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Accounting Is a Narrative

Accounting data or reports never come to us raw; they are mediated through narrative. All accounting is a story. It is an imagination (abstraction) with the virtues of economy, consistency, and broadband resonance. Though the language that paints this picture is always simple and restrained, it is filled with panorama and process. The accounting reports of a corporation deal with images that are at the very margins of reality. They are neither a perfect rendition of the past nor a perfect predictor of the not-yet. Yet they capture a period, a fleeting moment as the past slides into the future with the accountant’s capacity to present the absent as the real. Figures and data are not unmediated undeniable realities, which can be abstracted from practices of representation and the stories they create or describe.

Accounting is a story of how an organization has worked and why it works. It shapes how the persons in the organization view the reality of the organization, how they should respond to life, and what the organization might become. Accounting presents how an organization imagines itself in terms of the flow of financial resources at its disposal and how others imagine it.

Understanding the “identity” of the organization being portrayed by accounting is crucial for a pastor defining the clarity of her organization’s or mission’s goals. Accounting records, reports, and analyses shape unique expectations and characters of organizations. Accounting reports are not just simple narratives of financial flows meant for board or committee meetings; they are part of the social ecology of ministerial leadership.

The accounting world, the community of practitioners, is a narrative-formed one. As narrative it also presents a particular view of the world. It is based on two philosophical ideas. First, is the idea that an organization is a unit, a single entity that can be identified in and of itself. The organization is an entity that can be succinctly distinguished from others and a set of accounts can be kept to recognize and record its activities. Second, there is the notion that equality is the fundamental principle in the organization’s life: assets must exactly match liabilities (Assets = Equities; Assets = Liabilities + Owners’ Equity). The whole process of measuring, recording, and reporting the transactions of an entity must always end up with this equality.

The social practice of accounting takes the form of ideas and principles that are clearly based on or warranted by this set of central convictions. Any effort to understand the mindset and “social ethics” of accounting as a profession or discipline in itself must recognize the critical significance of its narrative. “Every social ethic involves a narrative, whether it is concerned with the formulation of basic principles of social organization and/or concrete policy alternatives. . . . The form and content of a community is narrative dependent and therefore what counts as ‘social ethics’ is a correlative of the content of that narrative.”15 How does the narrative and ensuing social ethics of the accounting profession (community) relate to the kind of narrative that determines the life of the church as a communion?

We will engage with various dimensions of this narrative from multiple angles as we dynamically formulate a combined theology of accounting and money in every chapter of this book. This book provides students with the basic resources and skills to engage the accounting dimension of ministerial leadership; to enter into the imaginative landscape of church leadership via the portal of accounting.

The Basics of Accounting

Accounting

There are two ways to understand what accounting is. First, you consider it as a history of your church in numbers, figures, and statistics. It is snapshot of the financial status of the church. Second, it is a means of organizing and presenting key information and data of the church in financial terms. Accounting as a photograph or means of reporting on the resources of the organization works by producing financial statements, which help to evaluate the performance of the church and estimate its future prospects.

How Does Accounting Work?

Each transaction is entered into a book or journal. Each is entered twice or has two sides to it, positive and negative. Each entry has its own mirror image. When the entry is positive it is called debit. The negative is called credit. This way of keeping each transaction as two components is called double entry bookkeeping. The debits and credits in the book must be equal and this is what keeps the book balanced.

Before the accountant can record transactions in the ledger or journal the organization needs to make a decision on how to recognize its revenues or expenses. It can account for transactions on the basis of cash or accrual. The organization either focuses on recording when resources are used or gained instead of when cash is finally paid or received for them. Churches can choose to recognize revenues or expenses when cash has been received or expended irrespective of the time of the service. For instance, pledges will not be recognized as cash until actual money is received even if the person making the pledge has an impeccable pledge redemption record. This is what cash accounting means. On the other hand, accrual accounting records revenues when earned and not when received and recognizes expenses when incurred instead of when they are actually paid off. For a church on the cash method, water bill for December 2011 will not be included in the expenses of that year if the actual payment was made in January 2012. Many churches use a modified or hybrid system that combines the features of cash and accrual accounting methods.

