Ministers and Finance Officers

There may be a big difference between ministers and finance officers in the Church -- which may go quite unspoken. Finance officers tend to focus on monthly income, annual budget, property expenditures, and so on -- and one will notice this by their speech. They tend to take their figures very seriously, too. A minister, on the other hand, tends to think more in terms of seasons, phases, life-cycles, faith, and so on. Sometimes a minister may be thinking in terms of very long phases -- say ten or twenty years. I myself have thought in terms of years-long financial phases. OBSERVATION: It all seems hard to put into words, but while one very much needs the regular figures of finance officers, that is not the all-important way of looking at things.