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| Church Capital
I heard recently that the United States has pledged 100 million dollars for aid in Haiti. That’s a huge number. It’s a little daunting to think of how to come up with that kind of money. However, at the same time, the donations to the Red Cross alone were listed at around 150 million to date!
The bottom line is that individuals pulling together for a common goal are an incredibly powerful force.
The same thing is true at our church. Thanks to the generosity of each contributing individual, our church has made some really big things happen like helping our school stay open and paying off our debt early. Even the recession and all of the fundraising for MCA last year didn’t hamper our goals of funding our school, providing a Children’s Pastor, putting up a sign, and keeping all the mundane things like heat and lights going to name a few.
However, in the last couple of months, giving has slipped quite a bit. Our year starts on July 1. We should have $183,500 in church budget giving so far. We only have $151,000. We’re over $30,000 short of our goal. Each month our budget is $26,216, so if we don’t take in that much in contributions, we’ll be further behind budget. For example, in January we took in just $14,900, so we were over $10,000 short just in January.
How does this actually impact us? Well, for the time being, we have decided to hold on hiring a part-time Children’s Pastor. We won’t meet our reserves goal of dollars for our rainy day fund if giving doesn’t increase, and we may even end up eating into the savings we put away last year. It just doesn’t seem like this should be the time to use up our reserves, so, the question we have to ask ourselves is, “How can I get involved and help?” The biggest way is by being a faithful, monthly contributor. It’s hard to think our faithful $10 or $100 or even $1000 will do much towards closing a $30,000 gap, but it really makes a difference. All of the people who texted in to give $10 to Haiti probably didn’t think they were doing much, but all together, just the texts alone raised $34 million of the Red Cross’ money for Haiti. Each of us doing our part really does make a huge difference.
By Rachelle Ellis, Governing Board—Finance |
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