Cut That Budget

I’ve been talking with the Pastor at my Church again. Our budget is in perfectly good shape, but it never hurts to cut back a little, especially when we are aware of the reality that our National economy is struggling. The Government is going to cut the costs of health care, and we need to follow suit.

Being pretty much clueless about everything except the Word of God, he (my pastor) had no idea how to reduce the budget – so I used some of the things I have learned from our Government in the past few days to help him get started on a couple of progressive changes.

First, we need to cut back on the literature order. There’s no reason each person – or each family should have an individual copy of the study material. We could have one family take it Monday thru Wednesday, and another family use it Thursday thru Saturday. He asked how we would handle new families coming into the Church, but I shut that down quickly. We’ll just limit our membership, after all there are plenty of Churches down the road.

Secondly, we can cut back on A/C and heat. There’s no reason to be warm every Winter Sunday. Every other one will do just fine. Ditto for the Summer and the A/C. People don’t mind a little inconvenience when we’re in a “savings” mode.

This works, I told him, just the way our new National Healthcare works. Your new Doctor (your old one was able to make more money as a plumber so he moved on) will have a new load of patients, but you’ll still be able to get an appointment – it just takes about two or three times as long.

You really don’t need that annual check-up or those silly tests. Every five to ten years you can get a quick “once-over.” And, if you new Doctor (your old new one got a “shovel-ready” job) misses something, the Counselor will see you sooner or later, if there is a later.

I explained to him how they’ve been doing this kind of thing in other Countries for years and years. And, in an attempt to answer his “concerns,” I told him to stop obsessing (he is such a worrier) about the lack of Churches in England, Germany, etc., because there had to be “very complicated” reasons for their decline.  Sometime he is such a dunce.