Annual Church Conference Report

First, the budget proposal was unanimously approved. And the bylaw change was postponed due to a bylaw that requires such changes be announced 30 days in advance, not one week. It will be re-visited in January.

Rick gave the following report for the Elders.

Annual Church Conference

December 2, 2011

Every year around this time we gather as a church body to make an important decision: where will we go next year? That’s what a budget says. Some might think it’s just about dollars and cents, and that it simply is a guide to spending, which it is, but a budget really is a statement of faith and vision. And if you’ve been to our annual meetings in the past few years, you know that we talk about budgeting by vision. It’s what we believe.

Before we get to that part of our meeting tonight, and to also making a change in our bylaws about scheduled church conferences, I want to spend a few minutes with you laying some foundation for the budget and for the new year to come. It’s not ever been our practice to hide anything from you or be less than truthful, and we’re not going to try and spin the facts, but want to be real and at the same time optimistic about what God has around the bend for us here.

This year saw us accomplish a lot in outreach and saw a strong number of baptisms. But 2011 has not been a banner year for us at Nags Head Church. For the first time in the past 20 years we did not grow larger as a church, and with people moving away, a few leaving us and some just dropping out, I’m sure our partnership is less now than it was a year ago. Some of you have had friends leave us for varying reasons. Some just have fallen through the cracks. And that’s an area of concern, not only for us as your leaders, but we know it impacts you as well.

On top of that, and we believe connected to that are two other trends that concern us. One is that our finances have taken a hit. Certainly the local economy has something to do with that. We’ve seen faithful, ministering and giving families move away because of jobs. And although we’ve seen some new folks come in to the church, those who are new believers typically don’t immediately become tithing partners. And many of the baptisms of this year are youth, who aren’t able or ready to contribute financially.

Trying to be pro-active, I challenged the church to the 3:10 Dare over the summer, encouraging those who haven’t learned the habit of tithing to try it and for those of us who do to add a percent to our giving. Burnie led the Financial Peace University, which taught biblical principles of stewardship. That course will be repeated soon, by the way. And we added online giving, which is the way things are going in our culture, to help giving be more convenient, esp. to younger people. Our staff continued to work outside jobs to help out. Yet, still our bottom line is struggling to meet our needs.

I don’t want there to be any misunderstanding about this next statement. We don’t put a dollar sign on anyone. But there are only two ways for our finances to grow. One is for us to give more. But likely most of us here are doing all we can. And since most of us aren’t seeing raises, it isn’t likely for our ability to give to increase. The other is for our church to grow in partners. When we grow in the numbers of people in the church, we see our offerings grow as well. I may not be able to give more next year, but all of us can witness and invite our unchurched friends to come to church with us. That’s how we grow. So, let me ask this question of everyone here: Who became part of NHC in 2011 because you led him or her to the Lord or invited them to come to church? That’s all of our responsibilities.

So, you’ve seen that our 2012 budget proposal is significantly decreased from this year’s budget. At the same time it isn’t a surrender. It does say, “We’ll grow from 2011”, because it plans for growth. We had to make some difficult decisions with this budget. And truthfully, if growth doesn’t happen in 2012 we’ll be making some more difficult decisions this time next year. But we’re going to aggressively work with God at turning the ship back on course.

The sluggish economy, the loss of partners for whatever reasons and our efforts to keep the level of ministry and mission up at the same level have all worked together to create a general feeling of discouragement among many of us, me included. I’m not one to retreat, but to charge forward. But sometimes when your charging too hard you can run out of gas. Out of that discouragement and fatigue, we’ve seen a trend lately of folks having to choose between their ministries and other priorities of work and family. That shouldn’t be a choice anyone has to make. But again, when we’re tired, it’s easy to become discouraged.

So, if you were hear at the last CREST meeting you heard me say that 2012 is going to be a year of transition for us. It’s been a while since we’ve made any major transitions as a church, but we believe as pastors that the time is now. We’re going to work hard to simplify what we do and what we ask you to do, without compromising our mission or our purposes. But we’re going to seek in 2012 not to overload anyone. We’re also going to return our staff to being full-time in our roles, knowing that we need that devotion on their parts to lead us forward in our ministries.

If you’ll remember from when you took Discovering NHC (which I encourage you to retake once in a while) one of the statements I make in that class is that if you can’t deal with change you’ll have a hard time with this church. But we believe there are some necessary changes that need to be made, correcting some things, that will help us be better focused on Christ and His will for this church.

That starts with what we do tonight. I want to challenge you to accept this budget and to stay committed to your ministry and your financial commitments here. I also want you to agree to the bylaw change, which isn’t a major thing, but is part of the transition to make things simpler for us all. So before we move on with both of those, I want to lead us in prayer.