The principle of consistency requires that once a church has chosen a method it should stick to that method for the sake of comparability of reports across time. It is not a measure of good practice to change from cash to accrual in one year and in the next go back to cash accounting.

The record of revenues and expenses under each of this method of recognition has to also pass the test of matching. This is to say accountants try to match expenses of producing a service or product with the revenue associated with the service or product. Part of the activities of the accounting departments in any organization is to ensure that expenses are measured, recorded, and reported in such a way that identify them with their associated revenues.

Though expenses and revenues are to be matched, accountants bring different attitudes to them. The rule (the principle of conservatism) is that the accountant should be quick to recognize expenses and losses, but slow to recognize revenues and gains. The reason being that he or she should work to avoid the overstatement of values of assets and owners’ equity.

The conservative attitude does not mean that accountants record all insignificant events or every outlier for the sake of completeness. They make judgment about what to observe and measure with the aid of the principle or concept of materiality. They observe, measure, record, and report important things. The only problem is that it is difficult to draw a bright line between important things and insignificant transactions and events.

Before accounting statements are prepared and reported a decision also has to be made with regard to the accounting period a church wants to use for its reporting purposes. The period is usually a year and the church’s financial statements must include a description of it. The description enables the reader to know for what period income or cash flows has been measured. Statements are usually twelve months apart, but a church can also choose to present quarterly statements.

Values in financial statements are at historical cost, less depreciations or repayments. Traditionally in the United States accountants will not measure, record, and report assets in the balance sheet at current market value. So when current revenues are matched with expenses, the expenses are recorded only at their historical values. In times of high rate of inflation and rapid changes in the purchasing power of a national currency, this simplification (cost concept) does not augur well for sound economic decision-making.

In another vein the reports of the church treat the church as a going concern and as such the usual financial statements will not present the liquidation value of the church. The preparers of financial statements will assume that the church will operate indefinitely as a going concern. It does not matter that some in the church think that the church is better dead, liquidated than for it to continue to be operated as a going concern.

The measurement, recording, reporting of expenses and revenues, and of all other categories in the balance sheet, income statement, and statement of cash flows are presented only in terms of money. So whatever is difficult or impossible to observe and measure in common monetary units does not get reported. For this reason, among many others, it is important for the pastor to know that financial statements do not present a complete picture of the church. It will not cover knowledge, skills, reputation, and faithfulness of the members that have not yielded revenues but can ensure the continued survival and flourishing of the church. As with the methodology of National Product (GNP), products and services “outside” the market system are not counted, measured, and reported in the measurement of national income. In both cases, unpaid volunteer work is not counted.

Financial Statements

1. Balance Sheet (Statement of Assets and Liabilities)

2. Net Assets

3. Statement of Revenue and Expenses (Income Statement)

4. Statement of Cash Flows

5. Fund Accounting

6. Auditor’s or Accountant’s Report

7. Footnotes

Balance Sheet (Statement of Assets and Liabilities)

The balance sheet shows you the current economic status of the church at a given date. This snapshot of the financial information of the church captures the assets, liabilities, and owners’ equity (net assets). The balance sheet presents the assets and liabilities of the church at a given date. The values of assets and liabilities as recorded in the balance sheet are not the original costs; they are the original cost of assets less of depreciation (portion of the original cost included in expenses of preceding periods) or cost of liabilities less payments and extinguishments. Land is almost always reported on the balance sheet at its original cost. As you move down the balance sheet the quality of line numbers drops. This is true for assets and liabilities. Doubt about their true value increases.

Assets are resources of the church that can earn income or can yield future economic benefits. This includes buildings, vehicles, equipment, furniture, cash, prepayments, investments in bonds, securities, and stocks, claims, and so on. Assets are things or securities that the church owns which can be exchanged for cash or economic benefits in the future. Assets could be monetary or non-monetary, current or fixed, tangible and intangible assets.

Liabilities are obligations of the church, which will demand future payments or sacrifice of economic benefits. They include debts, mortgage, wages, unpaid bills, loans, and so on. Generally, those who have provided resources (cash or non-cash) to the church to whom the church has an obligation to make payments are called creditors or lenders. Liabilities could be short term (current) or long-term.

