By Bernie Schnippert
Greetings from the Treasurer's office.
For the second month in a row I can share more or less good news about the finances.
Your spring festival offerings exceeded $2 million, which was above the projection. These Festival offerings came right behind the special offerings you gave to help with the first quarter financial crisis.
However, the daily mail average for May finished at just over $107,000 a day. This brought the year-to-date average down to just over $110,000.
A look at the past eight years shows that Festival offerings have, and continue to, play a major part in our income stream. In fact, Festival offerings have yielded between 16 percent and 21 percent of total contributions each year.
And even as we have made the transition as a church to a new covenant perspective, where Festival attendance is not commanded, your offerings have continued to produce around 17 percent of our annual contributions.
As I write, PTM is again beginning to open boxes of offering envelopes coming in from around the country. We hope that the positive support we experienced in the spring will be reflected as the Pentecost offering is tallied.
Whether you gave an envelope containing a dollar bill or a check for thousands of dollars, or any amount in between, we are grateful for every penny. We know your heart is in supporting the gospel of Jesus Christ, but that you also have your own financial obligations that can compete with limited dollars. Our intention is to use the money you give us prudently.
As you can see from the chart below, the daily mail income average for May finished at just over $107,000, bringing the year-to-date average down to just over $110,000.
Daily mail income includes all general donations received in the mail, but does not include Festival offerings.
Our budget for the year was initially set at $112,500. The first quarter showed us that this goal was probably not going to be met. As a result, we made the cuts we had talked about in previous issues and lowered the mail income budget to $110,000 a day.
While May was about exactly that amount, experience shows that the summer financial doldrums can set in right about now, and we therefore don't take our income for the rest of the year for granted.
Further, experience shows that some of the coming months must far exceed the projected year-end daily average or the average will not be met.
In fact, if the seasonal trends of the last few years hold true this year, we fear that the daily average may fall to around $105,000 by year-end.
The positive Festival offerings should help offset the projected shortfall, if it occurs, and thus we may finish the year close to budgeted expectations.
Nonetheless, we hope you will continue to help us meet the projections without us having to rely on special offerings to take up the slack.
Thank you again for your continued, generous support.
Even if we meet total budget expectations, we will almost certainly run a budget deficit anyway (due to a slightly unbalanced budget because of expenses associated with the sale of the Big Sandy facility).
Here is some news about the "world's cutest grandchildren" (mine, of course).
My wife, Arlene, and I kept Pentecost with the combined La Crosse and Baraboo, Wisconsin, congregations.
The next day we traveled to my daughter Crystal's home in Lone Rock, Wisconsin, and spent the next three or four days with her, her husband, Dan, and the kids, Heather and Clint.
The twins are about 15 months old, and are thus toddlers. However, I think they should be called runners, since they always run wherever they go.
If their play habits are any clue to their future, it appears they are on track to be the next brother-sister comedy team. All day long they engage in running, playing, swinging their arms around, laughing, and falling down and getting up again in the cutest most heart-warming antics you can imagine.
Copyright © Worldwide Church of God, 1998