EVC Finances
Report of 2022 and Projection for 2023
Contents:
Introduction
2022 Financial Report
2022 Income
2022 Expenditure
Looking Ahead to 2023
2023 Income
2023 Expenditure
So What Now?
Dear church family,
This is a report about Exeter Vineyard’s finances, where we’re at and where we’re going. Our money is used to fulfil our purpose and outwork our values and I hope this comes across in this document.
Doing church costs money - hiring venues, supporting good works, paying for stationary, printing, wages and so on. All of our income comes from donations by our church family. As such, we try to give feedback each year about the church finances and how we have spent the money that’s been donated.
To be honest, occasionally this finance report never makes its way to the top of my to-do list - last year for example. The reason this can happen is because often finances are not a major issue for Exeter Vineyard. The members of our church family have been such faithful and generous givers that we’ve been able to carry everything we want to do.
However, as we go into 2023 things have changed. Looking at our budget projections, both our income and expenditure have dropped, but the income has dropped more than our expenditure, meaning we are having to stop doing things we feel are important.
So there is extra significance to this finance report beyond just feeding back what happened with last year’s income and expenditure.
This report will give a summary of last year’s finances and then look to the year ahead. Our financial budget is discussed and supervised by our team of trustees, with Mark Denton taking the finance lead, bringing his expertise from his day job. Ken Brown works as our Finance Officer, managing the week-by-week financial activities.
All the figures here are taken from our Quickbooks ledger and are on a cash basis. This is slightly different from how our accountant handles our accounts (which can all be seen on the Charity Commission or Companies House websites) but I think these figures help paint a clearer picture of the the money we received and how our spending matches our priorities and values.
Dave
2022 Financial Report
2022 was our year of moving from “pandemic-abnormality” towards a “new-normal”. It was only in January 2022 that we were able to start having twice monthly Sunday Services - and even these have adapted and changed over the year. We re-started activities for our young people and we had our first church weekend away. It was at the beginning of 2022 we decided to stop having an office and, after a massive clear out, moved lots of stuff into various storage solutions. As 2022 progressed things started to fall into place - not necessarily from working to some sort of master plan, but more excitingly it felt like we have found rhythms, structures and resources that God led us to.
As such our finances in 2022 were dealing with change, so while we can have a pretty good idea of what 2023 is going to look like, last year’s income and expenditure was a little different.
2022 SUMMARY
Income £124,123.01
Expenditure £135,746.61
Net Loss -£11,623.60
The graph below compares to previous years:
Unlike the four previous years we made a net loss in 2022. However, we were able to support this loss from our reserves, which had been built up during the pandemic when our expenses were drastically reduced because we had to stop lots of activities.
INCOME
The majority of our income is people donating through the Gift Aid scheme. This allows us, as a charity, to additionally claim the income tax on the donated amount. We also receive donations that aren’t Gift Aided - this might be because the donor doesn’t pay income tax, or it may be because the person hasn’t registered for the scheme. These are called Freewill Donations.
Gift Aid Donations £88,318.00
Gift Aid Claimed Back £22,372.14
Freewill Donations £13,302.62
Bank Interest £130.25
Total £124,123.01
We also had additional income of £4,698.25 for people paying towards the Weekend Away. I haven’t included this in the income, since it was for a specific purpose and not for the general activities of the church. Similarly, when we get to expenditure, I have removed the same amount from our general church spending.
EXPENDITURE
To make analysis easier, our spending is separated into five areas - Charitable Contributions, Church Admin, Church Activities, Employees and Legal & Financial
Charitable Contributions
This is money we give away that doesn’t directly benefit Exeter Vineyard. All this giving go to things that have similar aims to our church's charitable objectives. We aim to give away a minimum of 10% of the church’s income.
In 2022 this included supporting missionaries - the Dugmore family, working with YWAM in southern Africa, and the Wisbey family, working with Wycliffe Bible Translators. We also give some money towards the UK partnership supporting Vineyard churches in India.
We spent just under one thousand pounds on supporting homeless and vulnerably housed people through our Crosslines team - providing weekly hot meals for up to 40 people at a time and also some much needed equipment for the Crosslines kitchen.
Some money went to local initiatives, such as Exeter Foodbank, South West Community Chaplaincy (supporting local ex-offenders) and a local cross-church youth event.
Finally, in this category, we have the spending to support people in the church when they hit a tough time. These benevolence payments are an important part of us being a supportive family. This might include a bunch of flowers, financial support for a specific crisis and so on. In 2022 we spent £509 on this.
