Stewardship and Finance Committee
2002 Annual Report
Committee Members: Lorri Williams, Chair; Brad Falk, Nancy Johnson, Ron Soliday
First of all, we'd like you to know how grateful we are for the generosity of Emmanuel's family of believers. The incredible response to our year-end mailing brought us nearly out of our financial hole. We started December close to $10,000 in the hole in the General Fund. Thanks to your amazing reaction to the need we finished the year at only $2,239 in the red. We plan to make up that much smaller deficit through fundraising activities, possibly a spaghetti and/or chili feed during the Bi-County tournament.
Even with all this, the family of Emmanuel has given more in general offering this year than they did last year. This has been true of each of the last couple years, also. God is truly at work blessing our congregation.
We tried a new stewardship program this year called "The Living Stewardship" program and it seemed to be well received. We got a good response with it and think that it will be even better in 2003. We got off to a late start with it in 2002 and can do better this year.
We are going to take some time in this report to clarify some things and answer some questions people have had. First of all, we want to clarify how our different funds are used. The general offering that you give on Sundays or mail in to the office is used for the general operating needs of the congregation...utilities, insurance, staffing, programs and materials, etc. This is what is called the "General Fund." We also have the "Memorial Fund" which is made up of money given in memory of someone. This money is usually "undesignated"...that is, it is given with no specific purpose in mind and can be used however the council decides. And we also have the "Endowment Fund" which is made up of funds that are given to the congregation through someone's will or estate. These funds are deposited in a trust fund and when it reaches a certain level we will be able to use the interest it generates for mission projects, charitable gifts, and some of it for projects involving our facilities.
With that said, we want to clarify where some of the money we've spent this year came from. At the annual meeting in 2000, the congregation voted to set some money aside for future needs of our church. So approximately $17,000 was set aside to pay for siding the church, another $17,000 or so was set aside for addressing the accessibility problems with our building, and a final $17,000 (plus or minus) was set aside for "other needs" as identified by the council. These funds have all been kept in our Memorial Fund.
Here are some of the major things those funds have been spent on:
Siding the Church -
Bill Smith, West Plains Construction $13,342
Sanctuary Remodel -
Wallflowers (new carpet/installation) $5,889
LJ Paint Systems (paint sanctuary) $1,600
Piazza Construction (extension) $2,432
Foster Electric (conduit/outlets) $ 511
Master Plan Development
Don Neraas, Architect $ 570
Madsen, Mitchell, et.al. (Sue Lani) $1,450
Other funds have been spent on less obvious but equally important things such as camperships...2001 saw a record number of students from Reardan attending Lutherhaven!
At the end of 2002, there is still approximately $27,868 in the Memorial Fund to be used for projects of the congregation. If one would break it down in the three areas of emphasis identified in 2000, it would look something like:
Siding the Church - used $13,342 of $17,000 - $3,658 remains
Accessibility Issues - nothing actually done to address these issues physically yet
- Master Plan expenses could be partly accounted for here
Other Needs
- Sanctuary remodel - used about $10,400 on this project
- of course, part of this could be considered accessibility...
None of these expenditures had any effect on our General Fund this past year since all of these expenses came out of Memorial Funds that had been set aside for these purposes.
So how did we get so far behind in 2002? We planned it that way!! Well, okay, we didn't really plan it that way but the budget we passed for ‘02 did have a deficit of over $5,000 built in. How did THAT happen? Fair question. We think it happened like this.
Travel back with us several years. In 1999, Pastor Mike served us for about half a year and then Pastor Dave arrived. We finished that year well ahead of the game, to the tune of about $10,000! After a sufficient amount of rejoicing had been done, we proceeded to include that carryover in the 2000 estimate of income. Not good. But we didn't catch it until the next budget round. So our 2000 expense budget was artificially inflated by $10,000 that was actually 1999 income counted again in 2000.
When the 2001 budget round came we decided that we'd leave things pretty much where they were and hope the congregation (that's you all) would gradually increase your giving until we caught up to that inflated figure. And who knows...we may have done just that. But then 9/11 happened and the economy tanked and...well you know the rest of the story. We tried one more year to leave it close to the same and that was this year. Now we've decided the only safe thing to do is find ways to cut as much of that artificial inflation out of the budget as we can and have a balanced budget for 2003. So that's what we've done. If you can hang in there with us for a little longer, we'll tell you how we did it.
When you start talking about having to cut $10,000 or more from a budget our size, there aren't many options available. So here's what we did...
1. Converted our benevolences to a percentage of income which slightly reduced the amounts for 2003. We "saved" about $500 here.
2. More conservative use of office supplies and using more e-mail to reduce postage will save us about $800.
3. We only budgeted for one renewal of our copier maintenance agreement. We've been renewing about twice a year but the last one was just in December 2002 and we may make it through 2003 with only one. This saves our budget about $600.
4. We cut out the money for the Bishop's Convocation that Pastor attends in the fall. The Synod has financial aid available to meet those registration costs. That saved about $350.
5. Most other areas (like Worship/Music or Education) have only a small budget anyway...or like Property & Maintenance are made up of relatively predictable and fixed costs. So that really only left one other place to make significant cuts...
6. We eliminated the janitorial position thereby reducing the budget by $1,560. We'll be needing some volunteer help here so if you see some dirt dragged in or if there are cheerios on the floor, don't complain...grab the vacuum!
7. We eliminated the secretarial position along with the childcare benefit that went with it. Nicky has been very gracious about the whole thing and has offered to volunteer enough time to get bulletins ready for Sunday (the newsletter might take a little more incentive!). This reduced the budget by another $3,350.
8. Finally we reduced Pastor's package by about $4,050. He offered to take the cuts and selected those that would have the least impact on his family for right now. So part of his retirement program was removed ($2,700), his continuing education and professional expenses items were removed (about $750), and his car allowance was reduced (by $600). When the council reviewed and approved this budget proposal, they passed a motion that if extra funds were available during the year, the retirement funds would be the first thing replaced.
As difficult as some of these decisions were to make, we believe it is the right step to getting our budget in line with our actual resources and giving levels. We fully expect that the giving of the congregation will continue to grow as it has for the last several years and we believe that these corrections will allow us to grow with a realistic budget that starts the year balanced.
Once again, we want to thank all of you for your generosity to and caring for this congregation and its ministries. God bless you all in the new year.