Net Assets (Equity)

Net Assets is the difference between assets and liabilities. Net Assets = Assets – Liabilities. This statement shows the change in the net assets of the church. It is determined by the “capital contributions” to the church (that is, donations in form of restricted and unrestricted funds) and accumulated net earnings (that is, total revenues less total expenses, accumulated surpluses and deficits).

The “earning” figure is either added or subtracted from the “unrestricted funds” in the balance sheet in a given year, depending on whether it is positive or negative. The sum of restricted and unrestricted equity or capital (as represented by net property and equipment) is the “Net Assets.” In very simple terms, the net asset is the differences between the assets of the church and its liabilities (see a sample balance sheet, on page 21). It represents the net worth of the church. In the corporate world, the net assets will be referred to as “Shareholders’ funds.”

Statement of Revenue and Expenses (Income Statement)

Tithes and offerings of a church are considered as its revenues. This is not all. Churches also earn interest income and dividends from their investments. They also receive donations and contributions. Some churches that have rental properties earn revenues from them. Expenses of a church include wages and salaries, utility bills, bank charges, interest expenses, insurance payments, offices supplies, and so on that help it to operate. Revenues less expenses represent the “net income” in corporate accounting language. Revenue – Expenses = Net Income (or Net Loss).

Statement of Cash Flows

This statement indicates cash generated by the operating, investing, and financial activities of the church. It records the sources of cash and the their destinations during a given period. It gives you a measure of the liquidity of the church.

We stated earlier that accounting works with an equation, Assets = Equities (owners’ equity + liabilities). The balance sheet (statement of financial position) is where this is amply demonstrated. The income statement explains changes in owners’ equity (or net asset) by showing movements in revenues and expenses. The statement of cash flows explains the changes in the cash and cash equivalents in the balance sheet in a given period of time.

Fund Accounting

This statement shows the sources of fund of the church and how it was used to achieve its goals and objectives. Usually a separate chart of accounts is maintained for each of the funds of the church. The report is designed not to show the profitability of the church, but to highlight accountability.

Auditor’s or Accountant’s Report

It is often surprising how many people ignore the Accountant’s Report. It should be the first thing to check, to see how well the church has followed generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) in preparing the report. The auditor’s opinion, if there is one, should also be read whether it is clean or otherwise. The auditor’s opinion does not assure that the numbers in the Annual Report are 100 percent correct, but at least it is comforting to know that somebody has taken a look at them before you and there are no material errors.

Footnotes

The footnotes are very important. Accountants often tuck away important information in the fine print in the footnotes. Read everything. To be able to give a reasonable verdict on the quality of a church’s financial statements and indeed its economic health, you have to comb the footnotes.

This concludes our brisk survey of the Annual Report. But remember, this book is not aimed at making you an expert on the understanding and interpretation of financial statements. You are not an expert yet; so do not fire your church accountant or treasurer.

Sample Balance of Andover Hill Church

Andover-Newton Hill Church

Balance Sheet

May 31, 2013

	2013	2012
Assets
Current Assets
Cash and Cash Equivalents	$161, 586	$119, 427
Noncurrent Assets
Property and Equipment
Parsonage	375, 501	360, 186
Musical Instruments	33, 862	16,000
Office Equipment	28, 553	26, 444
Other Assets	15, 678	13, 650
Less Accumulated Depreciation	(28, 740)	(31,500)
Net Property and Equipment (P&E)	424,854	384,780
Total Assets	$586,440	$504,207
Liabilities and Net Assets
Current Liabilities
Prepaid Pledges	16, 277	10, 838
Account Payable	22, 580	15, 093
Total Current Liabilities	38, 857	25,931
Long Term Liabilities
Mortgage and Loans	38,954	30,600
Total Liabilities	$77,811	$56,531
Equity (Capital, Net Assets)
Unrestricted Assets	65,146	50,998
Donor Restricted	18,629	11,898
Represented by P&E	424,854	384,780
Total Equity	$508,629	$447,767
Total Liabilities and Equity	$586,440	$504,207

As you might have noticed, the numeraire or the “programming language” of accounting is all about money. It is the preferred method of recording information about a church’s or corporation’s activities. The structure of the flows of economic resources manifests itself to us only as dollar signs. Money is the key to the structure of existence of a corporation, and even its manifest potentials and latent possibilities. For a resource to be at all and be manifest to the reader of accounting it must be monetized.

