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What if churches and ministries discovered they have more assets than they realize? What if the church could reimagine how to use its resources?
The Distillery podcast explores what motivates the work of Christian scholars and why it matters for theology and ministry.
[Introduction]
What if churches found that we actually had every resource that we need within our grasp? Princeton Seminary alumni Mark Elsdon lives and works at the intersection of money and meaning as an entrepreneur consultant, pastor, and speaker engaged in faith-based impact investing, church property development, and social enterprise. Mark is co-founder of Rooted Good, which seeks to create more good in the world through social innovation. He is also executive director at Pres House on the University of Wisconsin's Madison Campus. And he's owner of Elsdon Strategic Consulting. Mark is President of the Board of Directors of Working Capital for Community Needs, an impact investing fund that provides microfinance for the working poor in Latin America. In this episode, Distillery co-host Shari Oosting speaks with Mark about his book We Aren't Broke: Uncovering Hidden Resources for Mission and Ministry. In their conversation, Mark expands on why he insists the church and ministries have more assets than they realize.
You're listening The Distillery at Princeton Theological Seminary.
Shari Oosting
So, Mark, thank you for talking with me today.
Mark Elsdon
Good to be here.
Shari Oosting
So we are gonna talk about your new book, We Aren’t Broke. This is a timely conversation. I'm wondering if you'd be willing to open the same way that you open the book, which is by sharing a little bit about your own story, about how this became such an important topic for you, this kind of blending together of resources, mission, and ministry.
Mark Elsdon
Yeah, sure. So, I have been a pastor working at Pres House Presbyterian-affiliated campus ministry at the University of Wisconsin in Madison for about eighteen years now—it'll be eighteen years this summer. My wife, Erica Lou, and I came to Madison as graduates of Princeton Seminary for our first call. And we basically got started rebuilding a campus ministry that had been—had a really rich and long legacy, but had become dormant with no students involved at all—a building that was falling apart around us and kind of no real viable funding plan for the future. I'm not really sure why we, why we took the call to be honest.
Shari Oosting
It sounds like a risky decision for a seminary grad.
Mark Elsdon
Yeah. Why did we—I don't know. Anyway, we were naïve, and I think we were taken by the idea of creating something new and having space to do that which, which we sort of had since there wasn't anything really going on at the time. So we came to relaunch the ministry and then to figure out what the funding model was gonna be. And one of the ideas that the board that brought us to Pres House had on the table was an idea that had been around for actually about eighty years since the beginning of the organization, and that was to provide student housing for University of Wisconsin, Madison students on the property that is Pres House—we’re located right in the heart of the campus, right on the main quad of the campus. And so that idea had been around since the 1920s but had been sort of put on hold when the Great Depression hit in the early Thirties and then kind of was on and off, thought about for many decades but then became a real viable option to explore again when we arrived in 2004. So we set about rebuilding the ministry at the same time as looking at developing the property into a student housing facility. And we can maybe come back around to this, but to keep this part of the story reasonably short, we did in the end build a seventeen-million-dollar housing facility that houses about two-hundred and forty students on the parking lot that is adjacent to the historic church building that is Pres House. And that was a transformative moment in the history of the organization—and for me in terms of seeing how it could impact the lives of students—really has been a powerful ministry opportunity, but it has all been also been financially transformative. And it—our budget grew 1500% from the time that we started to today from about $150,000 a year to about $2.4 million a year. And so that has changed everything, of course, about what we can do and how we go about doing it. And so over the years I learned a great deal about property development, about business management. I went back in and got an MBA—well, probably about fifteen years after had finished my MDiv—went back, did an MBA at the University of Wisconsin Business School. And so started to see how the power of using church-owned real estate. And then another element of this story, which we might come back to, is an investment from a church partner, a denominational partner, an impact investment from their endowment funds. Those things came together, those sources of capital came together to allow us to do this transformative work that both changes the financial situation, but really ultimately is about changing the lives of thousands of students.
Shari Oosting
Well, I think we'll have a chance to visit some of those particular stories, but let's talk about money for a little bit, because there are a lot of people who don't go to seminary, wanting to ever think about money or a budget or investments, but that became pretty significant for you pretty early on, it sounds like.