Finally, as part of the UK and Ireland Vineyard churches, we give 5% of our income to the network to support church planting and development.
Church Activities
This is the money spent on carrying out the activities to fulfil the purposes of our church, such as our Sunday services, activities for young people, staff training, supporting volunteer leaders, having a website and so on.
Some notable figures from this area:
£7,310 – Running our Sunday services;
Including venue rent, hospitality and new or replacement equipment.
£5,996 – Activities for our young people;
Such as Messy Church, Sunday morning Launch sessions, Elevate Saturday evening sessions, Youth Bible Study, the Elevate weekend away, and baby and toddler coffee mornings - including things like venue rent, activities, food and equipment costs. It’s interesting to note that these activities are also a point of contact with a number of children and families who aren’t part of our church.
£1,314 – Costs to the church for the Weekend Away;
This was the cost for subsidising tickets, buying equipment and hiring a van to get the equipment to Heatree House. This is the cost to the church on top of the money people paid for their tickets.
£2,560 – Staff training and support;
This is money spent for the development of staff members and includes training courses and a residential conference for Vineyard pastors. £120 was spent on books and audiobooks for Dave’s research and £1,080 was spent for Dave and Adam to visit Olten Vineyard in Switzerland. The connection with Stephan and René, the pastors there, has been really key in the development of Exeter Vineyard. They have been so helpful in asking questions, offering an external perspective and encouraging from their experience. It was 2022’s visit where the idea that would become Discipleship Groups was born.
£767 Website;
The cost of hosting our website, plus a one-off site re-design and re-hosting in 2022.
£4,573 Annual cost of supporting and training our Hub leaders;
These volunteers really make the church run and throughout the year we want to support, encourage and equip them for this role. Every month we host a Hub leaders’ meal at our home and in October we had a weekend ‘learning retreat’. This feels a crucial element to be a healthy church with wide engagement and a shared ownership of the vision and activities of the church.
Church Admin
This is the money spent on more behind-the-scenes costs. It includes things like stationary, ink cartridges and stamps (£483), software (Microsoft Office Suite, Adobe applications and ChurchSuite - £689), admin equipment (£212) and utility costs (£1,580).
We also had costs in 2022 associated with our office. Since 2012 we rented an office near the football ground. It was mostly used for admin work and storage, but as our understanding of church has changed (from being an organisation that put on events to a community of disciples) and especially during the pandemic, we realised we didn’t need an office with several desk spaces. During the pandemic the office basically became an expensive storage space. Originally we were looking to rent a space that was more suited to holding various meetings, but even this idea changed as we realised it would be empty a lot of the time and we could get the same result, for less money (albeit with more effort) from hiring venues, such as the Beacon Centre, when needed.
We handed in our notice at the end of 2021, but the first quarter of 2022 includes a rent payment of £2,148. There were a lot of costs involved with moving out of the office, including redecorating, hiring vans, replacing locks, electrical tests and so on.
We also had the issue of finding storage. A lot of equipment we don’t use very often has been moved to Mark and Judith Stanbury’s as they’ve kindly given us some space on their family farm. We also have hired a small amount of storage space in Exeter for equipment we need more regularly and for Roundabout’s stock. Things that we needed often are now stored in our garage or house.
Currently we hire a shipping container on the edge of Exeter for £92 a month. It’s not ideal, especially for the Roundabout items, but it seems the best compromise for cost, location and size.
Employment Costs
Exeter Vineyard Church has 6 employees and this is by far our biggest expense now we don’t have office rental and associated costs. Beyond the wages paid directly to staff this also includes employers National Insurance and employers pension contributions.
I (Dave) am employed full-time. My duties include the overall direction of the church, as well as the resources and content for our main meetings and videos. I support our volunteer leaders and run two youth sessions a month. I connect with other churches in the city, including championing Joyfest, and also with the Vineyard network of churches.
Sarah is employed for 2½ days a week. Alongside me she helps with the overall direction of the church and supporting volunteer leaders. She also heads up and organises the Crosslines team and is one of three church leaders who sits on the steering committee for the cross-church Exeter response to Homelessness. Sarah also is responsible for our children’s activities at our Sunday services and Messy Church. Sarah is our Safeguarding lead.
Adam works one day a week. He gets involved in a number of areas as needs arise. He is heading up the worship team as it rebuilds from the pandemic and is involved with college aged students.
