Homil for October 19, 2008
Homily October 19, 2008
29th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A
Once when I was at another parish and we had a particularly argumentative meeting about the budget, I was saying to one of the priests who lived with us, the next morning, "You know, Alcoholics Anonymous has a tradition that we ought never finance, endorse, or lend the AA name to any outside enterprise or related activity, lest questions of money, property, and prestige divert us from our primary purpose. Wouldn't it been nice if the church operated that way?"
And, without batting an eye, he quipped back, "Well, if it did, AA wouldn't have a place to meet."
Well, we're coming into that time of the year when we are asked to talk about stewardship and about the archdiocesan appeal. And to tell you the truth, I don't want to do it. And every time I'm called to talk about money, I just somehow feel that I'm taking away from the Gospel. But then I remember from the Gospel today, we do live in two worlds, don't we? We live in a real world where we have bills to pay all of us do, and I know money is tight for all of us, but we live in this material world and we live in a spiritual world. And it's tempting to put a wall between them and see them as two separate things. But if we do that, we wouldn't have a place to meet, and we wouldn't have a place to come together on Sunday. So I ask your indulgence as we begin a period of talking about that.
And I've asked John Peterson today (John is chairman of our finance committee) I've asked him just to share with us the basic facts of our parish finances. John has put together a preparation, and I think Dan and Walt will help him pass it out. I really invite your curiosity about this. We welcome questions and observations and comments.
[John gave financial presentation. See John Peterson Financial Presentation]
Financial presentation by John Peterson:
Is this okay? Can everybody hear? I'm going to give Walt and Dan a minute to pass the handouts out to everybody here. I hope I made enough. I wasn't sure. I was trying to cut back in expenses no pun intended there.
Okay, as Fr. Larry said, my name is John Peterson, and I'm on the parish council. I help out with the finance committee. And what I wanted to try to do here in the next five minutes and I promise I'm going make this brief, and I'm going to get through it pretty quickly what I wanted to do was just to try to give you all a very high level view of where our money comes from, how we spend it, and the current financial conditions of Holy Cross Parish.
So, if you all have the handout now, if you just kind of flip over to page two. Let me just start by saying that Holy Cross has a fiscal year that runs from July 1 through June 30, so right now we are three months into our fiscal year. We basically just completed our first quarter. And for this fiscal year, the 20082009 fiscal year, the finance committee submitted a balanced budget of $380,000 for our parish. So what that basically is saying is, that's what we think it's going to cost this year to run the parish, $380,000 to make everything go. Okay? So we hope to bring in, in revenues, $380,000 and we're going to spend pretty much everything that we bring in.
If you flip over to page three of that handout, as far as revenues are concerned, we have seven major categories in which Holy Cross generates revenue, and there you can see those seven categories right there. It starts and leads off with Sunday collections and runs through fees and interest, investments, so on and so forth. If you flip to page four, what you're going to see is a pie chart that basically shows how much is budgeted for each of those individual seven categories. And as you can see, again, we hope to bring in $380,000. We think that's what it's going to cost to run the parish this year. And $171,000, or 46 percent of that $380,000, is going to come from Sunday collections. So this year, for the 20082009 fiscal year, we hope to collect or bring in from Sunday collections $171,000, and I think that's a very key number for us as a parish. So that's kind of from a revenue side.
I wanted to try to give you a little bit more detail, so if you turn over to page five, you see we have seven categories, but then we have individual subcategories relative to each of those seven main revenue buckets. So, for instance, if you're wondering when we say fees, what are we talking about, well, we have sacramental fees, we have religious education fees, we have adult faith formation fees, so on and so forth. So that gives you a little bit more of the specifics behind the revenue that we bring in to Holy Cross.
So let's turn to page six, then, and talk about the expenses that we have. At Holy Cross, on our income statement we broke down our expenses into 14 main categories. They lead off with salaries, assessments, property and facilities, so on and so forth. So you can see on page six the 14 categories in which Holy Cross spends its money.
If you flip to page seven, again you'll see another chart, a breakdown of how we plan on spending that $380,000. So our lead categories are, again, assessments, property and facility and salaries. Seventyfive percent of our total expenses go to those three buckets. And just in case you're wondering, if you're looking in the $97,000 or $98,000 that we pay out to our salaried employees here at Holy Cross and you're thinking that's a lot, it's not. They do a heck of a lot of work for us and are probably underpaid, if anything.