In the world of accounting we have assets and liabilities, which are recorded in ledgers and journals. The entries in the ledgers and journals presuppose dollar values, economic worth. The values presuppose numbers (exchange ratios). Accountants see money as mere numbers. There is a whole pattern: numbers, ledgers, things. Money is a relation between things. But this is not the only way to understand money—at least for pastors and theologians who do not want to take mathematics as the model according to which we can measure relations between human beings. Thus, it is germane to take a moment to grapple with an alternative conception of money.

What is Money?

Neoclassical (mainstream) economists have a simple definition of money, in spite of their ever-raging debates about how to measure and account for fluctuations in the demand and supply of money and how to specify the appropriate quantity of money an economy needs to generate and sustain inflation-free full employment. Money is any convenient commodity (good, paper, thing, etc.) that serves the following functions: acts as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, a store of value, and a standard of deferred payment.16 This is a very functionalist definition of money—for money is what money does. Economists consider money as anything that performs the functions of money. In this way, economists link the existence and nature of money to functions of money.

The theoretical understanding of money in modern capitalist economies is centered around the “intrinsic” commodity nature of money; that is, money as representing only exchange ratios, as a neutral veil, and as only a medium of exchange. In the mainstream (neoclassical) economic view, money is essentially either a natural commodity or a symbol of a natural commodity: a commodity that can be traded for all other commodities. Whether this commodity is gold, cigarette, or paper is not really the issue; whatever it is, it merely symbolizes the underlying exchange ratios between tradable commodities. It is a veil over the “real” economy, having no economic force sui generis. Eminent economist and Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson writes: “even in the most advanced industrial economies, if we strip exchange down to its barest essentials and peel off the obscuring layer of money, we find that trade between individuals or nations largely boils down to barter.”17

The economists’ definition of money views money as serving as universal measure of values (in its unit-of-account function) by which all qualitative differences are converted into quantitative difference, thus desiccating all social ties. Classical social thinkers like Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel in different ways interpreted money as “the very essence of our rationalizing modern civilization” and “a tool of rational cost-profit calculations.” It is a rational instrument without much “cultural significance” (that is, without much qualitative differentiation, earmarking, personalizing, and non-homogenization), focused only on “arithmetic problems.”18 The general idea is that money and monetization, the twin battering rams of capitalism, have been very successful in transforming “products, relationships, and sometimes even emotions into an abstract and objective numerical equivalent” all over the world.19 Though Marx argued that the objective relations between commodities are the phantasmagoric forms of social relations between people, he still viewed money, a “god among commodities,” as the radical, frightful leveler that desiccates all social ties and spaces.20

Against this extraordinarily narrow concept of homogenous money, some sociologists, namely Viviana Zelizer, have attempted to formulate a more substantial institutional and cultural account of money. They have vigorously put forward the notion of the diverse nature of money, asserting that monetary exchanges are thickly social, cultural, and relational. Sociologists have argued that all monetary phenomena are socially contingent. They posit that money is not a neutral, nonsocial substance and that it is influenced everywhere by culture. They have countered the mainstream neoclassical economic perspective that regards money as a given and as nothing more than a lubricant between “real” goods in order to reveal the meaningful social relations among persons or groups in monetary transactions.