Rachel works 2 days a week as our operations manager. She keeps a lot of plates spinning behind the scenes to keep everything going. She helps Sarah with the children’s activities and Messy Church. She also has been fantastic, especially during Covid, at keeping in touch with more isolated members of our church family. Rachel is our Safeguarding deputy.
Jacob works 6-hours a week and edits, prepares and publishes our fortnightly video messages. He also produces and publishes our podcasts. In 2022 he rebuilt our website and maintains the site. As his time allows he has been involved in other ways to free up Dave’s time.
Ken also works 6-hours a week as our finance officer, maintaining our financial records, ensuring bills are paid, communicating to the trustees and liaising with the accountant who carries out our legally-required independent examination.
Legal & Financial
These are things we need to do to remain legally and financially compliant. The big costs here are insurance (£1,708), payroll services (£794), DBS checks (£215) and the cost of the Independent Examination of our annual accounts (£770).
Looking Ahead to 2023
As I said earlier, 2022 was a bit of a transitional year. I really believe during the year we experienced God’s guidance towards organising our church around discipleship and, now we’re into 2023, I feel we have a strong sense of what we’re to be and do for the next season.
This means we’re more able to forecast our finances for the year ahead. Of course, this is not an exact science, but it feels like we have a good idea of the major brush strokes.
INCOME
Throughout 2022 we saw our income drop. The majority of this was due to a relatively small number of households, who were regular givers, leaving the church.
It is just a fact of (church) life that people will decide to go to other churches, and this is fine; we believe it’s important people find a meaningful and engaged community.
Alongside this, we have also seen people generally disconnect with church during the pandemic and then not reconnecting afterwards. This is a common issue for every church.
In our budget for this year, we project our 2023 income to be somewhere in the region of £110,100. This is down £14,000 on 2022.
EXPENDITURE
Our budget of 2023 expenditure is £118,280. In many ways we’re very streamlined - no office rent, the cost of a Sunday service twice a month, a relatively small staff team.
However, this is still a projected net loss of £8,180. As our budget stands, we plan cover this from our reserves, although this isn’t ideal.
We can manage because we have reserves. We are required by the Charity Commission to 3-months of operating costs ring-fenced, but because we were able to build up our reserves during the lockdown we do have something like £15,000 of usable reserves. However, given our projected loss for 2023 this won’t last long and it’s good practice to have some money as contingency.
The budgeted expenditure of 2023 covers all the central activities of the church - staff wages, Sunday services, young people activities, giving away 10% of our income, covering necessary legal costs and so on.
We have worked to reduce costs in areas where there are savings to be made, and although often these aren’t terribly significant against the whole budget together they make a bit of an impact. For example we are tightening our belt on young people’s activities, such as purchasing less craft kits, cooking pizzas instead of getting takeaways, and so on.
But these don’t make an awful lot of difference, so our real savings have been by cutting out certain costs entirely. So this year, because of finances, we won’t be doing some of our usual activities. Each of these cancelled items are things we feel are important and we would love to do, but are left out as response to the reality of financial constraints.
Here are the things we have taken out of the 2023 budget to reduce costs, but really would love to be able to do. These are listed somewhat in order of priority.
1. Youth Weekend Away - cost £1,500
For the last two years we have taken secondary school aged children for a weekend at St George’s House in North Devon. This has been a fun time of community building and spiritual focus. It has been a fantastic time away and I believe really crucial to this group of young people, ranging from 11 to 18 years old, becoming a supportive and encouraging group.
At Vineyard we believe the children and teenagers are fully part of our church and I’ve loved how we’ve been able to invest in these young people to help them develop not only a living faith but also to equip them with friendships, experiences and insights to help them thrive at a significant point of their lives.
At the moment we can’t afford to run this weekend (although we do have our normal weekend booking penciled in until the end of March). We could ask parents to pay for their children, and perhaps we will do this, but I have always loved thinking of church as a family, where everyone is involved in blessing and supporting everyone else - and this is my understanding of giving to church, that we’re not paying for our own benefit, but giving to support community as a whole.
2. Hub Leaders’ Learning Retreat - cost £3,000
Exeter Vineyard runs on its volunteer leaders. We would be in an unhealthy (and unsustainable) situation if everything depended on staff. Of course, paid employees do more and have specific roles, but the pastoral care, organisation and facilitation done by our Hub leaders is tremendously important.
