Dear Belmonters:

On behalf of your Finance Committee, I am providing this financial update regarding Belmont UMC, sharing our financial goals for 2024, and asking for your help.  The Finance Committee held our monthly meeting on Monday, October 16, and reviewed the 2023 year to date results as well as the 2024 budget requests that had been submitted by our various program and administrative committees and teams.  The overall message is we are doing well. Belmonters continue to be generous and faithful, but there is more that we need and want to do.

First, our year to date results through September: our church related expenses are running about $57,000 under budget and giving from pledges and loose offering is about $18,000 ahead of budget. We tend to spend more than 25% of our budget in Q4, and Belmonters tend to give more in November and December. While 2023 looks good so far, we need to not let up and finish the year strong. Our Weekday School (WDS) is also having another outstanding year financially. Net income as of September 30 shows the WDS at a positive $27,512 and the church at positive $42,712. For context, the church and WDS have a combined 2023 budget of about $3.1 million. Please, keep up the good work, Belmonters, and thanks to each of you for what you are able to do to help make this possible.

For 2024, the Finance Committee asked our various committees and ministry teams to prepare a budget that reflects the financial resources they need for 2024 to complete the programs and ministry they want to accomplish. About 75 people have been working on this effort for the past two or three months. It is my understanding that over 35 people worked diligently on the Program Ministry budget request, eliminating some items and adding some new items as they evaluated what we were doing and how it could be better. For example, we have recently taken over the Conference Wesley Program for our neighbors at Belmont University, and we are continuing to enhance our live streaming opportunities for Sunday worship. Our Staff Parish Committee wants to provide our staff a 4% pay raise to try and keep up with inflation. We are facing increased healthcare costs and additional pension costs due to the conference not providing a pension holiday in 2024. Increased childcare hours, an expected overlap for a couple of months in our Director of Music Ministries position, and sharing a part time HR manager with the WDS are all important new items. We are adding to our administration budget a contract to provide IT support. This will help with network security, live streaming of church services, staff computers, building access software, and many other items. We should have done this years ago!! Our share of conference askings (apportionments) is going up 3% because our overall budget grew 3% last year. Our property budget, the amount needed to keep our very large and very old building going, is increasing from $527,461 to $552,935, mostly due to urgent needs with some of our HVAC equipment. Did you know we budget about $128,000 for utilities and over $58,000 for insurance? Those are not very exciting expenses, but without them we would not have a building to meet in or offer to our community in ministry.

Bottom line to all those numbers is we have expense requests of about $1.86 million which is a 6% increase over 2023. Your Finance Committee believes we can do this. We hope you, the Belmont UMC community, will want to do this also. We need an overall increase in pledges of 6%. Some will be able to do that, some will not, some are no longer with us, some are new, and some can do more. Over the next several weeks, you will be hearing a lot of information about our plans for 2024 as part of our Investing In God’s World campaign. We are hopeful you will embrace these goals for 2024 and respond as you are able to help us achieve them. Every gift is important, and every gift makes a difference regardless of size. Please be watching and listening for information about this - in person at church, in your snail mail, via e-mail, and on our web-site. Most importantly, a big thank you to each of you for what you do to help Belmont UMC make a difference in God’s world.

John Pearce, on behalf of Belmont UMC's Finance Committee