It doesn’t seem like it’s been many weeks since I last had to write a magazine article. It’s now right in the middle of the year, and it’s fairly difficult to know what to say. At the best of times it’s very difficult to make money sound interesting, depressing maybe as yet again Banking starts to hit the headlines .... particularly difficult now as our church savings aren’t bringing in very much interest (if any at all!).
Our agreed budget means we need to have an average weekly income of about £1100. We’re currently averaging around £920 per week including hall rental. Our expenditure is fairly much to target. We’ve slightly overspent on building repairs; from past experience when dealing with an older building it is very difficult to accurately estimate for any repair work, and one piece of work tends to lead to another piece of work. We’re over budget by about £1000; however, all the work we planned to do has been done, and we’ve under spent on other areas of our budget so the overall impact is not too bad. Many of you will notice the work that’s been done in the sanctuary. We’re trying to make all work done cost neutral. The refurbishment work is being paid for through the sale of pews and benches.
If anyone has any questions on our budget / expenditure please ask me, or drop me an email and I can give you any more details. I don’t really want to fill the magazine with pages of numbers, just to give a general idea of where we are and how we’re doing.
In the next few weeks we’ll be announcing our Christmas appeal. Our aim is to send £3500 to Lom to support their winter soup kitchen. For the last two years we’ve managed to successfully raise this sum of money ... and we hope to manage to do the same again this year. We’ve had visitors from Lom this year and our contacts there are very special to us (see p. 15). I will be sending out the appeal letter soon—meanwhile please pray about what you can give sacrificially to this.
