A friend sent me a job listing today for someone to head up a ministry position at the Archdiocese of Boston. The listing has some serious requirements, but I noticed that is a part-time job, only 21 hours. Who can afford to work only part time who has such credentials? A mom, you say? Except this job will require a lot of work at events that will take place at night and on weekends. It should probably be a full-time paying a full-time wage and thus they could go out and hire someone and give them a good wage to support a family on, but then current budgets won’t allow that.
But what if they endowed certain ministry positions, like universities endow chairs? What if, instead of asking some big donor to give $100,000 to the general fund for the archdiocese, we asked him to donate $500,000 to fund the, say, Director of Youth Ministry position in perpetuity? I think endowed ministry offices would be an answer to certain funding problems.