Charges, and Changes, and Budgets, Oh My!

It has been a busy couple weeks at Cornerstone. We had our Celebration Dinner and had an opportunity to make financial commitments to the church for next year. We are close to submitting a budget for 2009. We had our annual Charge Conference last night.

I am not sure it is the same at all churches, but it is always fun at Cornerstone to look back at the past year, what we have done, and the lives that have been changed. It is also fun to look forward to the exciting new challenges of a new year. Then again, it is just fun to get several hundred Cornerstoners in a room with food and glow sticks! We had financial commitments for 2009 totaling between $700,000 and $800,000. How awesome to see such faithfulness at a time when everyone's wallet is feeling squeezed.

The finance committee met Tuesday night and we are close to sending a budget to the Executive Council. That budget is expected to be between $1.2 and $1.3 million. It took a lot of prioritizing and cutting to reduce it to a level we are comfortable operating within. Jack Fisher and the rest of the staff work very hard to get our budget ready. We will submit the budget for the Executive Council to approve in December. The finance committee also aproved the payment of 4 months of our apportionments to the United Methodist Church. That will have us paid up through September.

Finally, Cornerstone had our annual business meeting called the Charge Conference last night. We approved the leadership for next year. I will be stepping down as chairperson of finance and handing it over to Nic Cofield, but I'll blog more about that later.

Have a great Thanksgiving! Christmas will be here before you know it (unless you shop at Hobby Lobby or Target, where it has been here for months). If you have any questions, please send me an email at finance@cornerstonebuzz.org or see me Sunday morning.