On page eight, if you take a look at that again, what I wanted to try to do there was give you a little bit more detail behind our individual expenses, more detail behind those 14 categories. So again, here are the subcategories. When we talk about assessments, for instance, we have a cathedraticum expense, a property assessment, we have to contribute to the arch for the Criterion, so on and so forth. So again, more of a breakdown on expenses.
Flipping to page nine and we're almost through here so what have we talked about so far? That's kind of our budget. What I'd like to do right now, then, on page nine is turn to our income statement and look at a very high level, our cash flow that has come in over the last four years. So if you go back to 20042005, we actually brought in $22,000 more in revenue than we spent that year. In 20052006, we brought in $27,0000 more in revenue than we spent. In the 0607 fiscal year, we brought in $89,000 more in revenue than we spent.
Now all that sounds great. The one thing that I'd like you understand about 0607 and that $89,000 is, that money was money that was coming in and was pledged to our legacy of mission campaign and our church renovation campaign. So people were going above and beyond for those two campaigns, and that's where a lot of that money came from. Then if you look at the fiscal year that we just finished, 0708, we actually spent more, $87,000 more, than we brought in. Well, what were we doing there? All the money that was pledged and earmarked through our legacy of mission campaign was then spent the following year on the things that you all wanted it to be spent on. We put in new bathrooms, new kitchen facilities in the Kelley Gym, we've worked on our windows, we paid for a new boiler, so on and so forth.
If you flip over to page ten, the detail behind those big numbers you just saw on page nine are kind of laid out. I'm not going to go into these in any great detail here, but that's kind of the bottom line of where those big numbers came from.
Now, we're going to keep moving. Second to the last page, page 11, that kind of brings us to our balance sheet. We've talked about our budget, a little bit on our income statement, the cash flow, the money that's been coming in and going out. Now let's take a look at our balance sheet and talk about what we're really worth as a parish.
The balance sheet represents our financial position at a specific point in time. It defines your assets and claims against those assets, i.e. your liabilities. So basically the balance sheet says, here's our assets less our liabilities and it equals what our net worth is. Now, the last balance sheet that I was able to take a look at was the August balance sheet. And at that point what it said about Holy Cross is that we had $90,000 in assets, we had $61,000 in liabilities, which means that we have an equity of about $30,000.
Our assets are in the form of cash. That is basically in our Holy Cross checking account and our various savings accounts. Our liability comes from deferred income. That's income that we have earmarked for specific projects. And we owe $20,000 in debt to the arch. They keep asking about it, every year, wanting to know when we're going to pay that down. So we've been slowly whittling that down over the years. But that's kind of what it looks like from a balance sheet perspective.
Now that $30,000. It may look good, but I think what I would have to say in going to the next page just some take home points, and I'm going to skip right to the bottom line here from a balance sheet perspective, we're solvent. We're not in debt. We're solvent, but it's tight. We bring in at Holy Cross basically just enough in revenue each month to kind of cover our expenses, and we get by. God seems to provide. But when we have an instance like we did last year when the boiler goes, or pick your next property and facility nightmare, we're going to be in a tight way, because again, we do bring in just enough to get by each month, and so far it works for us.
That said, what I think we need to do as a parish is, we need to stay focused on our Sunday collections. As I said earlier, this year we have a goal of bringing in $171,000 in Sunday collections, and I think we need to meet that goal. We're doing okay so far against it, not quite there, but we need to meet that goal of hitting the $171,000 or improving.
We've been doing very good in fundraising. In 2004 we had gross revenues on fundraising of $16,000, and then this last fiscal year we had gross revenues in fundraising of almost $50,000. So our fundraising group has been doing tremendous work, Mary Berry and I won't go into all the names because I'll miss somebody but we've done a nice job over the years in raising money. But a lot of that money that we raise, instead of going toward special projects, has to go back into keeping the church running. And it would be nice if we could hit our collection goals, our Sunday collections goals, so that that fundraising income that we bring in can be used for church improvements and future projects that we'd like to see the church carry forward and basically improve the church.
I think you're probably going to see us probably reduce our capital expenditures coming up here in the next couple of years, just because of the overall funding come in.
