Dear Lake Avenue Church Family,

It was so wonderful to gather as a church family on Easter. Being together and celebrating the resurrection of Jesus and what God is doing in our church was such a blessing. As we look forward to the installation service of Pastor Mathew P. John and the coming months at Lake Avenue, our Ministry Council would like to bring you an update on our church budget as we have walked through this transition season and look forward to our season ahead.

At the August 2021 Congregational Meeting, in approving our annual budget, we shared that given all the changes, we anticipated that we would have a gap this year between our post-Covid General Fund offerings and our operating expenses. Thanks to the support we received from the PPP Program in both 2020 and 2021, we have been able to have stability in our cash flow during the Covid season. This stability, as well as the amazing moment of faithfulness in congregational giving during December, gave us time to monitor and gather more information about post-COVID giving patterns and the impacts of our Senior Pastor transition. We continued to monitor and provide updates to you at our January and March meetings.

We are now at a place where we have been able to clearly see the pattern of our post-Covid giving and are taking serious steps to right-size our budget to report to you. While our December giving was absolutely amazing, our monthly giving has fallen below projections and we are losing ground on the December gains. Our Finance Committee has recommended that the target for our offerings should be $5,900,000. Our current operating expense budget is $6,900,000, leaving a gap of $1,000,000. Our cash position is sufficient to meet our immediate and short-term needs. However, the staff and the Ministry Council are focused on addressing our financial needs in order to bring solutions to you at the Summer Congregational Meeting. We are also pursuing, where possible, opportunities to reduce our operational expenses this year.

As your Ministry Council, we want to communicate both the significant decisions that need to be made in the upcoming months and our desire to keep you apprised of our process. We will be providing opportunities to receive input and we also ask for your prayers as we seek God’s will for the future of LAC.

In Christ,

Dan Crichton
Church Chair