March 6, 2011 Presentation

On March 6, 2011 the Personnel & Salary (Human Resources Committee) of the Riverside Church presented a glossy slide show with peppy management acronyms like those used by Wall Street management during the Reagan recession. “A-SMART” was extolled as a scrupulously fair management device to handle “problem” employees. The Committee lauded the many generous benefits afforded church employees.

All of it sounded compelling and wonderful, unless you have heard, as I have, from many employees who independently describe similar stories involving unfair treatment by management at Riverside. There is a stark contrast between the motto cheerfully expounded by the Human Resource Director, “Love is our aim, mutual respect is our pathway,” and the fact that so many current and former Riverside employees now refer to this once famous social-justice institution as the “Evil Tower” or just “Mordor.”

If everything is working as well as the Committee claimed, the numbers they presented should have supported their claim, and even their motto.

But they don’t.

According to the Committee, from 2007-2010, 143 (85%) of 169 employees left Riverside. (I reported that 165 employees left between 2007 and 2011. The Committee did not report on employees who have left in 2011.) In any institution, an 85% turnover rate in four years is staggering.

The Committee presented a benign narrative of the turnover number. They categorized those who left as terminations, resignations, layoffs, retirements, not-returning-after-illness, ending of contracts, and no-shows, creating an appearance that most employees chose to leave of their own accord. But such parsing to make it appear that employees choose to leave is a common narrative-control device in corporate America. It is a way employers create a narrative that looks good to prospective investors.

In the end, the numbers tell the real story. Well-managed companies have low turnover rates because employees are treated well, grow in their jobs, and stay there because they are happy. Riverside’s reported 85% employee turnover in four years is a red flag that something is seriously wrong.

As regards compensation, the Committee corroborated my claim that a handful of employees are paid compensation packages that place them among the wealthiest of the world’s human beings. Eleven (11) employees earn salaries over $100,000 (top 0.66% of world’s wealthiest humans). Using the most conservative numbers based on the minimum salaries reported by the Committee, these eleven employees cost the congregation a minimum of $1,250,000 per year in salary alone (($100,000 x 8) + ($150,000 x 3)).

This number may exceed current congregational giving, in which case donations to this church solely fund these 11 salaries. Four of these eleven individuals are clergy; the other seven are finance and business employees. Thus, it appears that merely 37% of congregational giving supports ministry. For comparison, look at the spending of charities on http://www.charitynavigator.org/. The most effective charities use over 90% of donations to provide services, and keep administrative costs under 10% of donations.

Curiously, the Human Resources Committee cannot report actual total compensation for the employees it hires and oversees because Human Resources doesn’t, apparently, know the total value of the employees’ compensation packages. Executive-style perks like travel funds to pay for taxis, limousines, school tuition, real-estate loans, donations to non-profits that pay the Riverside employee outside the church, etc. are not subject to the Committee’s overview. Thus, the $1,250,000 number does not represent the full actual compensation. (Similarly the Committee was unable to provide a cogent hierarchy chart, claiming the “matrixed” model was too complex to diagram. Having worked in much larger organizations with far more complex management structures, I can attest that creating a valid org chart for an organization that employs only 169 people does not require a Ph.D. in mathematics, or even an MBA.)

Given the value of benefits reported by the Committee, as well as executive perks, it certainly appears that several employees earn compensation packages over $200,000. The U.S. Census Bureau defines households earning over $200,000 as “rich.” These earnings place them among the wealthiest 0.01% of humans on earth.

Furthermore, if current congregational donations cover only the salaries for the highest paid 11 employees, then building maintenance and compensation for the other 158 employees can only be siphoned from the endowment, which will be exhausted within a few years. No wonder Riverside’s management has cut spending for every form of actual ministry or social justice effort. This budget structure is, quite simply, ruinous.

Strikingly, at the March 6 meeting the Committee talked a lot about money, but the words “service” and “to serve” were not mentioned.

The Committee stated the business of Riverside is “worship,” by which they apparently mean “producing religious ritual performances” like an entertainment production company. No one mentioned service to others or social justice or helping the poor. No one mentioned Christ’s ministry. Instead, the Human Resources Director, one of those earning money in the top 0.66% of people on earth, extolled the virtue of teaching employees to save money on floor wax.

The Committee defended the practice of keeping luxury compensation secret as a “privacy” issue, but could not explain why this is necessary given that many other denominations and the Catholic Church routinely publish total compensation and benefits of all employees to their congregants.

The Committee claimed that the only way they can “attract talent” is by paying luxury compensation. But this corporate keep-up-with-the-Joneses (and Tammy Fay and Jim Baker’s) theory doesn’t explain the approximately 300% increase in Senior Minister’s compensation over the last 21 years. (Rev. James Forbes’ starting compensation was approximately $65,000). In her early decades, Riverside was not in the keeping-up-with-the-highest-paid-churches business. Apparently, during the quarter-century when the American lower and middle class has increasingly struggled and the rich have gotten much (much) richer, Riverside’s leaders radically changed course away from Christ’s example of charity and social justice outreach.

The premise that the kind of “talent” needed at Riverside is found in individuals who demand to be made ultra-affluent and “rich” is a new premise. And it is a corporate premise, not a Christian premise. It is not the premise that drew Fosdick or Martin Luther King, Jr. to the pulpit. Money is not the magnet that attracts Christ’s work. Witness Mother Theresa, parents raising children, volunteers who tutor children, build houses, run soup kitchens, provide pro bono medical and legal services, counsel rape victims... Ministry is not about money. It is about service and Love.

Towards the end of his life, Rev. King realized that the root cause of most, if not all, forms of discrimination and injustice is economic injustice. King was murdered, not because he combated racism, but because he spoke truth to power in a capitalist society about the outrage of economic injustice. He dared to expose the foundation of almost forms of all human discrimination: economic injustice requires the subjugation of the majority to foster an oligarchy for the “rich.” King’s preaching against economic greed was far more of a threat to a capitalist socially which relies on the social stratification and economic discrimination expounded in “Wealth of Nations” than preaching against racism, or any other particularized form of discrimination.

“You cannot serve God and money.” Matt 6:24. People who serve God, Christians and those of other faiths, do not demand to be made part of the financial oligarchy of the world. The talent required to do social justice work does not demand oligarchic affluence while others go hungry.

The glossy March 6 presentation revealed that The Riverside Church has become a corporation. Her management is corporate, her management ideology is corporate, and her treatment of employees is corporate. In this Madoff era, Riverside’s Finance Department is funded at $1,200,000, and boasts a “Chief Financial Officer” who is one of the three highest paid employees in the church. Her few highly employees are being made affluent by the largesse of the congregation, while management drains the endowment to pay for their party.

Like Rev. King, I see neither social justice nor Christ’s example in this.

Jennifer Hoult, Esq.