And I guess the last thing I'd like to say is we're all a part of this. This is our church. We're not talking about equal giving, we're talking about equal sacrifice. Everybody needs to do their part and do the best they can, and I'm sure that we all do. But keep your eyes focused on Sunday collections. That $171,000 goal for us is key. And I think if we make that, we'll get through this next fiscal year in decent shape.
Thanks, everybody.
Thank you, John. I just want to add, if you look over there you'll see where we've had plaster repair. So one of those unexpected things last year was leaks through the mortar. Dan Herbertz has done a wonderful job of staying on top of that project, and we've completed the repairs, and I've written the check, and we're able to do it. Dan is holding off on signing off on it till he gets a little more work squeezed out of the contractor, and we're very appreciative of that. But we had $34,000 of unanticipated expenses to repair mortar leaks around there, and that pretty much exhausted money that we had for capital improvement.
I think what I want to close with is just that question, what does belong to God? Now, I have to confess, there are some things I often don't pray about. When I go shopping, if I go to the mall, I know I should but I don't pray before I go to the mall, because if I see something I want, I want to buy it. And I only want to ask will it fit on my charge card or can I afford it. I don't ask God, "Do you think I should buy this?" And do you know why I don't ask? I'm not sure I want to know the answer.
Well, I say that jokingly, but think for a moment of your life and the things that you pray about. And then think of the things that you don't pray about and that you never pray about. And that's even more curious. The things I pray about are obvious. The things that I don't pray about are maybe the things that I really need to look at, because that might be where I'm not really wanting to hear what God has to say to me.
Well, I won't ask you to raise your hand. How many of you have ever prayed about parish finances? How many of you have ever prayed about what you can give? I know some have. But, all I want to do is ask you to pray and think about it. And at the same time, I know John threw a lot of information out at you. Believe me, I've been here 12 years, and I still don't understand our finance statements completely. But then when I look them over, I have access to the bookkeeper and I can say, "What's in this category?" She can give me a printout of every item in there.
So all that information is available and none of it's secret, so look it over. And if you have questions, please know that we welcome them and we don't see them as an inconvenience, but they really will help us understand more what kind of questions people might have and how to present things to you.
29th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A
Once when I was at another parish and we had a particularly argumentative meeting about the budget, I was saying to one of the priests who lived with us, the next morning, "You know, Alcoholics Anonymous has a tradition that we ought never finance, endorse, or lend the AA name to any outside enterprise or related activity, lest questions of money, property, and prestige divert us from our primary purpose. Wouldn't it been nice if the church operated that way?"
And, without batting an eye, he quipped back, "Well, if it did, AA wouldn't have a place to meet."
Well, we're coming into that time of the year when we are asked to talk about stewardship and about the archdiocesan appeal. And to tell you the truth, I don't want to do it. And every time I'm called to talk about money, I just somehow feel that I'm taking away from the Gospel. But then I remember from the Gospel today, we do live in two worlds, don't we? We live in a real world where we have bills to pay all of us do, and I know money is tight for all of us, but we live in this material world and we live in a spiritual world. And it's tempting to put a wall between them and see them as two separate things. But if we do that, we wouldn't have a place to meet, and we wouldn't have a place to come together on Sunday. So I ask your indulgence as we begin a period of talking about that.
And I've asked John Peterson today (John is chairman of our finance committee) I've asked him just to share with us the basic facts of our parish finances. John has put together a preparation, and I think Dan and Walt will help him pass it out. I really invite your curiosity about this. We welcome questions and observations and comments.
[John gave financial presentation. See John Peterson Financial Presentation]
Financial presentation by John Peterson:
Is this okay? Can everybody hear? I'm going to give Walt and Dan a minute to pass the handouts out to everybody here. I hope I made enough. I wasn't sure. I was trying to cut back in expenses no pun intended there.
Okay, as Fr. Larry said, my name is John Peterson, and I'm on the parish council. I help out with the finance committee. And what I wanted to try to do here in the next five minutes and I promise I'm going make this brief, and I'm going to get through it pretty quickly what I wanted to do was just to try to give you all a very high level view of where our money comes from, how we spend it, and the current financial conditions of Holy Cross Parish.
