United Methodist Budget Case Study

Financial Secretary: The most glaring issue, which opens up easy access for, would be embezzlers in the congregations check policy. All checks being written to cash basically enables anyone to cash out the check, the church, a rouge employee or volunteer, or otherwise. All checks need to be made out to the church, not to cash. It would be even better if the church went the route of many churches by allowing donors to have donations processed monthly (or weekly depending on donor preference) through

Pastor Fred Dyess had retired after serving as pastor for thirty years and Director of Missions for the Baptist Association of Greater New Orleans for fourteen years. The Lord called him out of retirement to start a new church. Bro. Fred checked with the Eastern Louisiana Baptist Association Director of Missions, David Brown, to learn what areas the association had targeted for a new church and what was needed. He was told that the Louisiana Baptist Convention required a new church to have a sponsoring church. Dr. Roger Dunlap and Macedonia Baptist Church gladly voted to be our sponsoring church. The Louisiana Baptist Convention and the Eastern Louisiana Baptist Association each gave Victory a budget supplement of $500 per month decreasing

Assume that the CWC has adopted the budget as developed in Case I even though it does not hit the 5% budget surplus target. Now they want you to allocate the budget into functional areas. Revenue is not allocated to functions. However, expenses are allocated to functions using the percentages shown in the following section.

Table 4 shows the average Rocky Mountain church spends above the UMC average on clergy compensation. Rocky Mountain has almost 4% more dedicated to staffing expenses, pushing its rank to 8th. The average Rocky Mountain church spends 2% more than the conference average on program cost but, the UMC average on operating cost. Rocky Mountain is paying its staff more, and its clergy just above the UMC average all while maintaining the conference average on debt payments. Moreover, the conference is spending 2% more in program spending, which if reduced would help bring the conference in line with the UMC non-capital spending average.

I am concerned. I always want our church to be current when it comes to assessments. So, please allow me to ask a few questions that might help me understand.

In 2014, the cash and cash equivalents available for ministries was 26,769,966 dollars; this money no doubt changed the lives of the poverty-stricken people of the world. Over 70,000,000 dollars was used in providing emergency relief in the year 2014 and over three times that amount was set aside for Children’s ministries including Operation Christmas Child. This immense amount of money gave millions of children around the world a priceless gift and also made it possible for them to receive the love of Christ

United ministries funds students and employees to maintain their job or school status. Whatever need it may be, United Ministries and its partners help the community by generously offering a chance to eat a meal and stabilize financial

The United States as of November 2014 is $16,787,451,118,147 dollars in debt. Churches tax exemption causes the United States a burden because, as of a study conducted by Jeff Schweitzer, PhD, a former white house senior policy analyst, churches own about 500 billion dollars’ worth of untaxed property. According to another survey estimates that “stringent enforcement of religious tax exempt facilities could generate up to $16.75 billion in additional annual revenue - almost enough to fund NASA for a year.”( Bekiempis, Victoria, Newsweek Global) this is already a large sum of money but , “ Less conservative estimates, including an academic paper that pondered the fiscal implications of taxing all churches like for-profit corporations, put that number at $71 billion - enough to send a Mars Rover into space almost every two weeks.”( Bekiempis, Victoria, Newsweek Global) With that kind of money being taxed

As the Seventh-Day Adventist Church grew, they developed Conferences around the World. For the purpose of this study, we will look into the Florida Conference. “Florida Conference of Seventh-day Adventists is an unincorporated, nonprofit organisation which serves as the administrative body for its sisterhood of churches with an emphasis on evangelism, nurturing constituents, and operating a system of schools”, (Adventist, n.d.). The Florida Conference covers 57 counties of the 67 in the State of Florida, it also manages 206 churches, 56 companies, and at least 33

Some current issues affecting the Salvation Army include: donation levels which continue to decline, at the same time there being an increase in the numbers of those who require The Army’s services. Reasons for the increase in the numbers of people requiring assistance include the loss of jobs, insufficient insurance and/or no insurance, as well or the difficulty in finding jobs with a living wage, also fewer and fewer funds from either donations or federal funding as more and more agen-cies are falling short of their goals. Even with all of the difficulties, the Salvation Army still attempts to provide help to thousands of people on a yearly basis. One other concern not discussed as publicly as other issues affecting the Salvation Army, is the religious message of the organization. This could be attributed to many people being assisted in a non-religious setting?

One becomes a member of the SBC by joining a Southern Baptist or mission church. In 1917, the SBC Executive Committee “was formed and composed of eighty three representatives from qualifying states and regions” (Southern Baptist Convention, n.d.). Executive Committee does not control the individual member churches, but reviews budget statements. In addition the committee receives and redistributes money given from “denominational churches, serves as a trusted agency for its Convention properties, and works to better community relationships” (Southern Baptist Convention, n.d.). This committee is not a board and is subject to review by any of its entities. It can make suggestions to entities, but each church is individually governed and are not held accountable to the Convention’s guidance. The Executive Committee handles many aspects of Baptists churches in order to provide better organization across all entities. Along with the committee and the thirteen supportive corporation, it is ensured each area of the SBC is maintained to include ministries, conventions, youth education and it many other areas of specialty. Every year an annual meeting is help with the representatives of each church that is in a “friendly cooperation” with the SBC. At this time new representative for the Executive Committee may be elected, financial reports are

Losing funding when running a human service program can be devastating to not only the person running the program but also to those who are taking part of the services that the program provides. To lose the backing from the faith-based funders and have to rely strictly on the funds from the federal government changes the entire concept of how the program can be ran. Losing faith-based funding and going to a government ran program will have an impact not only on the clients that use the program but also the staff members that are there because of the mission, beliefs and vision that the program originally had.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are winding down and that will help lower the defense spending by almost $1 trillion over the next decade. The congress is realizing that they need to do some restructuring and have already begun rearranging the military budget in response to austerity. Congress conjured up a $630 billion defense appropriations bill that made plans to reduce civilian and contractor personnel by 5 percent over the next five years and in return ramp up advanced weapons programs, including drones, bombers and missiles says The Washington Post. The American Conservative

According to Hinks, Methodists were usually more willing to place “the powerful God of Christianity… on the side of social and political justice.” One religious message that Walker conveys through this Appeal that supports this claim, was

Faith-based organizations are becoming quite creative funding all sorts of ministries. Creativity can also come at a cost.