RE Fees Ended

The Religious Education Council was asked by the Board of Trustees last year to evaluate FUSN’s practice of charging a fee for our Children’s Religious Education classes, and to make a recommendation regarding this practice. After devoting several Council meetings to analysis and discussion of this issue, we came to the unanimous decision to recommend the elimination of these fees. We made our recommendation to the Operations Council on October 20, 2010, and they voted to pass the recommendation on to the Board of Trustees.

The Board voted on November 9th to accept the RE Council recommendation to eliminate RE fees beginning in September, 2011, with funding for the entire RE program to come from our operating budget, funded by the annual budget drive.

In researching this issue, the RE Council looked at data from other congregations. We discovered that most Unitarian Universalist congregations do not charge for RE classes, considering these classes to be an essential service of a vital congregation. Using information from 46 similar sized congregations, we found that 33 of them, or 72%, charged no fee for Children’s Religious Education, citing reasons such as “children are the future of our faith” and “we believe that the religious education of our children is the responsibility of the entire congregation.” Of the remaining 13 congregations, 4 of them, or 9%, charged only nonpledging families a fee, with the remaining 19% charging all families a fee, similar to our practice.

We noted that the FUSN Children’s RE program attracts new members, with many families beginning to attend FUSN when their children start asking questions about family beliefs and god. That being the case, we believe that new families may feel more welcomed at FUSN and be more likely to become actively participating members if they were not asked for money at the onset. New families may also mistakenly assume that the RE fees ($100 per child, per year) cover the cost of the program (roughly $830 per child, per year), and may feel less of a responsibility to make an appropriate pledge and volunteer to teach.

We discussed the fact that no other program at FUSN has a fee associated with it, including Sunday worship services, coffee hour, and Adult RE courses. Charging for Children’s RE classes communicates the message that religious education is not central to a congregation’s mission, since churches generally support basic services from the operating budget. This is not a message we want to send, since we believe that our Children’s RE classes are central to our mission at FUSN.

The RE Council is mindful of the impact this loss of this revenue will have on the budget for the next fiscal year, but we are confident that in the long term, this will be a positive step, moving our congregation forward along the path to growth and meaning. We anticipate that our newly revitalized membership committee will be taking a more active role in welcoming in new families and guiding them along the path to membership, and that job will be easier without RE fees. We are also hopeful that our congregation will keep this change in mind and increase their pledges where appropriate in order to offset this revenue loss in the upcoming fiscal year.

Kim Shanks

Chair, RE Council