So, if you all have the handout now, if you just kind of flip over to page two. Let me just start by saying that Holy Cross has a fiscal year that runs from July 1 through June 30, so right now we are three months into our fiscal year. We basically just completed our first quarter. And for this fiscal year, the 20082009 fiscal year, the finance committee submitted a balanced budget of $380,000 for our parish. So what that basically is saying is, that's what we think it's going to cost this year to run the parish, $380,000 to make everything go. Okay? So we hope to bring in, in revenues, $380,000 and we're going to spend pretty much everything that we bring in.
If you flip over to page three of that handout, as far as revenues are concerned, we have seven major categories in which Holy Cross generates revenue, and there you can see those seven categories right there. It starts and leads off with Sunday collections and runs through fees and interest, investments, so on and so forth. If you flip to page four, what you're going to see is a pie chart that basically shows how much is budgeted for each of those individual seven categories. And as you can see, again, we hope to bring in $380,000. We think that's what it's going to cost to run the parish this year. And $171,000, or 46 percent of that $380,000, is going to come from Sunday collections. So this year, for the 20082009 fiscal year, we hope to collect or bring in from Sunday collections $171,000, and I think that's a very key number for us as a parish. So that's kind of from a revenue side.
I wanted to try to give you a little bit more detail, so if you turn over to page five, you see we have seven categories, but then we have individual subcategories relative to each of those seven main revenue buckets. So, for instance, if you're wondering when we say fees, what are we talking about, well, we have sacramental fees, we have religious education fees, we have adult faith formation fees, so on and so forth. So that gives you a little bit more of the specifics behind the revenue that we bring in to Holy Cross.
So let's turn to page six, then, and talk about the expenses that we have. At Holy Cross, on our income statement we broke down our expenses into 14 main categories. They lead off with salaries, assessments, property and facilities, so on and so forth. So you can see on page six the 14 categories in which Holy Cross spends its money.
If you flip to page seven, again you'll see another chart, a breakdown of how we plan on spending that $380,000. So our lead categories are, again, assessments, property and facility and salaries. Seventyfive percent of our total expenses go to those three buckets. And just in case you're wondering, if you're looking in the $97,000 or $98,000 that we pay out to our salaried employees here at Holy Cross and you're thinking that's a lot, it's not. They do a heck of a lot of work for us and are probably underpaid, if anything.
On page eight, if you take a look at that again, what I wanted to try to do there was give you a little bit more detail behind our individual expenses, more detail behind those 14 categories. So again, here are the subcategories. When we talk about assessments, for instance, we have a cathedraticum expense, a property assessment, we have to contribute to the arch for the Criterion, so on and so forth. So again, more of a breakdown on expenses.
Flipping to page nine and we're almost through here so what have we talked about so far? That's kind of our budget. What I'd like to do right now, then, on page nine is turn to our income statement and look at a very high level, our cash flow that has come in over the last four years. So if you go back to 20042005, we actually brought in $22,000 more in revenue than we spent that year. In 20052006, we brought in $27,0000 more in revenue than we spent. In the 0607 fiscal year, we brought in $89,000 more in revenue than we spent.
Now all that sounds great. The one thing that I'd like you understand about 0607 and that $89,000 is, that money was money that was coming in and was pledged to our legacy of mission campaign and our church renovation campaign. So people were going above and beyond for those two campaigns, and that's where a lot of that money came from. Then if you look at the fiscal year that we just finished, 0708, we actually spent more, $87,000 more, than we brought in. Well, what were we doing there? All the money that was pledged and earmarked through our legacy of mission campaign was then spent the following year on the things that you all wanted it to be spent on. We put in new bathrooms, new kitchen facilities in the Kelley Gym, we've worked on our windows, we paid for a new boiler, so on and so forth.
If you flip over to page ten, the detail behind those big numbers you just saw on page nine are kind of laid out. I'm not going to go into these in any great detail here, but that's kind of the bottom line of where those big numbers came from.
Now, we're going to keep moving. Second to the last page, page 11, that kind of brings us to our balance sheet. We've talked about our budget, a little bit on our income statement, the cash flow, the money that's been coming in and going out. Now let's take a look at our balance sheet and talk about what we're really worth as a parish.
