Budgeting for a church is a unique experience
Hello There, Church!
By now, I am sure that a lot of you have gone out to our website and taken a look at the budget that the Church Council has proposed for 2024. If you haven’t yet, I would encourage you to familiarize yourself with it before our Annual Members Meeting on January 28th.
Budgeting for a church is a unique experience. When I budget for my personal finances, I know how much my income will be. I get a regular twice-a-month paycheck, and I can plan my expenses based on the amount of money that I know I will have coming in. But a church isn’t like that. We operate based on the generosity of our congregation, and we never know exactly how much that will be. We can do our best to estimate our expenditures, but the income section of the budget really is a mystery (at least to us humans, God knows it down to the penny).
Our longstanding practice at LTCC has been to prepare each year’s budget based on the previous year’s giving totals. So we prepared our 2023 budget based on our 2022 giving, and the plan was to prepare our 2024 budget based on our 2023 giving. Giving was down significantly in 2023 compared to 2022. That hasn’t been a problem this year, because expenditures were down by about the same amount. Because we only had to pay a Pastor for half the year (Interim Pastor Bob Slack didn’t arrive until July), we were able to break even and even run a small surplus despite the decline in giving. God may not have provided us as much money we expected, but he provided us the amount of money that he knew we needed.
But in October, when we first started the process of doing budget projections for 2024, they looked pretty ugly. We realized that if the expenditures went back up and the giving did not, we could be looking at a deficit of between $70,000 and $100,000 in 2024. Our ministry leaders began combing through their budgets looking for potential cuts. We had a lot of difficult conversations about what our priorities would be if we did decide to make cuts. Perry also sent out a message to the congregation (see the December 15th Weekly Update) explaining the situation and encouraging us all to pray about giving and how to manage our church’s finances.
You responded. December, which is always the highest giving month of the year for our church, was even higher than usual. By the time the Church Council met earlier this month to finalize our 2024 budget proposal, we were not facing nearly as steep an uphill climb as we thought we were in November and December. But if you look at the budget we are proposing, you will see that it still contains a projected deficit of $57,129.24.
Did we want to submit a budget with a projected deficit? Of course not. As the Church Treasurer, I never want to deal in negative numbers. But allow me to reframe the idea of a “deficit.” As I said at the beginning, the income section of our budget is a mystery to us. We don’t know what giving will look like in 2024. Will it be similar to 2023? Or 2022? Will it be higher than last year? Or lower? We don’t know. Here is what we do know: after carefully considering the needs of our church, the Church Council is proposing to spend $547,856.48 in 2024. We are stepping out in faith and praying that God will provide $547,856.48 in giving to cover those expenditures. Ultimately, all church budgets are based on faith: faith that God will provide us enough giving to meet our expenditures. He has been faithful in the past, and we believe he will be faithful again. But what if God answers our prayer by saying “No”? What if we really do end up running a deficit in 2024? Well, as of December 31, 2023, LTCC had a total of $292,334.55 in our bank accounts. God has blessed us with many years of surpluses. Perhaps he did so knowing that one year we would need to spend a bit more and dip into that savings. Perhaps 2024 will be the year that we do that.
Regardless of what 2024 brings financially, I hope that you will pray along with us. Pray that God would provide LTCC with the resources we need, not just financially, but spiritually. Pray that he would give the Church Council wisdom as we seek to steward those resources well. Pray that whether we break even, run a surplus, or run a deficit, that God would be glorified in our community through our efforts.
For the Elders and Deacons,
Church Treasurer
P.S. I’m working on getting the 2023 Giving Statements sent out, so look for that in your inbox within the next week or two.
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