Mark Elsdon
Yes. yeah, I think that is somewhat common, right? To sort of feel like we're just, we're in this for the ministry, for the relationships, to love people, and that's obviously is all true. But the reality is that any mission-oriented activity, whether that's in the church or outside of the church, requires thought about money and about the financial model. Yeah, so, any mission oriented organization—a church or otherwise—has to think about the finances, the money side of what they do. There has to be a sustainable, viable financial model for any meaningful activity to go on and to work sort of over the medium or long term. And so I found that thinking about the role money plays and aligning money with mission has been really important to—actually what has led to the success of the ministry. So they're not separate things—they're tied in together. And the way money is utilized and put to work in the world—and by money, I mean also property investment money—the way that that is put to work in the world can really—well, it always has an impact, actually. The question is is it a positive impact or is it a negative impact? I don't really believe there's such a thing as neutral with regard to the use of money—that's always either doing something positive in the world or doing something harmful.
Shari Oosting
Yeah, let's tease that out a little bit more. You make a pretty bold claim that our money or our assets are always at work. So, talk about that—maybe give a few examples of what you mean by that.
Mark Elsdon
Well, so, I mean, unless you put—literally, you put your money under your mattress—as soon as it's in the financial system at all, even if it's just in a bank account in a savings account or checking account, that money is out in the world at work. So, the bank that's holding that money is not actually holding it. It's not sitting in a vault somewhere—they're lending it out, they're investing it. So all of our money is at play in the system, so to speak, when we're spending it, when we're earning it, when we're saving it. And the impact that it has—sometimes we don't very often, we don't know actually what that impact is, but it's always having any impact, every second of the day. So, just as an example, we traditionally invest our money and my, we—I mean myself, as well—people as well as institutions, we invest our money often in the stock market. For example, there's been a lot of talk in the last few weeks about the stock market. It's been all over the place because of inflation and then because of what's happening in Ukraine and so on and so forth. And so there's lots of talk about it right now, but that's where most of our money ends up in some form or another. And then what's happening there is that money is being invested in companies—mostly large multinational companies like Facebook and Google, Apple, Alphabet (which is Google and Amazon)— and places like that to allow those companies to grow their business. So, they take invest from all of us in the form of shares that are purchased, and then they use that money to grow their business. And then they provide a return on that investment back to us. And that's how we make some money with our money. But it's at work, it's at play in the world, one way or the other.
Shari Oosting
You wrote the line: “The vast majority”—speaking of money—"spend their nights with Mark Zuckerberg and their days with Jeff Bezos.” I thought that was a provocative way of putting it.
Mark Elsdon
Right. So, you know, as a Presbyterian, I'm always interested in where Presbyterian money is. And, but I think this is widely shared across denominations, but the Presbyterian Foundation, for example, the largest holdings of its core funds are Amazon, Apple, Alphabet—which is Google's parent company—and Facebook. Those are the largest holdings, and those have often been considered clean tech stocks versus investments in tobacco, which have been screened out for many, many years or investments in weapons which have been screened out for quite a long time in church funds—and those are good screens, though, I'm glad we're not invested in those—but as a lot of us saw in the fall, Facebook's own employees admit that Instagram, which is a Facebook product, is intentionally designed to be addictive to teenagers. And for many teenagers—I have one, so I know this first hand—I have two actually—for many teenagers, Instagram is a very negative experience for them. So, Facebook is creating an intentionally addictive product that is negative for many teenagers. When we invest in Facebook, we are benefiting financially from the pain of those teenagers that are addicted to that product.
Shari Oosting
Yeah, that's really significant. And to think of all the other financial products that are in these index funds that we don't even have a clue what our money's invested in. For example, a lot of my own retirement savings is in—just a target date retirement fund.
Mark Elsdon
Right, which would be in, it will be in companies. And it will shift from stocks to bonds over time. That's what those target date funds are doing.
Shari Oosting
The primary driver, of course, is the highest return possible.
Mark Elsdon
Correct. That is the usual approach we take, right. How do we get the most money from our money at the lowest risk?
