Welcome members to the Resurrection & Life Lutheran blog. Members have been expressing interest in hearing updates from our various leadership teams. This blog is being created to help facilitate getting the updates out to our members, as well as, asking members to use the blog to provide feedback and questions to our various leadership teams.
On Tuesday September 12, our Boards, Committees and Church Council all met on one night. We start with a 30-minute Bible Study, broke out for Board and Committee meetings, and then Church Council came together for their meeting to close out the night.
We received a key presentation between the Board/Committee meetings and the Church Council meeting. Our Facilities Committee presented the initial master plans for our Resurrection Campus. We had some excellent feedback and discussion. We’re excited to share these plans with you on Sunday, September 17, after each worship service. We’re eager to hear your feedback, too.
The first night of this new meeting format went very well. It was a great blessing – being in the Word together, consolidating our schedule and working together at the same time and place. Please keep our leadership, their work and our ministry in your prayers.
Attached you will find a summary of our Council Meeting Minutes. Please note that our Council Meeting have a new revised format and not the traditional format you may have seen in the past. This new format was adopted based on input from the WELS Grace In Action team that worked with our Council back in March 2017.
Resurrection Life Lutheran Church Council Meeting – 2017_09_12 Congregation Update
Also attached is a Financial Summary. This is a simplified summary view. When reviewing the Financial Summary, there are some key notes to understand as you are assessing our current outlook.
- August is the start of a new school year. Tuition is starting to come in, however, there are sometimes slight delays in the full payments showing up in the August statement. There is also a slight delay in reporting the actuals verse budget for the School Affiliate funding.
- The Duel Site Revenue is a summary of the various grants we have received in the past for the Life Site and the ECM (Early Childhood Ministry). There are no more funds in the Life pledges as that was officially completed last year. Also, the ECM grant is down to $25,000 this year. To date, we have not yet transferred any of the grant dollars to the UB income, but that will happen over the course of the year.
- offerings in the month of August are typically slightly less than normal month due to it being a Summer month. We usually see an increase starting in the month of September. We do encourage members to consider moving to the Simply Giving. This is the program which you can electronically set up your offering giving. This helps our congregation see the offering income spread more equally across the year, as well as use us better forecast our full year outlook.
- In looking at the year to year comparisons, it may look like our current year is running significantly behind last year. This is primarily due to $80,000 in offering income which ended up in July 2016 instead of June 2015. The end of June is the end of our fiscal year, so when we compare between the years, we need to account for this anomaly. So we were to adjust last year’s offering number, we are actually ahead what we received in offerings at this time last year.
- From a compensation view, we will see some slight savings due to not have a full time School Principal. Currently Ron Helmers is providing part-time Principal support and Beth Laska was brought in this year as a supplement teacher helping out with the upper classes.
- Currently, we have $16,691 in our Reserve Fund.
Overview from a financial outlook, there are no major issues we see this month. We will need to continue to monitor the School income over the coming months, especially the school affiliate support. We also encourage members to consider their regular offerings to ensure we meet the needs of support all the various Resurrection & Life Lutheran ministries and mission work.
Worshiping the Lord
