Greetings in Christ!
I’m excited to send you all this update on our parish financial status and building project. Since I arrived here last year, I’ve been learning all I can about this vast and amazing enterprise that is our parish community. The good news is easy: collections are trending up, registrations are up and we are on our way to a new/totally renovated church…praise God!
This last week, we held our Town Hall meetings where we showed our new plans and the question and answer time was wonderful and life giving. I am very excited about what God is going to do in and through us as we begin our work, hopefully in September. We are working now on preparing the hall for having Mass there by updating our sound system and beautifying the walls and ceiling in order to enhance the dignity of the place we will worship in for about eight months.
Now, when we look at our financial picture, it’s important for me to be transparent and ensure that you have a sense of where we are and how we are doing. With that in mind, I want to give you “Three 4’s”: Four problems, four solutions and four ways to help. Let’s get right to it!
Four Problems:
- Budget: This is our first budget together and I am so very blessed by our wise and helpful Finance Council. God bless those wonderful men and women! What is clear to us is that our budget needs to either be augmented significantly on the revenue side or aggressively trimmed on the cost side. Each budget for the last four years has involved moving funds from savings to meet our spending needs. Since 2014, Holy Family has used almost $400,000 of our savings, mostly to cover expenses.
- Building Project: The end result of the building project is of course, going to be amazing. However, we anticipate that praying Mass in the hall may have a negative effect on our collections. Beyond that, while we have the money to do our renovations, that money is coming in over the next three years and most contractors prefer to be paid on time, not in three years. ☺
- Lack of Savings/Future funding: Because we’ve been removing money from savings, our ability to meet any major emergencies is threatened.
- Tuition: We have a couple problems here: delinquent tuition and the tuition system. Basically, we have almost $100,000 in delinquent tuition that it appears we may never collect. That’s a big amount. Beyond that, we restructured our tuition system a few years ago based on the assumption that when school families indicated they were parishioners, that meant they were giving to the parish and thus, entitled to a lower tuition rate. Currently, that has not played out like we had hoped.
Four Solutions:
- Responsible Budgeting: Our Business Manager and Finance Committee are helping us create a balanced, prudent and frugal budget. All this in order to stop the practice of pulling from savings to meet the budget. Next year’s budget is lean and, if we stay faithful to it, we will not need to pull from savings to meet it. The budget is lean because we are preparing for a possible decrease in collection revenue while we have Mass in the hall. We have cut significant costs and will continue to do so where necessary. I pledge to you that I have and will continue to listen to our Finance Committee, even where difficult decisions are required.
- Energy Savings: We’ve got a lot of money to save here and we are working with Consumers Power to maximize those savings. I’m simply amazed at the amount of money we can potentially save here and we’ll have some programs to talk to you about; ways that you can help us save money on energy.
- Expenditure Controls: Along with the trimmed budget, we are going to strive to maintain a system of frugality within our offices at Holy Family. We are working on pooling resources and cutting unnecessary spending.
- Communication on Tuition policy and collection: As members of the Finance Committee have spoken with our school parents, they discovered that a lot of them simply didn’t know that the restructured tuition system defines Church membership as not just attending Mass, but giving as well. We will communicate with our parents to express our hopeful expectations on Church donations.
Four ways you can help:
- Spread good information: None of the problems above put us in crisis. We are growing, people are giving and with a strict and lean budget, we will be fine. Share the good news with people about what God is doing in our beautiful parish family. This is, quite simply, an amazing place to be and I encourage us to share this with people.
- Stay faithful to your pledge: If you pledged to the Witness to Hope or Restore the Temple campaigns, it is really important to stay faithful to that pledge.
- Faithfully contribute: If you are not currently giving, please consider doing so: we are totally dependent on your donations and every dollar helps. If you do give, please consider giving through the online giving (Pushpay) platform. If you don’t know how to use Pushpay or what it is, please check our website at www.hfgb.org. Consistency in giving is so very helpful to us.
- Please pray: It is prayers that sustain us and the next few years will involve a lot of sacrifice, flexibility and hard work. Let’s give that all we’ve got. For me, I’ve been praying especially hard to St. Joseph the Worker and I’d love for all of us to do the same.
Family, we’ve got some challenges ahead, but these challenges can be met. I’m very excited about our future and I can’t wait to see what God does in and through us as we grow in love for Him and each other.
Your Priest,
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