For instance, Zelizer documents how people earmark money, place restrictions on its use to mark social boundaries, create separate spheres of exchange and regulate allocations to create differentiation of homogenous money, affirm cultural distinctions, and elaborate the social meaningfulness of money. In this way, she mounted a vigorous assault against the widespread economistic view of money as absolutely fungible, qualitatively neutral, and devoid of any use value. Her research has shown that money is “neither culturally neutral nor socially anonymous. It may well ‘corrupt’ values and convert social ties into numbers, but values and social relations reciprocally transmute money by investing it with meaning and social patterns.”21 In directing attention to monetary exchanges as thickly social, cultural, and relational, Zelizer argues that social ties and economic (monetary) transactions repeatedly mingle. In this vein she rejects the idea of “hostile world”22 and that of “economics-or-nothing reductionism” in economic-sociological analyses.23

Overall, in the sociological investigation of money three key properties of money have emerged to frame the discourse on money. These are unit of account, monetary media, and interpersonal transactions. Unit of account or money of account is the abstract numeraire, the official currency. In the United States the money of account is the dollar. Monetary media relate to the medium, the objects that are used as money. The money of account can be embodied in various material forms like metal coins, paper, or credit cards. The dollar, the money of account, is embodied in a range of objects: gold and silver coins, greenbacks, credit cards, various kinds of e-money, etc. The third property (interpersonal transactions) refers to money’s ability to mediate interactions between people, to “the connections among persons and groups involved in monetary transactions,” and to the way they use money to differentiate one relationship from another.24 Later in this book, I will argue that money is not only a socially contingent phenomenon, but also social relations as constitutive of money itself. The argument is that social relations are by no means secondary, but rather constitutive of money. Money is a social relation.25 In chapters 4 and 10, we will further explore this notion of money as a social relation.

For now, let us take a moment to examine what kind of relationship our monetary system has with the environment, which is an integral part of the web of relationships that make life and human flourishing possible.

Theology in Motion 1: Money and Environmental Pollution

The foundation of the monetary system in the United States is debt. In order to create money, “high-power money,” to put money into circulation the Federal Reserve Board has to buy government securities from the commercial banks, except it wants to literally print money. If the Federal Reserve Board wants to pump $20 billion into the United States economy, it has to buy that amount of government securities from the banks (creating new bank reserves for them) and pay appropriate interest to the commercial banks or their investors. The Fed cannot just create money as the Treasury Department does with its issuance of metal coins, which is debt-and-interest free. The reader who is not familiar with modern monetary economics may rightly ask: Where do the government securities come from in the first place? The Treasury Department of the United States government sells bonds to borrow from the public in order to supplement tax revenues. The banks buy the debt instruments for their use or for their clients and the government pays periodic interest to the investors. From this you can see that the foundation of the money supply in the United States is on debt, not commodity standard. Running an efficient system for generating market-clearing interest rates and payments of interest due on debts is key for the functioning of the whole monetary system.

The interest-based monetary system is one of the contributing factors to ecological non-sustainability of economic growth. It is often rare to find theologians who recognize the crucial link between the damage to the environment and the interest rate. In the market economy, every producer who intends to stay in business has to cover, at the minimum, his or her cost of capital. Let us say that the risk-free, before-tax interest rate on bonds (only a part of the weighted average cost of capital as cost of equity is ignored in this example) is only 4 percent; it means the profit rate has to be higher than this level for private production to go on. This also means at the minimum the economy has to grow at 4 percent to yield this kind of profit irrespective of concern for the environment. Now this is where the argument hits home. If the economy of the United States is growing at 4 percent per year, it will double approximately every eighteen years. (This 4 percent rate does not include allowance for return on equity, a margin for national population growth rate, and the compounding of interest, which is boundless. And if it does, the years will be dramatically less.) Now imagine the huge impact on the environment if Europe and Japan are also growing at the same rate—yet we know the average cost of capital in these societies is more than 4 percent per annum. The monetary system and the whole mechanics of capitalist production system have this built-in power to grow and grow just to make zero return on invested capital.

