Mastering Church Finances

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If you want the finance committee to be ministry minded, you need to recruit people who are on the front lines of ministry themselves.
—Richard L. Bergstrom

After beginning the meeting with prayer, Don, the chairman of the finance committee, said, "I trust that all of you have had a chance to look over your copy of last year's budget."

"I'm afraid I didn't get mine," replied Dolores Anderson, the treasurer.

"Nor did I," added Pete. "Were they mailed out by the church office. Pastor?"

"Not to my knowledge," groaned Pastor Peterson. Why does everybody always look at me when other people fail to do what they'resupposed to do? he thought to himself. "I guess the secretary neglected to get those out last week. I was hoping we'd be able to give some thought to this before our meeting tonight." He hated passing the buck like that, but at least the monkey was off his back.

"I'm sure we can go ahead with this tonight, Pastor," replied Don. "Dolores, will you please distribute copies of our financial report from the past eleven months. That will give us a guide to determine next year's budget. You'll notice, folks, that we were a little behind in our giving over the summer months. Our actual giving was 17 percent under the projected receipts. Fortunately, we were able to cut back in some areas over the summer so that we suffered an actual shortfall of only 4 percent. That leaves us with just $1,300 in the general fund as we enter the last month of our fiscal year."

"Pastor, I told you that budget was too ambitious," offered Ted, a retired teacher. "We need to be more conservative with how we spend the Lord's money."

"What about the endowment fund that was set up by Fred Bostrom's widow?" queried Lois, the financial secretary. "It seems a ...

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