Our congregation has faced so many challenges together during the past few years with grace, creativity, generosity, and faith. Our church finances have been deeply impacted along with most congregations in the country.
The reduction in income coming out of the pandemic through the regular giving of our members has required significant, if not radical, changes to our staffing and operations. As I shared during the annual meeting, our cash reserves have been depleted and the congregation responded at the end of last year to get us through to 2023.
The sacrifices made by our staff have included combining youth and children’s ministries into one position, having both pastors reduce from full-time to 3/4 part-time positions, all other staff salaries have been reduced by 5%, and effective in March, my family has been removed from church-sponsored healthcare coverage. These difficult changes have now reduced expenses by about $10,000 EACH MONTH going forward.
As I talked about during the annual congregational and budget meetings,
I strongly believe that our current contributing congregation is fully capable of sustaining this significantly reduced budget for staff, ministry, and outreach. That said because we have experienced unusually high snow removal requirements this year and high gas and electric costs, our cash balances are once again critically low and running out.
We are still anticipating that we will be receiving approximately $167,000 from the Employee Retention Credit program. The government indicates a 20-week turnaround, which would put us into the middle of May before those funds would arrive. We do not have the cash reserves or current giving levels to get us to that date.
I am confident that the people of Prince of peace will rise to this current challenge as they have done throughout our history. Following up on this discussion during the annual meetings, here is the need:
The two requests
- Will you join my family in making a “bridge the gap” donation to help replenish the cash reserves here at Prince of Peace? We need a bridge to get us from now until the ERC funds arrive.
- As discussed at the annual meeting, the challenge is to grow your regular giving by taking a step forward in faith in your own stewardship. If all of our current members increased their giving by at least 5%, we could sustain our ministries going forward.
A positive response to these two requests will change the future of our shared ministry.
There have already been seven funeral services in the new year here at PoP. The pastoral staff, music, and office staff have provided compassionate, gifted, and caring support to hundreds and hundreds of mourners. We have also preached and taught and baptized and married as the Gospel is proclaimed in every context.
The ministry and outreach of this church continues to be vital and profoundly impactful.
The greatest blessing is watching what happens when we all respond together as a community of faith. There is just nothing like the church when people offer their energy, gifts, and resources to build up the ministry we all share here at POP.
Your partner in this ministry,
Pastor Chad