Giving Updates

From our Treasurer, Richard Bentley, as seen in the weekly email newsletter.

November 2024 Update

Richard says:

It's great to see giving going up over the last few months. We are close to covering our current expenses, but still short of next year's expected increase to about $16k expenses per month.

November 2023 Update

Ash says:

Where we were:
At the end of 2022, our church expenses added up to about $12,000 per month. Have a look at the gold line on the graph below. You'll notice that our giving was roughly meeting those costs. Praise God!
We could have stayed there, except that there are 100,000 people in the City of Cockburn and we want to grow our ability to reach them for Jesus.
We want to see new people come to Jesus. We want to plant new churches and send out new gospel workers.

Where we are and where we are going:
Instead of staying sustainable, we chose to dig into our savings and expand our ministries beyond what we can currently afford. This meant we've been able to add staff, launch a kids' club, grow the kids' ministry, plan for a youth ministry, and rent some office space to help support a staff team and train apprentices and interns.  All that adds up to about $6,000 extra per month so to break even we now need around $18,000 per month.
It's actually a bit more complex than this since some costs will go down as volunteers take on admin roles, but other costs will increase. Richard our treasurer will be able to explain all this in more detail.
Basically, we've chosen to do more and to train new workers and all that costs more. By using our savings (and with some substantial support from donors outside the church) we can stretch like this for a year or two, but we need to become self-sustaining again very soon.

How will we get there?
One way is to just keep reaching out to people for Jesus and as they come and join us we can invite them to give to the same gospel cause that saved them and brought them from death to life.
Let's pray for this!
I suspect it'll be a slow process so we probably don't want to depend on this alone. Also we can look to our current community. At the moment we have a little over 50 families in our community, but maybe only about 40-45 families are really onboard keen for the mission. So if you take the $18,000 we want to raise per month and divide by 45, you get to about $400 per month per core family. 
That's a pretty blunt calculation. Some people wouldn't be able to give that much and I'm not asking them to.  Others are already giving several times that much and I'm thankful that God has given you both the resources and the heart for the gospel mission. You have gone into partnership with Jesus and his work!
I realise that people give to other good gospel causes, and we are asking for support for our apprentices on top of all of this.  So I'm not expecting to hear that everybody has decided to change their church giving to exactly $400 per month. It is just a number to help us understand where the church is at financially if it were spread evenly across the church family.
Wherever you are at, I encourage you to prayerfully think about what God has given you (both financially, and in terms of bringing the gospel to you), and to plan ahead to give generously in 2024. We want to push the gospel outwards rather than sit comfortably at a particular size. For that to happen we need everybody to be serving as part of the body. For most of us that means some combination of time and money.

August 2023 update

July 2023 Update

Great news for Mark - total fundraising has doubled!