Just got done with our annual church budget meeting. It actually went pretty smooth this year. You never know how it's going to go. Funny thing - we tallied it up and it was exactly $70 more than last year.
We have started referring to it as a "Proposed Spending Guide" instead of a "budget." The idea is to try to think of what we believe God wants us to do in the coming year; rather than how much money do we think we can milk out of people. It's all a guess anyhow. You never know what people will give. So we just try to guesstimate how much things are going to cost, and we trust God to provide. Our budget (I mean 'spending guide') is a little over $100,000.00 a year.
We break the spending guide down into seven categories: Administrative, Building & Grounds, Discipleship, Evangelism & Outreach, Fellowship, Ministry & Missions, and Worship. I actually like how it functions. And I can fit it all onto an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper (sure the font is small, but...). It's set up in Excel with one column for the 'Per Year', a column of subtotals for each category, and a column of 'Per Week' spending.
I am just glad it's done. This is one of those things I don't really like doing, but it has to be done. So... the numbers are put in, Excel has broken it all down, and all we have to do now is approve it at the annual congregational meeting in January. Whew.
2 comments:
Well, just copy and paste the total over to the "Outreach" column and the summer schedule for the pavilion will look like this:
The White Stripes 5/25
The Wallflowers 6/2
Rusted Root 6/10...
That would be a nice summer. Mmm... not sure if I could convince everyone else of that. :)
Post a Comment