This is what I shared with the church this morning:

——————

You may have noticed that here at SLE we don’t talk about our giving and financial situation much.

In a way, we don’t bring it up much because we don’t want money to seem to be a big emphasis of our church. And that’s true. We’re not on about raising heaps of funds to want to be a rich church. We’re not on about asking you to give so that God will in turn give you back.

But money is important. It pays for the gospel workers of this church. It pays for the training of ministry trainees and bible college students. It allows us to meet together in a building like this. It allows us to support missionaries who can serve faithfully and be able to live.

In future years, we hope to send out and support missionaries of our own like Fay and Helen.

Money doesn’t drive us, but money allows us to gather as a church, to grow as a church and to grow the church around the world.

So please let me encourage you to keep being thoughtful and generous.

—————–

SLE operates on, what I think is, a fairly modest budget. I would encourage you to browse through the budget sometime to see exactly where the money goes. Click here.

And here are the graphs from this morning giving us a visual representation of where we’re at.

• The blue line shows the weekly target we need to hit to meet budget
• The orange line shows our actual weekly average
• The year started with a bang… dipped back down below budget… and then for a few weeks we were actually averaging significantly more than our target
• However, since about April there has been a steady decline in giving such that we are now averaging under our weekly budget

• This graph shows the same thing in a slightly different way
• Each bar shows how much money above or below budget we are each week in a cumulative sense
• Up until a month ago, we were actually in the black, but since the weekly average has been dropping steadily over the past few months, we have now actually moved slightly into the red
• If this trend continues, we will have a significant shortfall by the end of the year