February 20 Congregational Meeting 2011 Budget and New Website

There is a congregational meeting this Sunday following worship. The main purpose of the meeting is to discuss and approve a budget for the church for 2011. Copies of the 2010 budget and expenses and the proposed 2011 budget have been available in the back of the sanctuary the last two Sundays; and last week’s Tower contained a one-page insert with a written, narrative budget summary and a very short (one side of one page) summary of the 2010 budget and expenditures and the proposed 2011 budget. This information will also be available at the congregational meeting on Sunday. In addition, there will be a spoken presentation and interpretation of the budget.

There may be a fair amount of discussion about the fact that by some calculations, our deficit is a little larger in 2011 than it was in the 2010 budget; and it is probably true that we cannot count on the Property Board under-spending its budget by $21,000 every year, thus letting us have a large surplus to bring down the next year’s deficit. While we are certainly in no immediate danger financially, if the trend of our deficits becomes a long-term trend, that would be a problem. The larger issue to my mind, however, is that we have 12 fewer pledges for 2011 than we had for 2010; and that has been going on for the last 3 or 4 years or so. This is puzzling to me because we don’t seem to have had any drop-off in worship attendance. We have had worse weather the last 2 or 3 winters than I remember previously, yet our worship attendance seems to have held steady. I don’t know what is causing the drop in pledges each year. Maybe a multi-year study can be done to try to see what is going on.

Before the presentation of the budget, there will be a short presentation about our redesigned website. Over a year ago, Liz Michaels led a committee started by the Deacons to think about and work on a redesign of our website. There were many meetings to discuss this, and all boards and others who have some “ownership” of material on our website were asked to read it, think about it, and re-write it for clarity, brevity and interest. Liz worked really hard getting this work moving. Jay Edgar joined her part- way along. We ended up hiring Jay’s company to redesign our website, but Jay has donated countless hours working with the staff and others on a Google calendar system for the website, a new e-mail system, and other things. Thanks to the wonders of projection technology, we will get to see the website projected on a screen at the beginning of the congregational meeting. Thanks very much to Liz and Jay and to all the others who worked so hard getting us a new and more visual and user-friendly website. You can access it yourself at the same address: www.firstcongmadison.org.

Controversy over Public Employees and Unions

There is a lot going on this week regarding Governor Walker’s proposed taking away the
right of public employees to bargain for their rights. I would ask you to keep all those facing
economic uncertainty in your prayers, and also to pray that the Governor’s words about calling out
the National Guard do not escalate what could already be a tense situation. I will be speaking at
both rallies in favor of collective bargaining rights for public employees.
Curt
 

View Curt's Invocation at the rally.