June 29, 2004
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Flowers: Real or Fake?
One of the changes we made this year to Soul Food was to add white paper tablecloths and fresh flowers. The upside is that it looks so much better than bare decrepit folding tables. The downside is that the total cost is about $1500/year, or 12% of the Soul Food budget. That amount of money is enough to hire another pastoral intern. Or shave $15 off the all-church retreat registration fee. Or could feed X number of homeless people for N days.
It’s a tough tradeoff, and I’m not sure if there is a “right” answer. Any thoughts?
Comments (21)
maybe floral donations?? cell groups? families? the cosmetically obsessed can volunteer to do flower duty every sunday…yah?
Have you ever seen those really nice crepe paper flowers? They look almost realistic, and although aren’t easy to, are possible to hand make. I bet if you wanted to, a bunch of us sisters (and the more secure brothers) could spend an afternoon making flowers for Soul Food!
Here’s a link to what they look like:
http://www.marthastewart.com/page.jhtml?type=product&id=product2891&site=
maybe instead of flowers as centerpieces, we could have information about highrock on those triangular-ly folded postcardy paper thingies, you know like when you go to the food court in the mall…
i think flowers definitely look nice, but that’s a lot of money spent annually. maybe once we move into our own building, we’ll invest in nice tables that don’t need new tablecloths each week.
man, now that you put it this way, it’s hard making an argument for real flowers. =(
I might have been unclear about the cost: about half of that is the tablecloths, and half is the flowers.
that $1,500 helps people want to go downstairs and helps to keep people there for a longer period. …looking at soul food as a ministry and not an expense, perhaps it is $1,500 well spent. perhaps it helps people to bond together and perhaps they end up living life more solidly together. …perhaps it even saves money because it helps take the load off of the pastors as members help each other through personal issues, thus developing the body, freeing up many hours of pastoral time and preventing the need to hire another pastor.
….there are any number of non-obvious advantages in creating the environment you do. and while monetary expenditures are easy to measure, opportunity costs are not.
Have you heard of washer/dryer?
I have!
Faith, it’s true. And it’s hard to compare apples (monetary expenditures) with oranges (welcoming atmosphere). That’s what makes this a hard question.
Chef, how do you keep the petals from falling off? Haha, just kidding. If you organize people to wash, fold, and return reusable cloth tablecloths, I’ll be glad to order a set for Soul Food. I tried to do that with cloth dishrags but couldn’t set up a workable system. So now we use paper towels.
Yeah, i was just going to suggest washable/wipable tablecloths instead of paper. You could also try to enlist Howard to make those crepe/ribbon flowers. There’s definitely a middle ground between bare folding tables and disposable tablecloths and fresh flowers.
But you’re the oh captain, my captain of soul food. All joking aside, seriously you should just wash them every week and reuse, reduce, recycle. You can just throw the dishrags into the same load as the tablecloths. As for the floral centerpieces, how about… investing in several white bowls, and putting Costco variety hard candy into the bowls? This would serve the need for a centerpiece, that is both welcoming and edible, whoohoo! And whatever that doesn’t get eaten up, you bring back the next week.
Too bad I don’t do my own laundry, or do laundry weekly, or own a washer that can handle 23 tablecloths at once.
I could take them to the drop-off wash-and-fold place, but that would probably cost more than the paper tablecloths! Life is complex, no?
Anyway, I’m looking to reduce rather than increase my Soul Food responsibilities to make it easier for my successor, whoever that person is.
Bowls and hard candy — there’s an idea… Probably half the cost of flowers ($14 for 2 dozen roses at Costco, and we might get away with $7 worth of candy instead). But more wrappers to clean up, and parents might not be happy at the free access of candy for their kids. Hmm…
i’ll do laundry.
i like having the real flowers… you could do a rotation where ppl sign up to have flowers for the church – my parents used to do that at their church.
if not, then the table tents are cool with activities and upcoming HR events.
if all else fails, you could use paper and have kids draw on it by putting a crayons on the tables as centerpieces.
Do you think people won’t come down because there are no flowers or tablecloths? Or another way, do you think people come down because of the tablecloths and flowers?
I tend to think that there are a lot of unnecessary expenses that could be cut out of many budgets, but I’m also pretty oblivious when it comes to things like decorations and stuff (how long have we had flowers???), so my opinion is pretty biased.
opportunity costs.
And there are opportunity costs associated with the flowers too
washing/drying sounds nightmarish without industrial strength resources. Have you thought about exploring what restaurants do? I imagine they farm out their linens or rent. You might not be saving any money there, but I don’t think it’d be more, especially if they want to consider part of their services a charitable contribution.
Fake flowers can be tasteful.
Sounds like a really neat ministry
What about fake plastic flowers? Could that be some middle ground. Maybe some that are not too tacky. I would suggest keeping the paper table cloths though. They really cut down on the work load.
How much do we pay to rent the church in the evening. I have always wondered how much more we will pay if we get our “own” place.
have you prayed about this? what is the Lord saying? His Spirit gives a different answer every time – He’s pretty creative.
Opportunity cost: the value of all goods and services that need to be consumed to produce something. It’s a bit different from tradeoff. There is an opportunity cost for having flowers, and a tradeoff for not having them.
You can’t even look at this in strictly absolute terms (i.e. comparing either situation A or situation B), since any noticeable change will itself have effect. For example: If currently you have no flowers and now are thinking of putting in plastic flowers, that’s a lot different than if you e.g. currently have $100 flowers and are now thinking of putting in plastic flowers instead. When people get accustomed to something, it’s hard to deprive them of that regardless of whether it was justified in the first place (on the flip side, when people don’t have any expectation about something and you improve it, it tends to have a huge effect). For the former situation, people will generally not consider opportunity cost and say “Now that we save $100/week, we can have better food!”; the natural inclination is to say, “Why can’t we have both?”
So I would go for subtle changes. E.G. I might start by reducing the number of flowers, then over time change to artificial. The amt of trouble to go through for this also depends on whether you think the tradeoff will really have an impact — will people notice a little, not at all, or a lot if you use plastic flowers? Personally, it would affect me minimally.