By Ronald Kelly
By Ronald Kelly
PASADENA—By the time you read this issue of the WCG News, most of our U.S. congregations will have implemented the new financial model. We are pleased with how smoothly this change has gone. The advance work and preparation certainly have paid off.
As I mentioned last month, as we move to a local-congregation-based financial model, our financial reporting will take on a different look. That transition will take place during the rest of 2004 and be fully in place by the turn of the year.
In the meantime, we will continue to have both centralized and local financial systems in place. By centralized, I mean that member donations are processed and receipted in Pasadena. By local financial systems, I mean that in the new model, the local church will be responsible for the collection, banking and receipting of contributions. As the months go by, centralized processing will be less and less, while local processing will become the primary focus of donation processing.
However, we are in the early part of the transition, so centralized funds for July totaled just over $1.45 million. That compares to $1.44 million in 2004. Considering that two districts were processing donations locally in July, this indicates a good increase compared to the previous year. Because the centralized figures do not include the locally processed funds, we can’t provide exactly how much the increase totaled.
Centralized income for the first seven months of this year came in at $9.2 million. Last year income was $9.8 million for the same time period. But again, we have not factored in local donations.
Work at headquarters continues to focus on the transition to the new financial model, the ongoing sale of the final 17 acres of the Pasadena property and plans to relocate our staff.
We continue to receive significant interest from a variety of potential buyers. We hope to complete the campus sale by the end of 2004. However, we still have much work to do, and these complex sales have a way of taking longer than anticipated.
We are also making progress on our headquarters relocation plan. We are evaluating several properties with a major concentration on an office facility in Glendora, about 20 miles from our current campus. We are only in preliminary planning, but hope to have more concrete information to share with you in the next month or two.
The 2004 round of regional conferences is wrapping up with the final conference in Florida planned for Sept. 17 to 19. We hope to see many of you at one of these regional conferences. In the meantime, we hope your excitement grows as each congregation takes on the responsibility and joy of local financial management.
Copyright © Grace Communion International, 2004