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 October 10th, 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.
This was the second time for the new meeting format. We have decided to start the meetings at 6:30pm from now on, on the second Tuesday of each week. It continues to be 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_10_10_master
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.
- September Financial Summary shows School Tuition ahead of budget. This is due to some families selecting to pay a more significant amount of tuition up-front in the school year. This will average out over the full year. No issues relating to school tuition at this time.
- 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). This is currently on track. Going forward, the Finance committee decided to rename this line item from “4600 Dual Site Revenue” to “4600 Special Grants”. The dual site naming was a carryover from several year ago when we received a grant for our new dual site. This label change will make it easier to understand this specific line item in the summary report.
- Offerings in the month of September are typically slightly less than normal month but tend to start showing an increase since we are moving out of the Summer month. We are showing our actual offering income down from where we have set our budget. We know members have been increasing their offerings to the pledge drive which is an awesome blessing. We also encourage members to consider increasing their offerings to the Unified Budget. We have been able to make our cash flow commitments, but will be monitoring this carefully over the next month. Please keep this in your prayers.
- The Finance Committee is noticing more members are using the Simply Giving. We continue to 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 $13,964 in our Reserve Fund.
Draft 1 Page Financial Summary Sept2017
Overview from a financial outlook, we need to focus on our Unified Budget giving. Currently our actuals compared to the budget, we are starting to run behind in our monthly offerings; however, we are spending less than what we have budgeted. We are making our cash flow needs at this time (able to continue to pay our monthly bills), and we do have a bit left in the Reserve Fund. With that said, we 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.
If you have any questions, please contact Doug Broeren (Treasurer) or Daryl Schultz (President).
In Christ Alone,
Daryl Schultz, Resurrection & Life Lutheran President