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The following is the talk given by Mike Wood to the 9.30 service on Stewardship Sunday. Please click the read more link to view the whole text.
Well it doesn’t feel like 12 months since I stood here last year to talk about Stewardship at St Mary’s. The past year has flown by.
Thank you for the opportunity to talk to you this morning. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Michael Wood and I’m chairman of the Stewardship Committee and also a member of the Local Ministry Team.
What I want to do is talk a bit about what Stewardship means at St Mary’s and how you can all help. Stewardship is about resourcing our church – that is ensuring all the various activities are run efficiently, be that officiating at services, singing in the choir, making the church and its grounds look so beautiful, ringing the bells, running our children’s groups, supporting our charities, keeping the website up to date or providing us with much needed refreshments after having to listen to me talk about Stewardship, and of course, generating income.
I know that a number of you are already very much involved with these activities within the church and we all owe you a huge debt of gratitude.
We categorise Stewardship into three parts, Time, Talent and Treasure and this is what we need from every member of the congregation. I would normally talk about giving time and talents first because the hardest thing is to ask people for money especially in this difficult economic climate. But these are difficult times for our church as well and I want to make you all aware of the current issues we face.
You should all have picked up a leaflet with your pew sheet today. The idea is to illustrate some of the facts from this talk and make it clear what we need to do.
The bottom line is that we are losing in the region of £1,000 every month. That means that during this financial year we will have eaten away at our reserves to the tune of £12,000. Now it is obvious that this cannot continue and I need your help to resolve this issue.
Some of you will be aware that the major expenditure for the church is our Parish Share which amounts to just over £84,000 for this year – this can be seen from the pie chart at the top of page 2 of the leaflet. That’s £7k every month of the year before we even turn on a light or print a service sheet. This was an increase of nearly 10% on the previous year which has really stretched our budget.
For those who don’t know what we mean by Parish Share; it is our contribution to the costs incurred by the Diocese of St Albans. Our £84,000 is paid into a pot along with the other 300 or so churches in the Diocese, of which the vast proportion, about 87%, goes towards the Parish Clergy, in the form of salary, pension contributions, the Vicarage, training of new clergy, and so on.
The Parish Share is obviously a very important part of funding the church. If we were not able to meet this obligation, which is an issue with some churches, then it is possible we would have to share our Vicar with another parish. I believe that would be nothing short of a disaster for St Mary’s and a situation we must do everything in our power to avoid.
We have been given an indication that our Parish Share will increase to over £90,000 for next year so the problem is only going to get worse.
So, what can we do? Well two things, rather obviously, decrease costs or increase revenue. Well actually, we want to do both. Our Treasurer, Brian Hayward is talking with the powers that be to try and reduce the planned increase to our Parish Share for next year and the churchwardens and others are looking at other opportunities to save money, for example on gas and electric.
From an income perspective, you can see from the second pie chart that our major source of income is through our weekly offering. This is where we can collectively make a huge difference for a small amount of individual pain. The chart on the opposite page gives a breakdown of the planned giving in a week. Now some of those 147 donations are individuals and some are families, so there are more than 147 people in the church who give regularly, but it works out to an average of just £6.90 a week. Our collective challenge is to increase this average to above our minimum target of £8.50 whilst also adding new people to the planned giving scheme. I’m sure there are people in the scheme who genuinely can’t afford to increase their giving, so it is up to others to help them with a larger increase were possible.
The reality is that we all need to be looking to increase our giving by at least £2.00 each per week – that’s less than the cost of a couple of loaves of bread!, To pinch a line from the political conferences, “We’re all in this together” and we can turn the loss into a modest profit overnight by meeting this challenge.
I spoke with Geoff Fletcher in the Diocese office about what I was going to say this morning. He has some figures comparing average giving across the Diocese worked out using average attendances and published income. Looking at a list of average giving in each parish, we are three quarters of the way down the list and need to do better than that in our support for God’s work within our church.
We are lucky that we have quite a lot of people on the planned giving scheme. The scheme is confidentially managed by Chris Pope, so he is the only person who knows who is a member of the scheme and their level of giving. This is, therefore, a general plea to anyone who is not currently part of the planned giving scheme to please join. There are two options to the scheme, using the white envelopes or, much more efficiently for the church, via standing order. For those contributing by standing order, there is a yellow card in the pews that can be put into the collection plate as a sign of your offering. We can claim tax back on all these contributions, which as you can see from the graphs, is a significant amount. Can I also remind any of you that pay the higher rate of tax that planned giving can be claimed on your self assessment tax return? It would be nice if this refund could also be passed to the church as an extra donation.
There is a third way of providing tax efficient giving and that is through the use of the blue envelopes. These envelopes are primarily provided for occasional visitors to the church and for additional donations outside of planned giving. I urge anyone who regularly gives using these blue envelopes to please join one of the two regular giving schemes. These planned giving schemes are by far the best way for the church to budget over the year and the more of the income we are guaranteed, the easier Brian can sleep at night.
You will find a coloured sheet with the leaflet that gives information on how to join the scheme or increase your current giving. Redbourn and its Parish Church have been in existence for 899 years. This current financial situation is serious and we must ensure we provide future generations with a wonderful place to worship and thank God for his generosity towards us.
On a lighter note, as a Stewardship Committee we are always looking for new ways to generate income and I would like to announce one such scheme this morning. We are creating a Business and Skills Directory that will sit in the library area and also be available on the website. This will allow any member of the congregation to advertise their business or personal skill in the directory. I encourage everyone to review the adverts and look to use those services. In return all we ask is that a donation is made to the church for any additional business that is made through this scheme. We will leave the advertisers to make a suitably generous donation on trust.
Thank you for listening this morning. I realise it has been very financially focused and there was a lot to take in, but I hope this has given you some idea of what it takes to run a successful church – and make no mistake, we are a successful church. Our problem is a growing gap between the money coming in and that going out, but if we all make a small sacrifice then we will not only close the gap, but provide funds for further expansion of God’s work here at St Mary’s.
We all need to take a good look in the mirror and ask ourselves, “Am I really doing enough to repay God’s love and generosity towards me?”
Amen
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