She told me that most of our office supplies are donations and we can't afford to just buy premium pens because I like them. I was miffed. So I paid out-of-pocket for a box of reliable pens (they cost about $1 apiece). Then I decided to prevent their loss I would label them with my name; that makes sense, right? The office had a labelmaker in the closet and I printed a label with my first name and affixed it to a pen.
My supervisor called me in and pointed out the label and asked me to consider how much that cost us. I ran some calculations and it came to about $0.25 for parts and labor to affix that label to a $1.00 pen. I was still miffed and didn't see her point.
Years later now I see she was utterly justified. It was such a small matter but she'd helped me understand what it's really like to run a business in the black. You just don't make concessions like that because every $1.00 pen you don't purchase is $1.00 that stays in the general fund until the roof collapses or you need to repair a toilet. So thank God for a well-run church that is also a business.
One of my current employees basically checked out at her last job because the boss was too tight to replace a janky VGA cable.
With us, she goes above and beyond, generating thousands a year in additional profits, because we and all it takes is making sure she gets the tools she needs and occasionally stocking the fridge with her preferred brand of orange juice.
It wasn't a case of my employer depriving me of tools necessary to do my daily tasks. It was a case of my employer pointing out that I had a very trivial desire that was totally unnecessary, and that I was being selfish by not considering their POV.
The church I worked for is not an independent entity; they're part of the largest and oldest corporation on Earth - literally. They operate 100% on freewill donations from the faithful; they don't run any profit-making enterprise. They are beholden to rules and regulations from above, but the diocese doesn't routinely assist them financially in daily operations or capital costs.
The church has to consider insurance and liability in everything they do, and my supervisor was the person in charge of making sure that employees were aware of, and on board with, rules and regulations like that.
That church is able to sustain over two dozen subunits of ministries, run by unpaid and mostly untrained volunteers. They've consistently maintained and improved the beauty of the physical plant, all while drawing significantly lower revenue than their neighboring churches. And the reason they can do that is because they're able to teach people like me to think about what it means to buy a $1 pen with a $0.25 label attached.