Shari Oosting
So, what's an alternative? It's easy for me to see, as you explain it, why that leads us to a problematic place as people of faith.
Mark Elsdon
Yeah, I think for me, the question is—so that's kind of this principle of the highest and best use of capital is to find where it is most gonna give you the highest return for the lowest risk. That’s, I mean, it makes sense from a financial perspective, but from a theological/ethical perspective, why? Why is that the way we should be using our money? I really struggle with that idea because I'm not convinced that that's the way God intends us to handle money and approach money, to just try to make as much of it as we can at the lowest risk, because it does produce all of these other problems. I'm really instructed by the parable of the rich fool. That's one of my favorites. While in a sort of hard and convicting way it's one of my favorites—where this person who's later called a fool has this incredible bounty of crops that the land produces abundantly—is what the parable says, is what Jesus says in the parable—the land of this person produces abundantly. And so he builds large, larger, and larger barns to store all the grain, this extra grain that he has. And at the end of the parable, he's called a fool. And in the end God calls in the loan—that is the language in the Greek that doesn't come through so well in the English translation—God calls in the loan that is this man's life. And essentially the man is, he dies before he has any chance to enjoy, sort of, all of that extra grain and good that he's stored up. And when I read the parable, what I read is foolish is his claim that it is all his, because the language says the land produced abundantly, but throughout the parable, the man says it is my grain, my goods, and I'm gonna store it up in my barns. And so he's sort of taken this ownership of what was really just on loan to him by God. We use that word “stewardship” in the church a lot. And we usually use it in reference to kind of giving at the end of the year to—
Shari Oosting
—a fundraising campaign, a stewardship—
Mark Elsdon
—yeah, a fundraising campaign, right. And I mean, okay, that's fine. But the idea of stewardship really is that we have been entrusted with resources to steward, right? So, the way I think about what we have—including our very lives—is that they are on loan to us by God to be put to use in the world in some way—on all the resources we have as well. They're not ours to own in some kind of fundamental sense—we're stewards of them, they're ours to shepherd to make use of. And so, the idea that the goal of our money or of our money-making decisions is just to make more of it for ourselves is fundamentally problematic, I believe. For my view, the goal of that money is to make the best good in the world that we can of it. And, so, if what we're trying to do is just generate maximum return at minimum risk, I don't think we're doing—I don't think we're being good stewards of that money. Ironically—because we often describe it in those terms to be a good steward of that money—is to make sure that it's still there many years later, or that it's growing while I actually think being good stewards of that money is to make sure that it's doing some good in the world.
Shari Oosting
As churches and other faith-based organizations have stewarded money, of course, many of them have accrued a lot of it. And much of that has been placed in things like endowments or other similar funds. Can you talk a little bit about the incredible amount of wealth that exists, even though there's a narrative of decline in the mainline church and a scarcity of resources?
Mark Elsdon
Yeah. I mean, this is one of those things that, so—my recent book We Aren’t Broke—the title We Aren’t Broke is there intentionally because I'm trying to challenge this idea that we sort of have this scarcity mindset that we are broke. There's lots of hand-wringing: we don't have much, we don't have enough anymore. And it is true—there's less money in some ways in the church in terms of giving and the offering plate. There's fewer members and many churches, and therefore there's less giving. And, so, there's less kind of program money coming in. But, actually, I would argue that the church is wealthier now than it's ever been in human history. There's trillions of dollars of invested assets and property in faith-based institutions around the world. I mean, you know, you and I know Princeton Seminary, well, Princeton Seminary has more than a billion dollars in its endowment and its endowment, I imagine, grew enormously last year by hundreds of millions of dollars in a single year. There's a—
Shari Oosting
—little mind-blowing—
Mark Elsdon
—a huge amount of money there. So, when we say we don't have anything, it's just not true. We aren't broke, actually, we have a lot. Not to mention all the property that we have. You know, there's church property—extremely valuable church property—in every city in the country. And a lot of it's underutilized. Some of the statistics that I've heard is that church buildings are in use 12% of the week. And that was pre-COVID. That's a pretty poor utilization rate of a valuable asset—12% of the week in use. And so we aren't broke. We have a lot of these assets and literally trillions—that's with a “T”—if it doesn't come through clearly in the audio, a trillion—
Shari Oosting
—there's a lot of zeros after that—
Mark Elsdon
—it's a lot of zeros—of money. And again, almost all of it is just at play in the financial system in order to make more of it.
