Happy Autumn!
I hope the beginning of the school year and busy season has started smoothly for all of you. In the Parish we are starting new initiatives in an effort to build on where we left off last year. For instance, instituting a 4:00pm Sunday Mass at St. Thomas to serve our Confirmation and Religious Ed families. As I’ve said, that Mass is open to everybody as a way to see if a Sunday evening Mass could be helpful in meeting the needs of our faith community. That’s not to say everything has gone smoothly. For example, our parish cookout was a great success, but we had to scramble due to the rain and held it in the lower church hall. Nevertheless, the company and the food were both great and the Saints display in Villanova Hall was an impressive experience.
That’s kind of emblematic of our overall parish life: striving to restore or build important ministries amidst challenges, like starting a Youth Ministry group or eventually training more Altar Servers. The case is the same for finances. As you know, I’ve been foreshadowing our need to revamp our finances with the coming of Fall. The reason is that we have spent down our savings for capital improvements (i.e. fixing our facilities as necessary). To be clear, our budget DOES include money for routine maintenance items such as cleaning or “changing light bulbs,” so to speak, but NOT to do major repairs or facility improvements. In the last year we made some staffing and ministry decisions to lower our operational costs, but we only take in enough money from all revenue streams to maintain a balanced budget so long as it does NOT include capital improvements. Essentially, we’ve been deficit spending for a few years, but you just haven’t noticed it because we were using saved money for the building projects that were done. That’s fine in a way, but masks the true cost “soup to nuts” to sustain a parish long-term with five facilities and multiple ministries.
That’s what the numbers in the bulletin reflect on a weekly basis. When it says: “Offertory needed for a balanced budget,” that is what must come in on a weekly basis to fulfill our parish needs, without including revenue from the Grand Annual, Religious Ed, or even funerals and other sacraments, but anticipating what should be there for capital improvements. We tend to run low, so we require a monthly “Deficit Reduction Collection,” which will also be printed when that occurs. Our goal is for that to go away if we get the weekly offertory where it needs to be!
Which brings me to the next topic: this year’s Grand Annual. Generically speaking, the original purpose of a Grand Annual was to provide revenue for a yearly capital improvement when the number of donors to the parish started to historically decline. As that trend continued, the Grand Annual was used to boost the overall offertory needed to sustain routine operational costs, while the capital expenditures required to maintain the facilities long-term dropped away. That’s why this year’s Grand Annual will be a much bigger ask, sorry to say. The yearly collection is still needed to sustain operational costs, but an additional, larger amount will be added to cover repairs, like the St. Dorothy air conditioning system, and others that can no longer be pushed off. I know, after spending money on parking lots and church doors, that’s like having rain on your parish cookout. But the reality is that capital improvements are an ongoing process and are, actually, more efficient when not left to pile up. On a happier note, we will be having more and larger fundraisers, like the Novemberfest, so that parish life, whether socially or financially, is as fun as possible. Thank you for all your support of the Parish!
