Been thinking about church budgetting for some times, last nite’s Focus Team about Giving has prompted me to write on this issue, apparently I am not the first one as Victor has just made en entry on this.
Say if we view church as just like any other companies/organisations, then what is our position in the company or are we the consumer who get service from the church. If we are the customer then giving can be seen as we “pay” for the service that church has provided. However the biblical model of us being a church member is that we are partners in the gospel, thus using the illustration that church being a company, we are the stockholders, we invest our money (among other things) in hoping that the kingdom will be furthered in this world.
This leads me to the next point, if I am a stockholder in IUC (or CBS), am I happy with the performance of the church financially? To be honest, no, I am not, it’s kinda discouraging, to be hearing budget deficits over and over again, I guess with IUC is sort of expected (as I am well aware of the student giving pattern..) but with CBS, it’s just come out of the nowhere.. suddenly being hit by a letter, emails and a phone call asking for support.. Is it really that bad and why there is “suddenly” a deficit (or it’s just me who isn’t aware of the situation til now), is this deficit was expected before (as with the case of IUC) or not?
I cannot help to think that maybe the staffs need to bugdet “wiser”?? Or do we need to hire an independet accounting team to have a look at IUC/CBS’s finance?? Or maybe we can cut cost at some things??
Surely the printed outline is the first thing that we can do without (although I am not sure whether it costs a lot to print outlines), I mean students take notes on their own sheets right? And there are many people not taking notes during sermon as well, so putting the outline on the OHP might be sufficient.
IUC is planning to at least bring aboard three fulltime workers in the future, one for women ministry, one for indonesian ministry and one for the cantonese ministry. I truly see the enormous need of having these three ministers in our church, but I am now getting more skeptical in our ability to support them.. I would expect rigourous fund raising campaigns are needed..
Ohh.. I don’t know, I suppose God will provide.. but just frustating, you increase your giving, but the budget is also increasing, therefore deficit is just expected to carry on.. but until when? When would we have a budget surplus for IUC? Or maybe a budget surplus is not good as that means we are not expanding (being passive).. One thing for sure, I don’t ever want to be the church treasurer (sorry Arnold :)), it must be very stressful job to have..
Maybe the partners in the church should think on what we can do about the financial situation? Or maybe, we just need to buy more “stocks” to keep the our company floating..
When we received the letter from CBS, Vivian’s immediate reaction is – “gee, it must be very costly printing these colourful glossy marketing material”. I guess there are always places where money can be saved, even though marketing graduates would argue that these are necessities. But it does discourage the supporters, thinking, well the money I’ve donated you last week all went into these glossy printings…
Nevertheless, I do not think a student church would ever get surplus financially, if they are by their own. The staffs are serving those who require most attention with least contribution. But these people are the leaders of future generation, the pillar of churches everywhere in 10-20 years (or more in Chinese churches 🙂 If the University Churches parish just works on its own, I do not see the possibility of surviving.
I think the Christian churches in Sydney should see this particular need, and provide financial support for the sake of evangelism in Sydney, not just in the suburbs around their churches. We are not many companies floating up and down in the exchange independently – we are one big company that departments are supposed to help out one another!
In reality, it is hard. Even in corporate world companies are splitting up in order to compete efficiently. And here we are talking about financial support for a church that is not directly beneficial to you 🙁
I wonder if the breakup of St. Mathias a few years ago had effected this in some ways? It just seems to me that these issues are becoming more and more prominent since that point.