Preview

I had the opportunity to meet with a number of our members who came out last evening to hear where we are and where we hope to go as a church. I spent most of my time talking about purpose, mission, vision, goals, values and of course $$$$$. It is really all good news. Our debt is below $500,000 with over $700,000 outstanding pledges. With a year to go it is reasonable to believe we will pay the debt and have excess funds. Somebody asked what we'd do with extra money. It's new ground! What do you do if you oversubscribe a capital project? We promised to use all the money received for debt retirement and have been completely faithful to that commitment. I'm sure we will figure it out!

My main concern is our 2009 budget. What do we do? Obviously these are difficult financial times. We have some inflationary issues (utilities are going up significantly). We want to increase compensation for our great staff. We want to move forward with programming. Does it make sense to ask for an 11% budget increase next year? I didn't get the answers to my questions but continue to sense a positive spirit among our people.

We talked about the houses around our church. What do you do with houses that would require an investment in to rent them? Glenn Ladd worked us through some of the challenges and I felt brought us to a place where we can reasonably assume these issues will be resolved in the right way (whatever that turns out to be) toward year's end.

It's always good to have an opportunity to share thoughts and ideas with the people who make up the congregation. We'll do it again one of these days.