Shari Oosting
And hopes to live off the interest.
Mark Elsdon
Yeah, which is building bigger barns for what? For what day? I mean, what day are we waiting for to use it and to put it to work?
Shari Oosting
Earlier you asked the question, we're saving this all for what day? It sounds to me like the argument you're making is we're for today—for today. Let's use some of it today.
Mark Elsdon
Yeah, there's no point in waiting, I don't think—I mean, what's what we're here to do today is to use our resources. And I don't mean to use them frivolously or unwisely or wastefully, but to put them to work—they're still getting a return on their investment, but it's just a different level of return. And it's measured not just in pure dollars, but also in impact.
Shari Oosting
And one that feels like it has a lot of alignment and synergy with the kind of culture in ethos that faith-based organizations and churches and synods wanna have.
Mark Elsdon
Yeah, I think to be honest with you, one of my greatest frustrations with this whole situation is that religious institutions are, for the most part—there's some exceptions—way behind on this work. So, there are many foundations that have moved to a hundred percent impact endowment foundations. Most of the church foundations I'm aware of have less than one percent in their in impact. I'm not sure why it is because you would—as you note—we should be most aligned with these values, but I don't know if it's our conservative approach, our fear of failure, our fear of risk. I don't know what it is, but there's a tendency in the church to not be doing this work and to actually be far behind the curve. The exceptions are Catholic sister organizations. Many of them have a hundred percent of their pension fund invested in impact. Many of their endowments, like groups of nuns, are fully invested in impact. They've been leading the way on this for 30-40 years. But most of the other institutions that I'm aware of, especially in the mainline church, are doing very little of it.
Shari Oosting
I have about ten more questions I wanna ask you, but we probably only have time for a few more. I'm struck by a couple of things. One is your simple encouragement toward the end of the book: start something somewhere. So, you've fielded a lot of questions from people because of the work of Pres House, but I'm curious: what stories have you seen emerging as you've connected with others who are trying to start something somewhere that encourage you?
Mark Elsdon
I would always say that it's better to start something somewhere than not at all, right? So, you know, we've seen some really interesting examples where churches are taking a food pantry ministry, for example, that they've had beloved food pantry ministry for years and years and years, and looking at expanding it to be a neighborhood owned grocery store co-op. So, they can really move the needle on a food desert where there's not access to good, healthy food, as well as do it in a sustainable manner that provides some income so that the project itself can run. It might not make a lot of money, but it will, you know, at least self-support or something like that. There was a lot of move in some churches, pre-pandemic—although I think this will emerge again, hopefully soon—around using empty space for co-working space to find a place for young professionals or others to come and work at the church, literally have coffee and Wi-Fi and connect with each other and meet people in a way that they wouldn't maybe show up for worship, but they might show up for that kind of—
Shari Oosting
—with more people working remotely that need might be greater now than ever before.
Mark Elsdon
Yeah, exactly. On the investing side, you know, it's a matter of thinking and asking money managers and investment managers—endowment committees—to just think differently about where that money is and what it's doing. There are funds that people can invest in. I'm actually currently the president of the board of directors of a fund called Working Capital for Community Needs that was started by church folk about thirty-five years ago in the Madison area. And we take investment from individuals, from churches, from institutions, and we lend it through intermediaries to the working poor throughout Latin America. We serve about 20,000 borrowers in Latin America who are using the capital of Americans to purchase an oven so that they can make tortillas to sell and support their family. And it's transformative—that money is at work literally every day in the lives of people changing their own lives throughout Latin America. And so there are ways to take money out of the traditional investments and invest it in funds like this—that fund, for example, has paid a hundred percent back to investors in the entire lifetime of the fund. So, while the financial returns might be a little bit lower, it's not particularly risky. And it is a way, you know—it's just an example. That's just one example. There's lots of other options like that out there.
