Kumar looks back on helming finance agency

Key points:

• The Rev. Moses Kumar shepherded The United Methodist Church’s finances during a time of global crisis and church disaffiliations.
• He is retiring after 17 years as top executive of the denomination’s General Council on Finance and Administration.
• Friends and colleagues credit Kumar’s deep spirituality with enabling him to leave the denomination in better financial shape after a tumultuous period.

As top executive of The United Methodist Church’s finance agency, the Rev. Moses Kumar can be counted on to know the denomination’s balance sheets.

However, friends and colleagues stress that Kumar is also a man of deep spirituality — someone who cares not just about dollars on a ledger but also souls being served.

Now, Kumar is about to retire at the end of March after more than 17 years at the helm of the General Council on Finance and Administration.

As he begins a new chapter, the denomination has a significantly smaller budget and far fewer agency staff. But he also leaves his executive role with the denomination well-positioned to begin rebuilding, start new ministries and live into a new vision.

Fellow United Methodist leaders credit Kumar’s strong faith with helping him shepherd the international denomination’s finances through one of the most tumultuous periods in the Methodist movement’s history.

“When I reflect on his gifts, the attributes that come to mind are his cool, calm and non-anxious presence,” said Kunle Taiwo, a longtime friend and a veteran lay leader from Denver. Taiwo now serves as nonvoting adviser on the finance agency’s board. “Moses is unflinching under pressure.”

For Kumar, the ministry of finance comes down to strengthening all ministries of The United Methodist Church — starting with congregations and the annual conferences that oversee them.

“How do we help annual conferences and local churches?” Kumar said. “That was foremost in my mind when I came on board to GCFA.”

The financial health of churches and conferences remains top of mind for Kumar and GCFA staff in this time of transition.

“Our whole team is looking at how we strengthen stewardship in local churches and annual conferences to support both global ministry and ministry in the local context,” he said. “And it’s important to note again and again that these things are possible because of the strength of the staff that we have — their experience and their professionalism.”

In fact, fostering the sustainability of conferences and churches has been a focus of his entire tenure at the finance agency — even as GCFA contended with global cataclysms not of its own making.

Kumar started at the agency in September 2008 — the same month Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, ushering in the global financial crisis and intensifying what became known as the Great Recession.

He then oversaw the finance agency through the COVID-19 pandemic that at least temporarily closed church doors and sent all worship online.

And just as the pandemic was easing, Kumar had to grapple with the impact of the disaffiliations rocking The United Methodist Church. Under a temporary church-exit policy, more than 7,600 congregations — about a quarter of the denomination’s U.S. churches — left between 2019 and 2023.

The recession, pandemic and church splintering all hurt church finances — requiring the finance agency to adjust.

Apportionments — shares of church giving — fund ministry beyond the work of individual congregations. While most giving remains within the local church, each annual conference requests a portion of local church giving that in turn supports its own ministries as well as its portion of funding for the General Conference-approved denomination budget.

The General Council on Finance and Administration is responsible for collecting and distributing these annual conference apportionments that support denomination-wide ministries. The agency, in collaboration with the Connectional Table, also puts together the four-year denominational budget that goes before General Conference voters.

Suffice to say, putting together a sustainable budget has only gotten harder during Kumar’s time at GCFA.

Rather than panic, his friend Taiwo said, Kumar engaged denominational leaders including the Council of Bishops, Connectional Table and fellow general agencies to look at their budgets with a new lens.

“Budgets are now built through a ministry needs perspective rather than recycling previous quadrennial budgets plus inflation,” Taiwo said.

Kumar and his staff’s work resulted in the 2024 General Conference passing a 2025-2028 budget of between $353.6 million and $373.4 million — the smallest denominational budget in some 30 years. The goal is to leave more funds with local churches and annual conferences and build a more sustainable future.

“I believe that even when dealing with whatever impediments are facing our denomination, Moses has always kept a vision of how we will be able to move forward as we live into our future. I have always admired that,” said the Rev. Reginald G. Clemons, vice president of the GCFA board and senior pastor of First United Methodist Church in Pearland, Texas.

