So How Did We End Last Year?
We ended our church’s fiscal year on June 30. At the end of every fiscal year, we look back and see how the prior year has been. As each of us knows well, we are in the middle of some tough economic times. This was reflected in our giving. It was under budget by about $55,000 and down from last year by $16,000. While it’s great that giving was only down a little from last year, our expenses continue to rise due to inflation and other factors out of our control. We really want to see giving going up year over year. Having lower giving this past year led to the Governing Board adopting a budget for our current year that has significant cuts in pastoral staff.
Our expenses were also down from budget by about $52,000. So overall, we came out about even since both giving and expenses were down almost the same amount. About half of the savings were due to not having an additional pastor for the last half of the year. The remaining savings came from not spending our entire budget in areas like Evangelism ($8,000), Utilities ($5,000), Other Salaries ($5,000) and other miscellaneous savings.
Since we were under budget in these areas, we were able to fund $18,000 of the $24,000 reserve goal the Governing Board set for this year. Some of you may wonder why we need reserves. About four years ago our church was in the position where we only had about $1,000 in the bank. This was a scary place to be. The Governing Board voted that we need to build up a reserve of $100,000 so that we are hopefully never...[more]
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