to Madison, WI.

Looking back on it all, I am not sure what prompted us to come to Pres House for our first pastoral call. There were zero students involved in the campus ministry. Zero. Despite a rich legacy of ministry going back to 1907, Pres House was dormant when we arrived. Students at the University of Wisconsin don’t attend church in significant numbers, and they certainly weren’t showing up at Pres House. The historic church building was in dire need of updating—the roof was leaking, and I quickly found myself fixing the toilet with paper clips, just to keep it running. There wasn’t enough money in the annual budget to fund our salaries. Pres House seemed pretty broke.

I guess we must have seen some potential. Or we were just naive and foolish. Maybe a little of both.

So, my first week on the job, I was sprawled on the floor of my office putting together a desk from a kit bought from Office Depot. I think it was day two of screwing the thousands of little screws into the particle-board desk when a freshman wandered into the building. He stuck his head into the chaos of my office and asked me, Hey, does ‘Pres’ stand for Presbyterian?

Yes! I replied. It does!

Cool, he replied. What happens here? I grew up Presbyterian and just moved to campus. What can I join?

After a brief pause, I decided to go for honesty; after all, it was my first official week as a pastor. Nothing! I replied. Nothing is happening here at all … but we’d love for you to join us in helping to start something new.

And so the rebirth began. Over the next year, after much prayer, discussion, and study, we had gathered a small group of students to form the core of a new community at Pres House.² A small spark of hope was kindled in the embers of a remarkable legacy of ministry.

But even as we began gathering a new community of students, we were asking ourselves how this spark would grow into the sustaining warmth of a real fire without fuel. We were spending down our endowment funds at an unsustainable pace. Our building was literally falling apart around us. Long-time, faithful donors gave just ten thousand dollars per year, and even less came from the denomination. This was hardly enough to sustain a historic property, pastors, staff, and the full-fledged campus ministry we and our board of directors dreamed of. Before we even began rebuilding, we knew that without some new approach to the financial model, it was only a matter of time before we would run out of money and have to close up for good. There was a spark of hope—but where would the fuel come from to keep the flame alive?

We started with the property and an eighty-year-old dream. Our board of directors had updated a long-held vision to build student housing on the parking lot next to the historic Pres House chapel. At the same time that we began to relaunch student ministry, we started planning for the construction of a seven-story apartment building. Meetings with the architects took place around our kitchen table while our baby daughter slept in the other room. The board was willing to take a huge risk and dream big, so we borrowed $17 million for construction of the new facility and complete renovation of the historic chapel building. After two years of planning and one year of construction, we opened the Pres House Apartments for 250 residents three years after we first arrived in Madison.

That is the much-condensed version of how my parking space was turned into the living community that changed the trajectory of Peter’s life and helped free him from the tyranny of heroin.

Sixteen years later, we now serve more than eight hundred students and young adults each year at Pres House through Sunday worship, large campus events, small groups, service and justice activities, and intentional communities in the Pres House Apartments. One example is the Next Step program for residents in addiction recovery that helps heroin addicts stay in school and rebuild their lives. Other communities are themed around vocational discernment, wellness, volunteer service, Christian practices, and so on. Demand is so high for our intentional-living programs that we are raising more money to fund more scholarships, and there are wait lists every year. We recently launched Candid, a wellness program aimed at helping students address the pressing issues of resilience and mental health by supporting them in the context of community. Some of our activities at Pres House, like a weekly worship service on Sunday afternoons, are explicitly Christian in content. Others are designed to be accessible and meaningful for students of all religious backgrounds. All of what we do is grounded in the love and grace of Jesus Christ for every person, even if we don’t require or expect those we serve to share that same faith commitment.

We have measured the impact of our mission and have discovered some powerful outcomes. Residents in the Pres House Apartments typically triple the number of people they know in our building from fall to spring—a vastly different outcome from standard student apartment buildings. In a typical year, 100 percent of surveyed campus church participants say they feel cared for by the Pres House community and would recommend Pres House to a friend. On a campus where only 10 percent of the student body is nonwhite, between 25 and 45 percent of attendees on any given Sunday are students of color. More than 90 percent of participants experience opportunities to interact with people different from them, and the vast majority report learning or trying something new in their spiritual life each year through our programs.