Now that we have shown that growth is endemic to the system, the question that immediately suggests itself is why does this growth pose a problem to the global environment? Bob Sutcliffe and Elmar Altvater among others have identified four areas of concern or tension in economic growth and environment nexus.26 They argue that universal (global) development at the current levels in USA/Europe/Japan is not materially possible because of the limits of the physical environment. Development as it is currently pursued is unsustainable because of the exhaustion of material resources and the harm done to the earth. Second, economic growth produces pollution and other effects (such as climatic changes and overproduction of waste) that negatively affect human welfare. Third, the use of Gross National Product (GNP) as a measure of development is deeply and methodologically flawed. Negative externalities of pollution are not reckoned in national accounts—thus overestimating national income. Another source of overestimation has to do with the measurement of GNP, which ignores depreciation and amortization of natural capital while incorporating into its calculations depreciation and amortization of “factory” capital stock (capital created by human investment). The final area of concern is distribution and equity between present and future generations and between the rich and poor. This tension is relevant not because of the usual politico-economic issue of fairness but because of the connection between equity and environmental sustainability. With the wanton destruction of the environment and the earth’s patrimony the unborn are subsidizing the present generation. The other issue is between the rich and the poor. It appears that to cater to the poor, to raise the human development level of the poor, more economic growth is needed. The economic growth and development needed to do this appear unsustainable owing to negative environmental impacts inherent in such a move. So it is argued that in order to raise the human development level of the poor, the rich nations and classes (within nations) have to reduce their resource use and waste production.

Is there a way to think about money, monetary thought, and financing schemes that would curb the unavoidable tendency to grow and pollute the environment just to be in one spot of profitability? In order to situate this question in proper discursive framework, one has to examine the fixed idée of economics and the logic of market economy. In their separate works, both Bob Sutcliffe and Elmar Altvater have argued that an examination of obstacles to sustainable development must be properly situated within the grand thought pattern of the West.27 The internal logic of capitalism, Western thought patterns, and the philosophical orientation of economics as a discipline (both neoclassical and Marxian) are a formidable set of obstacles. The whole edifice of economic thought has not seriously considered nature in its model and has discounted the real importance of natural capital. In the dynamics of accumulation, nature has to be transformed in accordance with principles required by capital, “invested with value,” and its intrinsic value is often, implicitly or explicitly, denied. This economistic thinking, which is undergirded by methodological individualism and the “quantitative aggrandizement of value (profit and accumulation),” are veritable obstacles to the kind of thinking and reorientation of societal attitude germane to environmentally sustainable development.

It is at this point of the intersection between the idea of sustainable development and the sociology and production of knowledge that I want us to take a different but complementary approach to the connection between monetary policy and ecology. Perhaps, we all agree that modern economic thought has not been friends with the idea of sustainable development, but we need to go further and recognize that modern Western thought system, in its root and branch, appears antithetical to sustainable development. I will now raise some issues to stimulate our thinking and provoke debate about the laudable quest for sustainable economic development amidst the current thinking and practice of monetary policy.

Western thought, whether neoclassical economics or Marxian, has failed to grasp the ontologically proper relation of human beings to nature. The relation has been conceived largely in terms of technical control of nature (the manipulative-pragmatic orientation to nature). In this regard, the evolutionary metaphysics of history of the Marxists, who see history as human productive forces acting on nature in the successive ladders of development, is as guilty as the dominant Western philosophical thought in which we find the pervasive and oppressive differentiation of subject (humanity) and object (nature), whereby humans violently act on their exterior world with precision instruments.28

Second, let us also not forget that Western thought right from Thomas Hobbes’s conception of order and stability in the Leviathan, Hegel’s dialectic of “lordship and bondage,” Marx’s class conflicts, Rousseau’s Social Contract, and to Heidegger’s primordial Polemos has been variously concerned with how to avert violence or use it for the benefit of society.29

From the peculiar bent of Western Christian thought to Descartes’s Meditations, the material reality is seen as a wholly determinate, objective, mechanical realm to be dominated and discerned by mathematical analysis. In this mindset other modes of intelligence or awareness and associative “empathy” in other cultures that have come to positively mediate human interaction with the landscape are neglected or severely downplayed.30 The resources to use in reorienting mindsets and behavior patterns are, indeed, limited in the West.

