South Elkhorn Christian
Church
Life Together by Mickey Anders
Last weekend's Cabinet Retreat was the best one yet. We had about 45 people there on Friday night for a wonderful brainstorming session about our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. It was a high-energy session with great crosspollination of ideas. Then Saturday morning the Cabinet settled into the business of assimilating that information and determining our direction and major goals for 2010.
We are still honing the wording of the goals, and will publish them later. But there was a lot of discussion about assimilating new members, finding out their gifts and making sure everyone gets fully connected to the congregation. Two major facility projects are on the radar - building a picnic pavilion with storage and additional lighting for the parking lot.
Raising funds for those major expenditures will be the first step to seeing them become reality. The Cabinet is aware that we cannot continue to make major purchases and major repairs to the facility without raising funds for those projects. Last year, we spent close to $70,000 on major repairs and new equipment without asking the congregation for special offerings to cover them. We spent that money on a new floor in McMahan Hall, replacement of two HV/AC units in the Historic Sanctuary area, replacement of seven HV/AC units in the McMahan Hall area, repaving the parking lot and the purchase of several items of new equipment, like a new phone system. We paid for all these items from budget funds and from reserve funds instead of taking a special offering.
The bottom line is that we spent more money than we took in for the year. Here are the end of the year numbers regarding our budget income and expenses: December Year Total Income 38,014.43 352,431.25 Total Expenses 40,082.43 382,900.03 Difference (2,068.00) (30,468.78) As you can see, we spent about $30,000 more than we received. Moving forward, we will be appealing to the congregation to raise funds for such special projects, rather than dipping into reserve funds or overspending our budget.
We have done all this work and supported our Outreach
programs with more funding than in recent years. One of the
organizations that our church has a long history of supporting is the
Christian Care Communities. We have a tradition of taking a special
offering on the fifth Sundays for CCC. I have invited Bill Schiphorst
from Christian Care Communities to make a special presentation to our
congregation at the next Vespers meeting next Wednesday night, February
3. Please come to learn more about the positive work of this fine
organization. We will meet in room 211-212 so that we can see video of
their work. Remember that Vespers happens on the first Wednesday of
each month from 6 to 7 pm.
Mickey