UUMC Finance Report
The UUMC Finance Committee recently reviewed the church’s first-quarter financials, and I’d like to share the highlights with the congregation.
We ended the quarter $19,000 ahead of budget in congregational giving, primarily thanks to people who paid their full-year pledges at the start of the year. Overall, we received 151 pledge cards from last fall’s stewardship campaign, totaling $710,137, which is just less than half of the church budget. We project another $163,616 in unpledged giving from the offering plate and from online giving from people who didn’t submit pledge cards. Most of the rest of the church income comes from the parking lot across the street and from an annual disbursement from the UUMC Foundation. (More about those income sources in future reports.)
But 2024 also brought significant budget challenges for us for this year and beyond.
First, we were among hundreds of churches scrambling to find a new property insurance carrier after Church Mutual, our longtime insurer, left the market on short notice at the end of 2023. I’m grateful to our Board of Trustees for guiding us through this challenge and securing a policy that meets our needs. But the new policy comes with a $98,000 price tag, nearly double our cost from 2023. We’ve accounted for this in our 2024 budget through a number of measures, including using some of the accumulated earnings from our parsonage fund (while leaving the principal untouched). That fund now stands at $1.6 million amid a strong market and continues to generate income for our pastoral housing allowances. Going forward, the trustees will work to find a more affordable insurance option, but we must be prepared to absorb this additional expense in future budgets.
Second, we saw a $10,000 increase in our conference apportionments, to $144,583. We saw this coming, despite the conference’s own budget tightening, as we learned how many congregations were choosing to disaffiliate. No one likes paying a cost for doing the right thing, but UUMC stood firm on its principles and is maintaining its proud tradition of paying its apportionments in full.
While those expenses were out of our control, our Finance Committee was glad to increase spending in another area — ratifying the Staff-Parish Relations Committee’s recommendation of a 3.5% raise for our fantastic staff. This is the only discretionary increase in our 2024 budget, which otherwise tightens expenses wherever possible.
Every dollar in the budget works to support our mission — from ensuring that the people who lead our worship and teach our children are paid a living wage to insuring the property where we meet in fellowship and host those most in need.
Over the course of the year and leading up to our fall stewardship drive, I’ll provide additional updates from the Finance Committee. We think our money is being well spent on the church that means so much to us and does so much good in the community. As always, we thank you for your gifts and service.
– John Bridges,
Finance Chair
