Overhead as Sacred Investment - And Why this Matters Now More Than Ever
This is part one of a two-part series on overhead expense within faith communities. This post proposes a re-framing of how to think about overhead expense. The next post (From Overhead to Stewardship: Making the Invisible Visible) suggests how to empower ministry leaders with this re-framing.
When faith leaders are asked to fundraise, it helps to connect the ask with the need. In the next two posts my hope is to name the need explicitly. Naming the need - being explicit about the ask - can do wonders for shared understanding.
In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus sends out the apostles two by two with a simple instruction: “Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave from there” (Mark 6:7–13). That house mattered. It helped make the ministry possible.
Houses of worship - whatever the faith tradition - play that same role today. They are the modern equivalents of those first-century gathering places that sustain encounter, relationship, and mission.
“Anyone have a space we can meet in?”
I write this as a financial and operations consultant to the Catholic Church, but also as someone who has participated in community organizing in Hudson County for more than ten years. At the end of any effective meeting, there is often a required call to action: “who can host the next meeting?” When groups need a place to gather, it is often community of faith that opens its doors. Never a co-working space. Rarely a commercial venue. It is typically a house of worship.
Houses of worship exist, as an essential part of their mission, to gather people together in real places. Not on Zoom. Not on conference calls. In actual rooms.
Yet we rarely pause to ask what it takes to sustain those rooms.
It costs money to meet in real life
In Hudson County, New Jersey, the cost of real estate has more than doubled in a decade, from approximately $246 per square foot in 2016 to over $500 per square foot in 2026. That single fact can help inform how we think about “overhead” in a faith community context, where the community itself is often charged with helping donate and fundraise to help “pay the bills.”
When the cost of space rises, the cost of gathering in real life does, too. Any institution that continues to offer physical space freely - to pray, organize, meet, mourn, celebrate, or discern - is absorbing that cost on behalf of the community.
That absorption is not administrative overhead. It is mission.
A hidden subsidy
When a faith community provides space at little or no cost, it is subsidizing the rising market cost of real estate so that people can gather in real life. The higher the surrounding real-estate market climbs, the larger that subsidy becomes. In other words, the cost of “overhead” is no longer neutral. It is an active choice to hold space for the community.
Naming the expense of sacred space is a conversation worth having
So how do we talk honestly about the costs of sustaining sacred space without reducing mission to line items or boring people with accounting language?
That is the question the next post will take up.
For parishes seeking structured support, my parish advisory and consulting services are outlined here.
