Stewardship Committee Letter
Annual Giving 2021
2020 has been a year of great challenges for St. Matthew’s Church, as for all churches and their members. Even so, we have moved forward, making changes to continue to provide for our members during COVID-19, and expand our ministries in confidence that better days lie ahead. For example, we updated our technology to provide online worship and meetings, we experimented with outdoor worship, we added small groups, we increased the hours of the Parish Manager to support our Interim Rector and we increased the hours of our Youth and Family Ministries Coordinator to design and launch our Lifelong Learning initiative. We committed to providing quality early learning to children in our community by reopening our Nursery School in September.
In planning for 2021, we continue to seek to be good stewards of our resources, while funding those things that will allow our dreams as a parish to come to fruition. In this season of stewardship, we would like to share with you our plans and challenges.
We will soon be bringing in a new Rector, and we need to offer a competitive compensation package that allows us to call an experienced member of the clergy. We are looking forward to having new leadership to continue in our mission to preach the Gospel, care for the sick, visit the bereaved, represent our church in the community, develop a vision for the future, and provide administrative support to the whole congregation. To properly support our new Rector, we will need to continue to provide administrative support through our Parish Manager, Parish Secretary, and Youth and Family Ministries Coordinator.
While we are seeking to increase our in-person worship opportunities as allowed and is prudent, we will continue to support live-streaming of our services, and online meeting opportunities. We plan to upgrade our accounting and management software to streamline our operations, and will continue to maintain our facility to the standards we have come to expect.
The following is a history of our pledge support:
| 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | |
| # Pledges | 165 | 148 | 140 | 118 |
| Total Pledge $ | $383,419 | $362,576 | $342,873 | $295,824 |
At the current level of staffing, the total resources required to perform and carry out our mission is $460,000. Recognizing other income (investments, plate, Nursery School assessment) of $103,000, we would need pledges for 2021 of $357,000, a 21% increase from 2020. If we were to reduce staff hours, we could get by with pledge income of $332,000, a 12% increase over 2020. Maintaining the increased staff hours would free our new Rector to spend time getting to know the congregation and taking on new initiatives. As you can see, our level of pledging exceeded the $357,000 amount just two years ago.
We realize that 2020 has been difficult for many of you. There are increased demands on our time, our energy and our financial resources. We believe strongly in the mission of our church, and feel that we are poised to move forward and bear good fruit in our community, but cannot accomplish that without financial resources. We ask that you give prayerful consideration to pledging as much as you can to support the mission of St. Matthew’s Church.
To make pledging easy, we are offering an online form, or you can detach the form included in mailed October 2020 edition of The Oracle newsletter and send it to the church, or you can email our Parish Manager directly. You can view all of our options online here.
We would ask that you complete your pledge by November 1st, so that we can properly budget for next year.
Thank you for your consideration and faithfulness.
The Stewardship Committee
Karen Randall
Chris Suhy
Marie Clark
Tim Walsh