Of course, not a single one of our Hub Leaders does this for a reward, but the weekend away is a fantastic way to acknowledge their hard work with time away from the normal distractions and pressures of home, and a chance for them to get encouragement and training for the next step of the journey.
I understand three thousand pounds is a lot of money, but this represents about £150 per person, which is actually very good value for money given the effort they put in over a year.
3. Staff training - cost £1,200
Each year the Vineyard Churches has a national conference and they ask that all senior pastors attend. With tickets, travel, accommodation and food it can cost about £500 to go. For a number of years Dave (and sometimes Adam) have been to Switzerland to visit the Vineyard church in Olten. As referenced above in the breakdown of 2022’s costs this visit has always been a really helpful time of reflection, input, challenge and encouragement for us as a church. This trip for just Dave would cost about £600. We’ve included £100 towards resources, such as books and training materials.
4. Pay rises - cost £2,000
We have budgeted a pay rise for part-time staff. Usually we match the percentage of the CPIH cost of living increase, but this year we’re doing less than half this figure. Also, a pay rise for me, as a full-time member of staff, wasn’t possible. The extra money I’ve listed above would be to help our staff meet the cost of living increase and also extend a pay rise to me.
So what now?
I believe Exeter Vineyard is in a really good and healthy place. In terms of what we are doing as a church, I feel we’re starting to fulfil our vision to be a church that helps people to be disciples. Financially we will be able to continue to do this in 2023.
It’s true, there are things we would like to do but we can’t because of our finances and I understand that life, and church, is lived within constraints. However, I do wonder whether there is an opportunity to do some of the items mentioned previously if our income increases.
Many churches have an ongoing and constant conversation with members about giving to the church. We decided not to do this - we didn’t like asking for money when we didn’t need it. But now we’re in a situation where we do need money, I feel comfortable to ask people to consider their giving to the work of the church.
This is where the two aspects of money and church overlap. We have been talking about the operational finances - money we use to pay for church activities.
However, there is also the pastoral aspect of finances - how we, as disciples of Jesus, learn to have a healthy, Kingdom-based view of our money.
Some people are surprised to find that money is Jesus’ second most talked about topic, right after the Kingdom of God. I believe this is because it is so easy to have an unhealthy relationship with money. Like an ancient idol, it is very natural to feel that our hope, security, value and happiness is bound up with our finances.
And often, if not always, this attitude to money works against developing a loving trust in God. As Jesus says, “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” (Matthew 6:24)
So, as we start 2023, I’m asking people to consider what they are doing with their money and whether they are receiving a nudge from God to start to give, or to increase their giving, to Exeter Vineyard.
If this happens and out income increases we will be able to do some of the things we’d like. If it doesn't, we won't.
I’m happy whichever outcome we get. As a church we are not defined by our bank balance or by these particular activities. We want to be a loving church family that is pursuing God and what he wants to do in and through us.
To help put our financial limitations in context, here are the figures from the list above added to our budgeted expenditure and what it would mean to meet these targets.
If you already give and are a UK tax payer, but aren't registered with us for Gift Aid, then registering will increase your donations by 25%. This is really helpful scheme and you can register very quickly online using this online form or ask for a form from the office.
Giving can be in any method. You can give with cash or cheque at our Sunday services - put into the black box - by posting to our office or handing to me or Rachel Cock.
You can also give by online banking. If you would like our bank account please email the office or Ken, our Finance Officer.
Giving regularly is fantastic for our financial planning and the majority of donors give monthly by bank transfers. But you can also give on an ad hoc basis. If you want to give by Standing Order get in touch.
We’ve obviously been talking about specific figures, but the important thing here isn’t giving a certain amount, but giving as God is leading. Remember the story Jesus told about how an old lady’s small donation was more valuable to God that the big amounts given by showy rich people. We give as we feel led and trust God to use these as he sees fit.
If you do give, or make a change to your usual giving, it’s really helpful to let Ken Brown, our Finance Officer, know. You can email him here.
If you have any other questions, comments or suggestions about the church finances, feel free to get in touch. You can catch me at a Sunday server or email me and the same goes for Mark Denton (our Trustee lead for finances).
And finally, well done! This is the end!
Thanks for reading all of this report! I really appreciate how serious and conscientious people are about all aspects of our church family.
Father God, we trust our finances to you. You are the ultimate provider and you are good! Help us be responsible and faith-filled with what you do give us and help us use our earthly finances for Kingdom fruit. Amen.