Shari Oosting
You use the language of finding ways to invest that are not extractive, but that are truly true investments. It seems to me that for you, this work is, is work of justice.
Mark Elsdon
Absolutely. Money, I mean, I think money fundamentally is about justice. And the idea of trying to generate highest returns at lowest risk often means that we're extracting that from somebody else. So, who's on the other side of the table? If we're are getting all that from the deal—getting lots of money, low risk—somebody on the other side of the table is giving us that money up, or some thing—oil out of the ground is sort of creating that return that we are then extracting. And if we're seeking it at low risk, somebody on the other side of the table is taking higher risk—money doesn't come outta nowhere. There's a way in which what we're doing is always somehow extracting it from a system. And so for us to think about the justice that's at play in those decisions means that we need to think about who or what is on the other side of the table when we're receiving those returns. I mean, Facebook can give a really high return because it's incredibly lucrative to have teenagers scrolling for hours and hours a day. That's how, that's how they can return—give that kind of return.
Shari Oosting
Yeah, it's striking to really stop and think about the lack of neutrality with our money, whether we're on the investor side or any other part of that equation.
Mark Elsdon
Right. That's right.
Shari Oosting
It's interesting to me that in some way, you've also—at Pres House you resurrected this old dream that had never come to life.
Mark Elsdon
Right.
Shari Oosting
And it's like, I'm curious about this idea of like—there was this eighty-year-old—like, oh yeah, we should have student housing. So, in some ways it wasn't a new idea,
Mark Elsdon
Right? No, it wasn't. That's right.
Shari Oosting
It’s like a really old, really dusty idea.
Mark Elsdon
That's right. It was there from the very beginning, actually.
Shari Oosting
And I think that some people get this creativity freeze of like—well, we could think of a new thing, we've never tried it before—it has to be the most creative thing. And I'm like, well, in some ways, Pres House is in the middle of a campus. Like student housing is not—
Mark Elsdon
No, it's not. Exactly. That's totally right. It's not—
Shari Oosting
It's not a bizarre idea.
Mark Elsdon
No. And I mean, that's one of the things I love about the stories of the food pantries. It's people taking a beloved old—often led literally by older people—idea, and then just remixing it, so to speak, into a different form, but it's still the same driving desire, right? I think a lot of the churches that are doing affordable housing or senior housing, it's similar—they've for many, many years cared about certain aspects of their neighborhood. And this is a different way of addressing that need. But it isn't—you're right—they're not coming up with like, they're not building a rocket ship to the moon or to Mars or whatever, like with Elon Musk or whatever, you know, that's not the kind of innovation necessarily we're talking about.
Shari Oosting
And the food pantry's not a bad idea. You're trying to help people who don’t have enough to eat.
Mark Elsdon
Absolutely, absolutely. And some aspect of that will be continued forward in these new versions. But, no, exactly—what you're doing is you're building upon the passions, the desires, the interests, the experience, the skills of a congregation in its own setting anyways, and just moving it in new directions. But I totally agree—it's not just sort of innovation out of thin air to something shiny and different for no reason, just because it's shiny and different.
Shari Oosting
Yeah, and I wonder if that's also a way in traditional congregations where there are a lot of older people who have this deep and abiding love for their churches where you're honoring that if you are able to ground a new thing in the history, in the story, to say it's not that any of that was bad, you know? But to still be led into the future in a new way. Well, I think that's a beautiful note to end on. Thank you so much for talking to me today, Mark.
Mark Elsdon
Thank you. It's great to talk to you.
[Outro]
You've been listening to The Distillery at Princeton Theological Seminary. Interviews are conducted by me, Sushama Austin-Connor and Shari Oosting. Our producer is Brooke Matika. Like what you're hearing? Subscribe to this podcast on Apple, Google Play, or your favorite podcast app. And, while you're at it, leave us a review and let us know how we're doing. The Distillery is a production of the Office of Continuing Education at Princeton Theological Seminary. Find out more at thedistillery.ptsem.edu. Until next time, thanks for listening!