Thursday 3 July 2008

Stewardship Appeal 2008 – Final Results

David Foulds, our stewardship recorder, sent me a note this afternoon, to be included in our church notices and newsletter. I'll let you read it in his words,
Thank you all for the fantastic response to our Stewardship Appeal. All the forms have now been processed and the results are:
13 new people joined and 4 left resulting in a net gain of 9 members. Those people and the existing members pledged to give £51,704, an increase of £6,749 (15%) over last year. This is an amazing result. Congratulations and enormous thanks to you all. This amount of giving will enable us to claim £10,922 tax back from the HM Revenue & Customs.
We have received a congratulatory letter from the Archdeacon which is displayed on the notice board.
This is a marvellous result and we should be thankful to God for his provision and to thethe church fellowship for their great generosity. Last autumn the DCC faced a difficult choice. We were determined that we shouldn't budget for a deficit and we were also keen to avoid the kind of cost-cutting that would restrict our investment in the Alpha Course and other mission opportunities. So we committed ourselves to a budget that included a significant increase in giving. And we prayed.

With this wonderful result of our stewardship campaign, a rise in the amount of income tax we can recover, and a better than predicted income from our lettings, we should cover our commitments and move forward in 2009.

We seem to be celebrating good news quite a lot just now. Praise God for all that is good.