Human Resource Inventory

by Rev. Nelson Murphy

ACM Central Atlantic Conference

Thirty years ago, I served a small suburban northern NJ church for two years as a part-time interim pastor while working full-time for the National Council of Churches. The dwindling congregation in this historic church was highly discouraged by chronic membership decline, year-after-year budget deficits, an exhausted endowment fund, and deferred maintenance everywhere. Sound familiar?

Church leadership fretted at every board meeting about how much longer they could keep on like this, where would they even find a part-time pastor they could afford, and should they sell the parsonage to keep the church’s doors open. Institutional survival was the all-consuming focus of virtually every meeting.

After I was there awhile, I suggested doing an inventory of the church’s existing resources. Leaders thought I was talking about itemizing the contents of their lovely, landmark-protected sanctuary, their spacious and largely unused education building, their desirable real estate footprint in the community, the spacious Victorian parsonage on acres of vacant land – all gifts from those who had gone before. They agreed this needed to be done and wanted to get working on it.

But I was not talking about taking an inventory of their physical resources like their buildings, vacant land and gravestones. I was talking about engaging the whole church in accurately identifying and enumerating the actual human resources of time, talent and treasure that were available from the members of the church.

Specifically, out of the 168 hours God gives each of us each week, what amount of that time does each individual member invest to make the life of this church happen?

What unique talents & skills do members have, and exactly how, what, when and where are they contributing these talent and skills to make the life of this church happen?

And finally, as accurately as possible, how much wealth do members really have? That is, what is the combined net worth of this church family, and what portion of it is being devoted to make the life of this church happen?

Time, talent and treasure freely given to the glory of God – these are the human resources that make the life of any church happen. These are the keys that empower every vibrant voluntary institution. If you do not know what the available resources are in terms of time, talent and treasure, how can you determine what might be possible for your congregation to do?

As you can imagine, there was a lot of push-back to the idea of doing this kind of resource inventory, especially the idea of trying to calculate the combined “net-worth” of the whole church. But this suggestion helped shift the conversation from a scarcity mode of thinking to acknowledgment that a plentiful abundance of material wealth and passion for those less fortunate more accurately characterized the members of this church. This led to asking what it means to belong to Jesus, or to obediently love Jesus by loving our neighbors, to acknowledging that everything we have is God’s gift given to be used, entrusted to us to help make things “on earth as it is in heaven” for all God’s people. The more folks wrestled with these ideas, the more excited they became about their future prospects, and good things started to happen.

Two young adults in that congregation took my suggestion to heart and began making this kind of time-talent-treasure resource inventory in the church. Through a series of small group meetings in people’s homes during Lent, members were encouraged to consider and answer the questions above. From the information obtained, they compiled a congregational resource profile that put the lie to the notion that they did not have enough. And soon after, a full-time pastor was called and the church started thriving once more – mostly through learning again how to share their abundant resources.

A human resource inventory is not a panacea for every church’s financial problems, but it might be a good place to start looking for solutions. Every church, no matter how large or small, has a plenitude of unused human resources that might be made available for undertaking God’s mission if we only knew (or mostly just admitted) they were there. Lack of money needed to do God’s work in our time is a spiritual problem, not a financial one. The money is out there and givers need to give it for their spiritual well-being. Preaching Stewardship that encourages freely giving of one’s time, talent and treasure is never out of season. Do it to help people give their money meaning, their hearts a big lift, and their churches the capacity to rightly and thankfully praise and glorify God by helping others.