We arrived at a balanced budget, every person left with unity of thought, and all our finances connected to the vision of the church.
How?
Every person accountable for a line of the budget provided their 2010 figures to the Treasurer ahead of time. Making no adjustments to the figures, the Treasurer compiled the numbers and brought the first draft of the budget to the meeting.
At the meeting, the budget was projected on the wall (side note: it's frustrating to me to have paper copies shuffling of papers, don't know what line item people are talking about...if it's projected, you can point to what you're talking about.)
We had a dialogue and cut figures and came up with ways to balance the budget.
Then came the fun part...
In order to balance the budget, all of us had to cut out funding in certain areas and had to leave some items unfunded. But that doesn't mean we ignored those items.
We took out large sheets of paper and each of us wrote down a personal wish list of items that we would like funded for 2010. Then, each person got 5 stickers. They could use their 5 stickers to vote for any item on any wish list but they could only vote for only 1 item on their own list.
We compiled all the items that got votes and ended up with 10 items. Each person took the list of 10 items and ranked them 1 to 10 (1 = lowest priority and 10 = highest priority). We added up all the votes for every item and found that there were 2-3 top priority items that everyone agreed that needed to be done.
Now, when God blesses us with more than we budgeted for and when donors come to us to fund projects outside the budget, the whole team (not just me) has the same answer on how that money gets spent.
I can't tell you what our top 3 items are for 2010 (that wouldn't be fair to our church) but I can tell you that this process broke down the silos of ministry and created a unity of vision like none other!
