A Three-Fold Focus

I have now been here just over 3 months, and I wanted to give you a short overview of where we are at financially. For the parish and school, we have done a pretty good job of keeping our expenses down. To go along with that work, we need to also work on a couple of ways of increasing our income, we are currently heavily relying on parish income and emergency funds to support the school. First and foremost, we need to keep recruiting for the school. We have quite a few open seats and each extra child helps to reduce the cost per student as well as continuing to grow our school. I know that over the last few years there have been some challenges, but I feel that we have now a wonderful staff as well as experienced leadership that works well together and works to have a faith-filled highly preforming school program. As we continue to provide this, the students will come.

The second thing we need to work on is our tithing or what we receive in the collection to the parish. The original plan was to be able to fund our mortgage with tithing, but over the last years, we have been paying the interest from tithing and principal from emergency funds, and in the last few months there has not been enough tithing to do that, and our entire $31,700 mortgage payment from our emergency funds, which at our current pace, will be gone in just over a year. The good news is that we are growing in registered members and hopefully that also means that we should be growing in weekly donations as well.

Another major concern is the Phase II building project. As most of you have guessed, the project has not been moving at the pace that was expected and I have been working on keeping this project on track. We are in desperate need for space and not only for the school, but for the entire parish. Our religious education program is in need of space as well. I am of the mindset (and Misty as well) that our school section is not just for school usage, but for the entire St. Luke’s Parish. We currently do not have a space for the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd (CGS) program in our building and so they are using another parish for the program. We currently only have the gym for large groups and the extra meeting rooms planned will be a great help. Also, if you have tried to schedule a group meeting or function here, we are very limited in space, because we do not have room. Within this project, we are adding storage space, we currently have stuff stored in many different places, including a trailer, the rectory, and in the homes of very generous parishioners and it would be wonderful to bring most of it back into the building.

A major issue holding us back is that the secondary estimates have come in significantly higher than expected. Originally the project was expected to be around $2.2 million to $2.4 million, and the estimates came in at $4 million, then was value engineered down to $3.4 million. Between pledges and payments, we have about $2.9 million raised so far, which leaves us with another $500,000 to come up with. It was clear in the survey, as well as by Bishop Pates, that we cannot accept any more long-term debt. So, this means that we need to raise the last $500,000 to begin. At this point we are planning on a spring start. With this will be kicking off what we are calling the Plus 1 campaign. What we are asking is that families that are currently giving to the Growing Together campaign to add one more year to their pledge and for people who are new or have not pledged previously to do a two-and-a-half-year pledge to get this project going. If the families that have been making payments add a year, this would add up to over $300,000 and then if a good percentage of new families would pledge, we would be doing great. I would be willing to bet that most of you here today have not been a part of such a growing parish, which does require a lot of funding to get started.

I normally hate asking for money, but this is where we are at, and even Jesus himself relied on the generosity of the people who followed him. So, to summarize, I feel that the focus should be three-fold, concentrating on recruiting students, raising the $500,000 to begin the building project, and raising tithing. While the numbers do not look good at this point, I trust in God that we will be fine. I fully believe that money problems here at the parish and school are temporary, and with God’s help and yours, we will get through this time and I invite everyone to help us with this wonderful goal.

God Bless,
Fr. Ken