[printprofilepic]Recently, a long-time friend and church member called me to ask how the church was doing. This person had heard some worrisome rumors concerning the state of the church. Since there may be others with similar questions, I think it would be appropriate to summarize a few facts. Bottom line: we are keeping the doors open and covering required salaries and expenses. But, although membership and pledges have risen steadily over the last four or five years, funding has not been enough to cover many of our desired projects. Here is a summary of where we stand:
Adult Sunday attendance (the number of adults walking into the church) was around 95 ten years ago. It was at a low (78) in 2005, and has increased since then to about 85. These numbers are six-month averages—on any given Sunday attendance obviously can be higher or lower than this.
Membership jumps around, but is virtually the same as 10 years ago, currently around 160. It reached a minimum, below 140, in 2006.
In the Mountain Desert District, Colorado has the largest membership (3692) with New Mexico ranking second (1597 members) among the seven Mountain Desert states. The average membership per UUA church in New Mexico is 123, thus we are one of the larger UUA congregation of those in New Mexico.
Let‘s look at finances. For last year, actual income came to $253,000 with $206,000 in pledges. With some belt tightening, expenses were a little below this number, but nothing was carried over.
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For this year the projected, income is $262,700 with $223,600 of that coming from pledges. The expenses are estimated to be $263,400, or about $700 over budgeted income, which should be covered by slight adjustments in actual expenditures as the year progresses. It should be noted that this year we have already also raised $24,000 in contributions to the new building fund.
To put it differently, for this year compared to last year, pledges are up about 8%. So we were able to cover some small additional programmatic expenses within our budget. But, none of the staff, including the minister, received a pay raise this year and we would like to be able to fund more programmatic costs.
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Our Financial committee, led by Dianne Wilburn, Steward, and Helen Finney, Treasurer, has already begun developing a budget for next year, which the board plans to present to the Congregation well in advance of the annual meeting this spring.
I give my thanks to Mike and KokHeong McNaughton for the membership and attendance data and to Helen Finney for the financial data. UUA membership data is from the Mountain Desert District’s Annual Report.
Dean Carstens
2010-2011 Church President
