by Jason Byassee
Dear Friends,
“We think every rupee is as precious as every child.”
Jason Byassee
So claims Chris Heuertz, founder of a terrific mission agency called Word Made Flesh, and our missions celebration keynote this spring. I so hope everyone can participate all weekend, April 19-21. He is the best of Wesleyan evangelicalism (a graduate of Asbury College) with Catholic care for the poorest of the poor (he spent months at Mother Teresa’s home for the dying in Kolkata). Word Made Flesh founded the first pediatric AIDS care home in South India. They treasure children. And they strive to treasure their funding just as much.
We do too here at Boone UMC. Last fall seemed to be shaping up like a hard one for us. We made budget plans for 2013 on the assumption that money would be even tighter than in 2012. We have since had several pieces of good news.
One, we finished 2012 in the black financially. This was due to some remarkable giving by each of you. Some of you told me “I dug deep, did we make it?” We didn’t make what we budgeted, but we did cover what we spent. Our future work here is to spread our giving out over the course of the year so we no longer have to pray for a “Christmas miracle”!
Two, we have been working to refinance our mortgage. Harold Tilley, Jennifer Whittington in my office, Jason Triplett and others did the work to put our loan out for bids and four banks came back with terms that would all have improved on what we were paying. We decided to refinance with Wells Fargo, since they offered the best rate and the most flexibility we could get. Our new rate will free up thousands of dollars in monthly cash flow. Harold gave this happy news to the administrative council this week. Let me reiterate what I said then: let us not say that finance committee is always the frowning body of “no”!
Three, we have received a significant gift from a bequest of a church member, Bette Hodson, who died in 2012. She loved our church, our children’s ministry, and our life together pursuing Jesus on this mountain. This is a game changing gift for our church. For now we will use it to pay off our smaller mortgage, provide funding for the visioning process and the creation of a capital reserve fund. The rest will be placed in our endowment fund to bless future generations.
Just to be clear, the giver of this gift wanted no part of it to go to regular operating expenses. She was wise to stipulate that. We need to cover our own bills through the spiritual practice of giving and investing in God’s work in this church and community. What the gift does do is set an example of the way one member’s giving beyond her death can bless her church for years to come. She did not have to ask her family to sacrifice to do it–on the contrary they made out far better than they would without this investment. Please see me or Jim Deal in our endowment committee for more about how you can do likewise.
Final note on our finances for now: with the recent arrest of a community member for embezzling from another local church, it is a good time to say that we have practices and people in place to prevent this here. We have two check signers for every check that goes out. Two people have to count our Sunday offering together (only one can be a staff member and they cannot both be check signers, or family members). We hire an external accountant to go over our expenditures. Our finance committee is moving us toward a full audit of our finances. We are bonded against any potential embezzlement. What happened is terribly sad. No one should be so naïve as to say “it couldn’t happen here.” But we have practices in place to make it exceedingly difficult. If any of you would like to discuss anything about our finances please see me or Harold, our finance chair, we can tell you more than you’d ever want to hear.
Let us all move toward treating children and dollars as the treasures they are.