The Finance Committee for Grace has been reformed and reorganized, as planned in the Church Transition Plan. Initially under the leadership of Ruling Elder, Tom Kauth, and later under Associate Pastor, Joshua Suh, the committee now consists of 6 members and each has an assigned role in carrying out the management of the church’s funds. The members are:
- Bernie Langer as chairman,
- Marshall Siler as church Treasurer with direct oversight over the church’s bill paying processes.
- Yong Johnson as Treasurer Elect with oversight over the church payroll processes.
- Ray Harbeson as Secretary responsible for committee record keeping, the preparation of reports, and coordination of our contribution counting and recording teams.
- Ruth Tullis, CPA, who provides oversight of our overall church accounting procedures, and
- Tom Kauth who, as Ruling Elder, provides the committee with a direct link to the Session for their oversight and coordination.
Assisting the committee is our contract bookkeeper, Amy Zohorian and our volunteer contribution recording team members, Holly Natrin, Shelly Hampton, Fred Janssen, Mike Martin and Holly Pfeifer.
The Finance Committee is responsible for managing all of the church’s financial processes. These include collection of contributions, recording of contributions, preparation of a draft budget for review and approval by the Session, payment of all expenses incurred by the various ministries of the church, payment of the church staff, disbursement of funds to our designated missions, as well as all banking done by the church.
In the Fiscal Year that we just concluded on August 31, 2022, the church budget estimated our income would be about $834,000, and we received $$833,336. Our expenses for the Fiscal Year were around $705,245.31 with most of the saving resulting from not having to pay for our Assistant Pastor (Scott Dillon) and not spending money in a lot of the ministries that he was expected to lead. In summary, our savings account had a net gain of a little over $128,000 for the Fiscal Year.
For the new Fiscal Year, that we just started on September 1, the approved budget estimates an income of $840,300. The budget includes a 5% pay increase for all of our employees with a larger increase for our two pastors to bring them up to the median pay for PCA pastors for churches of this size (200 to 300 members) in this region of the country. Bringing the pastor’s pay up to the median resulted in an 8% increase for Kenny and a 15% increase for Joshua. By using some of the money we gained in our savings account, we were able to meet all of the budget requests from our ministry leaders. In preparing their budget requests this year, the ministry leaders were actually able to reduce their overall budget requests in each major budget category when compared to their FY 21/22 budgets. This has allowed us to increase our mission giving from 14% of budget to 16.5% of our new budget (approximately $11,000 more than last year). We also used some of our increased savings’ account to set up a new Missions Contingency Account, which will allow our Missions Committee to respond to mission needs that might come up quickly during the Fiscal Year, but were not planned for in the actual budget.
To improve transparency, the Finance Committee will produce periodic reports, like this one, throughout the Fiscal Year that will provide you with more detail on our income and spending as we go forward. You can look for these reports in the Connection online and in your mailboxes here at Grace. Questions on any of the church’s finances can be directed to Bernie Langer (Chairman, Finance Committee) or any of our committee members listed above.