Financial Update – February 2021

Dear Everyday Church family,

Welcome to the first Finance Update of 2021. Our goal in these updates is to keep us in line with our three key values on finance:

  • Transparency
  • Accountability
  • Generosity

As I wrote back in October we are encouraging one another to apply these principles to our personal finances and to model them within our handling of our church finances. We do not know what 2021 has in store for us. When we gathered together in February 2020 we had no idea what lay ahead of us as a church and as a nation. We are cautious, therefore, to make any big predictions or promises for 2021. However, we can be clear on where our finances ended up in 2020 and we can be transparent about our plans for the year ahead.

2020 Review of the year

Budget 2020 Actual 2020
Income  £  1,314,202.00  £ 1,116,743.00
Expenditure  £ 1,451,743.00  £ 1,115,950.00
Surplus/Deficit -£ 137,541.00 £ 793.00

As you can see from this table we actually did better in 2020 than we had expected. Unsurprisingly due to Covid and the impact that it had on people’s personal finance, the loss of income from hiring our buildings, and the lack of weekly physical offerings, our income was significantly down on budget. However, because of the diligence of our team in their spending, savings made through the absence of physical meetings and hardest of all, tough decisions we had to make on staffing, we reduced our expenditure even more significantly.

Before we move on, can I say a huge THANK YOU to the staff team for their diligence and also a huge THANK YOU to you for continuing to pursue generosity even in tough times. Your ongoing generosity really is appreciated so THANK YOU again.

Your generosity also meant that in 2020 we raised £120,000 through our special offerings in March and in November – all of this money has been given, or is being given away to other organisations or individuals to extend the Kingdom of God and care for the poor in these tough times.

So those are the top line figures, but how is the money spent? We are always happy to answer detailed questions on how money is spent at Everyday Church and if you ever have a question please email me simon.elliott@everyday.org.uk, but in simple terms here are some pie charts to help (I do love a good pie).

Firstly how much of our money do we spend on Kingdom ministry?

All of it! All the money we give as individuals is part of our worship – we give to GOD when we give to the local church. All the money that we receive we spend to extend the Kingdom of God by seeking to make 3D followers of Jesus and equipping them to bring the Kingdom of God into every area of their lives. Whether the money is spent on paper or prayer, the water bill or our worship team – it is all spent to enable, equip, encourage and empower kingdom ministry.

Broadly that ministry spend will fall into one of three areas – Giving away, releasing people (staff and volunteers) or resources (heat/light/infrastructure etc.). That break down looked like this for 2020:

We gave away 10% of our core income, invested 64% on people and spent 26% on resources, logistics and infrastructure.  However, if we factor in our give away through our special offerings in 2020, that pie looks like this:

Including our Special Offerings, we gave away 19% of our total income in 2020. We will keep updating you on how the money being given away is being used.

So what about 2021? Well, it is hard to know what this year will look like. We do not know when we will be able to gather fully in our homes or on a Sunday. There are still so many unknowns in relation to our economy. However, we know that God is faithful and that we are called to keep seeking the Kingdom of God. We will keep you updated through the year but our top line budget for 2021 looks like this:

Budget 2021
Income  £  1,150,245
Expenditure  £ 1,203,707
Deficit -£ 53,462

Our plan is to increase our core outward giving from 10% to 11% with an intention to keep increasing in our generosity year on year. We will also look to have some special offerings in 2021 as we did in 2020. We will be investing 62% of our income in people/staffing and 27% on resources and infrastructure. Our hope and prayer is that our giving as a church goes above and beyond our budgeted income meaning we can both balance our budget in 2021 and even more importantly be able to be more generous to our community and the wider church family.

Thank you so much for standing with us at this time. Let us keep pursuing generosity as part of our worshipful response to all God has done and is doing amongst us.