The balance sheet represents our financial position at a specific point in time. It defines your assets and claims against those assets, i.e. your liabilities. So basically the balance sheet says, here's our assets less our liabilities and it equals what our net worth is. Now, the last balance sheet that I was able to take a look at was the August balance sheet. And at that point what it said about Holy Cross is that we had $90,000 in assets, we had $61,000 in liabilities, which means that we have an equity of about $30,000.
Our assets are in the form of cash. That is basically in our Holy Cross checking account and our various savings accounts. Our liability comes from deferred income. That's income that we have earmarked for specific projects. And we owe $20,000 in debt to the arch. They keep asking about it, every year, wanting to know when we're going to pay that down. So we've been slowly whittling that down over the years. But that's kind of what it looks like from a balance sheet perspective.
Now that $30,000. It may look good, but I think what I would have to say in going to the next page just some take home points, and I'm going to skip right to the bottom line here from a balance sheet perspective, we're solvent. We're not in debt. We're solvent, but it's tight. We bring in at Holy Cross basically just enough in revenue each month to kind of cover our expenses, and we get by. God seems to provide. But when we have an instance like we did last year when the boiler goes, or pick your next property and facility nightmare, we're going to be in a tight way, because again, we do bring in just enough to get by each month, and so far it works for us.
That said, what I think we need to do as a parish is, we need to stay focused on our Sunday collections. As I said earlier, this year we have a goal of bringing in $171,000 in Sunday collections, and I think we need to meet that goal. We're doing okay so far against it, not quite there, but we need to meet that goal of hitting the $171,000 or improving.
We've been doing very good in fundraising. In 2004 we had gross revenues on fundraising of $16,000, and then this last fiscal year we had gross revenues in fundraising of almost $50,000. So our fundraising group has been doing tremendous work, Mary Berry and I won't go into all the names because I'll miss somebody but we've done a nice job over the years in raising money. But a lot of that money that we raise, instead of going toward special projects, has to go back into keeping the church running. And it would be nice if we could hit our collection goals, our Sunday collections goals, so that that fundraising income that we bring in can be used for church improvements and future projects that we'd like to see the church carry forward and basically improve the church.
I think you're probably going to see us probably reduce our capital expenditures coming up here in the next couple of years, just because of the overall funding come in.
And I guess the last thing I'd like to say is we're all a part of this. This is our church. We're not talking about equal giving, we're talking about equal sacrifice. Everybody needs to do their part and do the best they can, and I'm sure that we all do. But keep your eyes focused on Sunday collections. That $171,000 goal for us is key. And I think if we make that, we'll get through this next fiscal year in decent shape.
Thanks, everybody.
Thank you, John. I just want to add, if you look over there you'll see where we've had plaster repair. So one of those unexpected things last year was leaks through the mortar. Dan Herbertz has done a wonderful job of staying on top of that project, and we've completed the repairs, and I've written the check, and we're able to do it. Dan is holding off on signing off on it till he gets a little more work squeezed out of the contractor, and we're very appreciative of that. But we had $34,000 of unanticipated expenses to repair mortar leaks around there, and that pretty much exhausted money that we had for capital improvement.
I think what I want to close with is just that question, what does belong to God? Now, I have to confess, there are some things I often don't pray about. When I go shopping, if I go to the mall, I know I should but I don't pray before I go to the mall, because if I see something I want, I want to buy it. And I only want to ask will it fit on my charge card or can I afford it. I don't ask God, "Do you think I should buy this?" And do you know why I don't ask? I'm not sure I want to know the answer.
Well, I say that jokingly, but think for a moment of your life and the things that you pray about. And then think of the things that you don't pray about and that you never pray about. And that's even more curious. The things I pray about are obvious. The things that I don't pray about are maybe the things that I really need to look at, because that might be where I'm not really wanting to hear what God has to say to me.
Well, I won't ask you to raise your hand. How many of you have ever prayed about parish finances? How many of you have ever prayed about what you can give? I know some have. But, all I want to do is ask you to pray and think about it. And at the same time, I know John threw a lot of information out at you. Believe me, I've been here 12 years, and I still don't understand our finance statements completely. But then when I look them over, I have access to the bookkeeper and I can say, "What's in this category?" She can give me a printout of every item in there.
So all that information is available and none of it's secret, so look it over. And if you have questions, please know that we welcome them and we don't see them as an inconvenience, but they really will help us understand more what kind of questions people might have and how to present things to you.
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