“He has worked to continue to make sure that our denomination remained financially strong and viable, and has welcomed conversations relative to how we will grow and thrive,” Clemons said. “He has led his staff and our board by example, and we are better for it.”

Kumar, Clemons added, “has no issue expressing his love for Jesus and the church.”

Kumar grew up Lutheran in Chennai, India. He said he committed his life to Jesus in high school and wanted to combine his accounting skills with ministry to the church. That drive led him, after earning his bachelor’s from Madras Christian College, to take a job in the India office of World Vision International, the Christian global charity organization.

He said his supervisor at World Vision persuaded him to move to the United States to pursue his Master of Business Administration at Eastern University in St. Davids, Pennsylvania. While at Eastern, his instructors included the late Tony Campolo, a noted Baptist pastor, sociologist and writer. Meanwhile, his wife, Felicia — who had grown up Methodist in India — entered the ordination process and earned a Master of Divinity degree from what was then Eastern Baptist Seminary (now Palmer Theological Seminary).

The Rev. Felicia Kumar is now senior pastor of Rehoboth United Methodist Church in Gallatin, Tennessee, northeast of Nashville.

Her husband came to work for The United Methodist Church in a different way. Kumar said the late Bishop Violet Fisher, an Eastern Baptist Seminary alum, suggested he apply to be treasurer of the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference, a role he held for eight years before coming to GCFA.

He credits retired Bishop Marcus Matthews, who led the Eastern Pennsylvania and Peninsula-Delaware conferences from 2004 to 2008, with suggesting he apply to be GCFA head.

Matthews said he was impressed with Kumar from the moment they met, when Kumar came to welcome the incoming bishop at the episcopal residence and immediately offered to pray for Matthews.

The bishop had worked with multiple church treasurers before. “But in all of those experiences, I had never met someone so spiritual,” Matthews recalled.

In the ensuing years, Matthews learned that Kumar was committed to whatever task was before him.

“For Moses, it wasn’t just simply a job, but what he saw himself doing — and I could see that — was that he was fulfilling what God wanted him to do,” he said. “So, everything I saw him doing, he could index it to his love for God, for the church. I saw in Moses a real love for our connectional church.”

That commitment carried over to his time at GCFA. In 2018, he took the extra step to show his love for the local church by becoming a licensed local pastor in what is now the Tennessee-Western Kentucky Conference.

That July, Kumar began serving a quarter-time appointment as pastor of Lillard Chapel United Methodist Church, a historically Black congregation in Murfreesboro, south of Nashville.

He served at the church for the next three years until preparations for the 2024 General Conference led him to step down so he could focus entirely on the work of GCFA.

The Rev. Sheila Ahler, who chairs the GCFA board’s General Agency and Episcopal Matters Committee, shares Kumar’s dual dedication to stewardship and local church ministry. She became a licensed local pastor after 40 years working as a certified public accountant. 

“His prayerful approach to issues often allowed us to step back and look at issues from other than just the financial impact,” she said. “I feel our decisions were often tempered by his pastoral leadership through some volatile times.”

The Rev. Jacob Dharmaraj, a retired pastor and veteran denominational leader, said Kumar’s election as GCFA’s head was also a source of deep pride for the Asian American community.

“Throughout his tenure, he demonstrated that financial leadership in The United Methodist Church is not merely administrative work but a vital ministry,” said Dharmaraj, who also serves as a nonvoting adviser to the GCFA board.

“With missional vision, integrity and steadfast care for those he served, he has been a role model for a generation of young Indian American United Methodists. The foundation he has laid and the direction he has set will continue to serve the church well in the years ahead.”

Kumar said that he and GCFA staff are always thinking about how the agency can help the denomination thrive. Sometimes, that means having to say “no” now to ensure sustainability into the future.

“When we have the financial challenges, GCFA has that role to find the right means to take care of the ministries,” he said.

“I think the most important thing for us is ministry. How do we help the ministry in the long run?”

Hahn is assistant news editor for UM News. Contact her at (615) 742-5470 or [email protected]. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free UM News Digest.