An Example of Church Leadership
One of the themes of this blog is that the crises we face provide an opportunity for the church to provide leadership. We have an excellent example of such leadership here in the Commonwealth of Virginia and in the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia.
The State governor, Ralph Northam, is a physician who served as an officer in the Army Medical Corps for six years. Therefore, he understands the peril in which we find ourselves. He was one of the first governors to take aggressive action as the disease started to spread. For example, very early on he shut down the public school and college systems for the remainder of the academic year.
Our bishop, Susan Goff, has been even more assertive. She shut down virtually all church services and meetings even before Governor Northam’s action. This week she closed all church offices, even those that have only one or two people in them.
The “New Normal”
This is the third in a series of posts to do with what the “New Normal” may look like once the COVID-19 pandemic is brought under control, and how the church may provide leadership in the coming recession (possibly depression). The first post in the series — Community — suggested that our economies will become more localized. The church, particularly those churches organized around the parish concept, can help develop such communities. The second post — No Debt — discusses the role that debt plays in our society. It suggests that, if we are indeed entering a Depression, then we may come to regard being in debt as being wrong, even immoral.
Related to the idea of avoiding debt are the concepts of thrift and frugality. I found various definitions for the those words; in this post I will use them as follows.
- Someone is thrifty is they do not spend more money than they earn. They live within their means.
- Someone is frugal if they spend significantly less money than they earn. They save money and buy something only when they have sufficient cash to purchase it. Frugality may involve some degree of sacrifice, as during the Lenten season. (An example of frugality is to do with the current shortage of toilet paper. A thrifty person busy only what he or she needs and uses what they have sparingly. A frugal person uses newspaper. It is not as comfortable, neither is it flushable, but it works.)
Thrift, thrift, Horatio. The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage table.
Going beyond frugality is the concept of intentional fasting, a feature of most of the world’s religions.
Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry.
Luke 4:1-2
One of the lessons that this virus-induced current recession and its associated mass unemployment has taught us is the importance of having savings. It is estimated that more than half of all Americans have less than $1,000 in savings, and about a quarter of Americans have no savings at all. In some cases this lack of savings may be unavoidable. For example, if someone is chronically unemployed for health reasons then they cannot realistically save money. But one has to wonder how many of the people with such low reserves were spending money on discretionary activities such as eating in restaurants or making the payments on a late model automobile. If and when their income returns these people may decide to permanently cut back on some of this discretionary spending.
An internet story illustrates what may happen. Before the crisis one man used to go to the hairdresser twice a month to have his hair cut and trimmed. Now, with physical distancing in force, his wife cuts his hair instead. He is wondering about making this change permanent, thereby saving $40 per month.
I came across an opportunity to be thrifty a few days ago. I was clearing out a small part of our back yard that I had intentionally let go wild. What I had not anticipated was that bamboo plants, which are very invasive, would establish themselves in that area. I decided that they had to be removed before they crowded out all the other plants. Normally I would have cut them down and dumped them in the town’s recycle truck. But, at the same time as I was cutting the bamboo shoots I was also planting English peas. The peas need something to climb on, so I used the bamboo shoots as shown in the picture. Waste not, want not. (Now I have to make sure that those shoots do not put out roots and start to spread.)
The example of the bamboo shoots illustrates another aspect of thrift. It is not always about large programs and big gestures; it is often to do with small actions, all of which add up to make a bigger picture.
It is unfortunate that our financial systems discourage saving. Interest rates are close to zero, the stock market is erratic (to put it mildly) and bonds can be risky in a time of financial crisis. And there is always the potential for high inflation that would wipe out much of the money that was saved. After all, our governments continue to issue staggering amounts of debt with no plan as how they intend to pay it off. One way of doing so would be to through high inflation. Still, even a difficult savings environment is better than going into debt.
Last week we saw that the Bible does not forbid us from being in debt, but it does discourage the practice. So it is with thrift and frugality. These are practices to be encouraged, if only because they make the occasional lavish expenditure even more noticeable.
Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year’s wages.
John 12:5
National Economies
The above discussion has been to do with the behavior and actions of individuals and of relatively small organizations such as the Episcopal church. But the same need for thrift, i.e., living within one’s means, applies also to national economies. In an April 2020 newspaper article The debt reckoning has finally arrived Robert Samuelson argues that nations should balance their budgets and create a surplus in normal times. Then, when a crisis such as COVID-19 hits, they can use massive debt to bring the economy back to life. But, for the last five decades, the United States government has run large deficits on the “something for nothing” philosophy — we can enjoy the benefits of government spending without needing to raise taxes to pay for those benefits. The upshot is that we do not have the financial reserves needed to pay for the sudden deficit spending needed in crises such as the one we are living through. We have wasted our ammunition.
Opportunity for the Church
One of the themes of this blog is that the changing and rather scary times in which we are living provide an opportunity for the church to provide much-needed leadership. In this and in previous posts it is suggested that that such leadership will include the following elements,
- Develop and lead local communities;
- Discourage the use of debt; and
- Encourage thrift, and frugality.
We will also need a theology that matches the “New Normal”, the post-COVID-19 world. The example I keep coming back to that of Augustine of Hippo. He and other church fathers lived at a time when the western Roman Empire was in terminal decline and society was entering a time that we now rather disparagingly refer to as the Dark Ages. In response to this long-term crisis they developed a theology based on the concept of a City of God — an eternal city that is greater than any City of Man. The theologians of our time will need to work out how faith addresses a time of resource depletion, climate change, population overshoot and long-term economic decline.
I also keep thinking of my grandfather who said that going into debt was not just a bad financial decision, it was immoral (The New Normal (2) — No Debt). He was making a theological statement.
Industrial Safety Management
For those of you who work in industry the corona virus is having an effect as to how we all think of safety. Therefore, I have started another series of weekly posts to do with the New Normal and the discipline of Process Safety Management. The first post is The New PSM Normal (1) — Deflation.