There needs to be a rethinking of the idea of human perception to promote a more sensitive and nuanced approach to the earth and for the recognition of the interconnectedness of sensory modalities.31 In general, Western thinking presents the human body as a closed mechanical entity, not an open and active form that is continuously adjusting and improvising to its environment and things in its world. The perceptual boundaries between the body as a subject and the world (nature in its fullness) as its object are not recognized as very thin and unfixed. “The body’s action and engagements are never wholly determinate, since they must ceaselessly adjust themselves to a world and a terrain that is itself continually shifting.”32 The Western cultural orientation that largely denies this receptivity and creativity, inter-subjectivity and reciprocity, is not easily amenable to the mental attitude required for environmental sustainability or deep appreciation of the relevance of the environment to human welfare.

The dominant method of valuation in both the exquisite halls of multilateral development institutions and in the plebian main street appears to be utilitarian. As per this method, everything including interpersonal relationships, fauna and flora, as Altvater argues, “are castrated and reduced to calculations of their utility.”33 In this way, intrinsic worth of human and nature is often denied and does not serve as a limitation on the commoditization of nature and human.

The overarching conclusion is that the struggle for protecting nature goes beyond the nexus of monetary policy, economic development, and environment. One must deploy strategies that address apparent antithetical relationships between nature and the Western thought system, which unfortunately has come to dominate other thought patterns. And to the extent of this domination, many parts of the South are as guilty as the North in subjugating nature to human’s untrammeled domination. Indeed in order to save the environment and embark upon sustainable development we must all wage a multi-front struggle.

Part of this struggle will involve rethinking the concept of money and accounting. In this book we formulate an alternative concept of money as a social relation and specifically in chapter 9 we will offer a constructive proposal to foster a theological understanding and critique of accounting, the language of business.

Exercises

1. The net asset of Andover-Newton Church (ANC) as of May 31, 2013 is $538,629. Assuming that the net income of ANC on May 31, 2014 is $100,000 and every other number in the balance sheet remains the same, what will be the net assets (equity number) on May 31, 2014?

2. Perform the same exercise as above, but this time assume that instead of net gain there is a loss of $38,000.

3. Why is the balance sheet always balanced?

4. Define double entry bookkeeping.

5. Brain Teaser: What is liquidity ratio?

15. Hauerwas, Community of Character, 9–10.

16. See Diulio, Theory and Problems, 241. See also Cowen and Kroszner, New Monetary Economics, 9; Mishkin, Economics of Money, 22–26.

17. Samuelson, Economics, 55.

18. Weber, Economy and Society, 167–93; Weber, “Religious Rejections,” 323–59; Marx, “Power of Money”; Marx, Grundrisse; Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 279.

19. Zelizer, Social Meaning of Money, 18.

20. See Marx, “Power of Money”; Marx, Grundrisse.

21. Zelizer, Social Meaning of Money, 18.

22. In the hostile world view, economic transactions must be insulated from social ties so that economic inefficiency does not arise or social ties are not polluted by commercial considerations. Nothing-reductionism fails to recognize how intimate and impersonal social relations transform the character and consequences of monetary transactions.

23. See Zelizer, Purchase of Intimacy; Zelizer, “Circuits within Capitalism,” 289–322; Zelizer, “Sociology of Money,” 1991–94; Zelizer, “Payments and Social Ties,” 481–95; Zelizer, Social Meaning of Money.

24. Zelizer, “Sociology of Money,” 1991–94.

25. Wariboko, God and Money, 97–122.

26. Sutcliffe, “Development After Ecology,” 328–39; Altvater, “Foundations of Life,” 10–34.

27. See Sutcliffe, “Development After Ecology,” 328–39; Altvater, “Foundations of Life,” 10–34.

28. See Serequeberhan, Hermeneutics of African Philosophy, 71–79; Abram, Spell of the Sensuous, 31–32.

29. Serequeberhan, Hermeneutics of African Philosophy, 75.

30. Abram, Spell of the Sensuous, 31–32, 36–37.

31. David Abram defines perception as an “open activity . . . dynamic blend of receptivity [reciprocity, an ongoing interchange between the body and the entities, the world, nature that surround it] and creativity by which every animate organism necessarily orients itself to the world (and orients the world around itself).” See his Spell of the Sensuous, 50, 52.

32. Ibid., 49.

33. Altvater, “Foundations of Life,” 16.