All winter long I have been looking forward to the first major snowfall. Well, now I have my wish and then some. If truth be told I'm feeling that I received a little more than I might have wished for. So Mother Nature, that's enough now! We managed to get our Annual Meeting in before the weather turned nasty. In Sunday's sermon I presented a kind of state of the parish review. The gist of this is that we are ready for change at St. Martin's and you can read my reflection on our current situation at either www.relationalrealities.com or www.stmartinsprov.org/sermons You will have followed throughout the autumn the progress of our Annual Renewal Campaign. We have an income forecast for 2015 of $523,500. Of this $351,000 comprises projected pledged income. Sean Mulholland, the Junior Warden was able to share the good news at Sunday's Annual Meeting that because of your generous response, while the number of pledges remained stable, we have now recovered from the decline in the dollar amount of pledges experienced through 2013-14. Let me express my heartfelt thanks to all our pledging members for their response to the autumn campaign. Nevertheless, we enter 2015 with an operating deficit of $29,000 on an overall budget of $552,600. This is a very manageable deficit and indicates the beginnings of a good recovery in parish operating finances. However, we are not quite there in terms of entering the New Year with a balanced budget, which remains our top priority. Sean Mulholland presented to the Annual Meeting a narrative on the long-term trends concerning financial giving at St. Martin's going back to 1994 and looking to the future. Over the next weeks, I want to share with you one revealing fact per week from Sean's narrative. It's helpful if we all share the same longitudinal picture of the giving trends, a picture, I might add, that will be vital for our planning for the future financial security of the parish. This week's revealing fact: We have been promised 150 pledges for 2015. Do you realize that our deficit only amounts to $193 per pledge? If all pledgers increased their support by $200 per year we would have a balanced budget. That is, if every pledging unit increased their pledge by $4 per week, we could fully fund all of the activities that we at St. Martin's hold dear. Of our non-pledging members we estimate we have around 25 identifiable miscellaneous givers and around the same number of non-traceable cash givers. If everyone increased their giving by $4 per week we would run a surplus of $12,600! Stay safe in the snow and ice and see you in church this Sunday! Mark+ |