Even while working with a population famous for not being interested in church, Pres House has been able to engage thousands of students in just the past few years alone. We have found new ways to meet the real needs of students. The little corner of the church located on Library Mall at the university is deeply involved in addressing the wicked problems of our community, from the opioid crisis, to student mental health, to racial tension on campus. I am a pastor who loves to preach, but our Sunday worship service is not the only, nor perhaps even the primary, place that students experience the grace of Jesus Christ, are challenged to grow in their sense of purpose, and are sent out into the world around them to serve and lead. That is now happening in their living rooms, throughout all aspects of their lives, and virtually 24/7. Instead of engaging for only one hour per week on Sunday, residents of the Pres House Apartments are involved in their very homes for more than a hundred hours per week.

The social enterprise at Pres House has had a transformative effect on our finances as well. Our budget has grown 1,500 percent, from about $150,000 annually in 2004 to about $2.4 million today. Since we gained a solid financial footing, traditional fund-raising has taken off, with more than $5.5 million raised from individuals, churches, and foundations. Because our overhead is covered by program revenue, 100 percent of each donated dollar directly supports students.

We found the fuel needed to grow the spark into a real flame. And we found that fuel literally in our backyard. In our parking lot. We built a financially successful and influential social enterprise on church-owned property. And in doing so, we totally transformed a historic institution and the lives of thousands upon thousands of young adults now and into the future.

When I first pulled into my parking spot at Pres House as a brand-new minster, the church was facing two major problems that, while not necessarily universal, are widely shared by much of the Christian church in the United States. These two core problems lie beneath the anxieties mentioned in the preface to this book.

1.Individuals and communities are longing for different expressions of lived faith that move beyond the traditional programs of churches. Traditional church programs are often no longer engaging people nor helping people engage the world. We are facing serious crises such as climate change, racial injustice, opioid addiction, income inequality, and more. How are we going to tackle these wicked problems with innovative solutions through new expressions of the church in the world?

2.Churches and church-related institutions (seminaries, colleges, etc.) are struggling with an economic model that is increasingly coming up short in funding mission, especially the kind of mission that addresses the wicked problems we want to solve. The way we have funded mission and ministry in the past is no longer working. How will we generate sustainable forms of revenue to support mission?³

I have been fortunate enough to participate in a ministry approach that has addressed both of these problems. Providing a purposeful and supportive living environment at Pres House has allowed us to engage and serve students like Peter and thousands more in the issues that really matter to them. While Sunday worship is central to our mission, we have gone much deeper and wider with our ministry, transforming areas of students’ lives that previously we were absent from. And we have found a sustainable way to pay for this work. While donor funds are still essential to accomplishing our mission, our earned income has completely changed the financial calculus and funded our growth. Most powerfully of all, the mission outcomes and financial outcomes are intimately and fully integrated. Success in mission leads to success financially, and the reverse is also true. We have reconnected money to mission and mission to money.

My story at Pres House is one particular example. It is not necessarily a model in and of itself. And nothing short of God’s own hand will solve these deep problems in all contexts. But there is real potential to put the dynamic power of redemptive entrepreneurship⁴ to work alongside the sustaining fuel of church-owned capital assets (i.e., property and investment) for lasting innovation and transformation in our churches and communities. And these tools are available to us right now, in the church today. This book is an invitation to innovate and transform lives and institutions using the abundance of gifts that God has given us. There is enormous possibility and hope. We are most certainly not broke.

Books have to be printed in a linear fashion with one chapter coming after another and one idea following from another. But this subject doesn’t fit neatly into that format. The ideas here are not linear but are more akin to a multifaced shape looked at from different angles. Rather than building an argument step-by-step for how we have resources for mission and capital to fund our ministry differently, I will look at this central thesis from different theological and practical angles.

In part 1 of the book, I invite us to reimagine the way we go about mission and our relationship with money in the church. In chapter 1 I continue the story of Pres House and describe how financial necessity and desperation led us to design a resource model using church-owned investment assets as capital for financing the Pres House Apartments, which produced a triple-bottom-line return: mission impact, financial sustainability for Pres House, and financial return for our denominational investor, which in turn furthered its mission impact. This chapter also introduces the concept of impact investing that I later learned is a well-developed and rapidly growing field.

Chapter 2 looks at the financial model we have employed in the church in recent history. This can be summarized as a two-pocket model, where money is raised or earned from investment in one pocket and then spent on mission out of the other pocket. This chapter begins the exploration of what happens to our money when it is invested traditionally.

Chapter 3 asks the question, What is the highest and best use of our capital? I unpack the parable of the rich fool who builds bigger barns in order to save up for a future day that never comes, rather than releasing what God has given him into the world.

Chapter 4 encourages us to apply