Deadline for Contributions to count for 2010!

All contributions sent to the Vermont Conference that are to be counted for 2010 must be received by the Conference office no later than January 7, 2011. All monies received after that date will be applied to 2011.

Oh, and it's OK if you want to send them in during December!

Do You Know What Your Church Contributes?

The Contribution Remittance Form has been updated. It contains many changes from earlier forms, and I respectfully request that you begin using this form and discard all earlier versions. A couple of things worth noting:

-          Every contribution sent to the Conference from a local church or association should come with a form. It's the best way to ensure you contribution is accurately recorded.

-          Contributions to non-UCC agencies, such as Church World Service, Heifer Project and others are no longer accepted by the Conference Office. Once it was thought to be advantageous for the Conference to have a record of all local church giving, so churches were encouraged to send everything through the Conference. In actual practice, this doesn't always work. Despite my best efforts to ensure that our churches get credit for the contributions rather than the Conference, we routinely get thank you letters from these charities thanking us for our (Conference) donations. Moreover, it delays your contributions getting to those agencies, as I generally send them monthly. If you need mailing addresses for these charities, they are available on the Church Finances page of our website.

The Church Finances page has both Microsoft Word and pdf versions of the Contribution Remittance Form, as well as an address list of the most common non-UCC charities our churches donate to. Here's a direct link.

Over the past 200+ years, the Vermont Conference and many of its churches have been blessed with bequests from loving members that have been, and will continue to be, used to support and expand our mission, ministries and programs. In the 1930's, Joseph P. Fairbanks bequeathed funds to be invested, the income from which, eight decades later, still provides assistance for education and relief of ministers. Additional funds have specific uses (see the financial section of the Conference Yearbook) while dozens of other donated funds were given without restrictions, and their income supports the Conference budget each year.

You too can make a difference by making planned gifts. A planned gift is one you make during your lifetime but which benefits the charitable beneficiary after your death. You may designate your congregation, the Vermont Conference, or a seminary or national ministry of the UCC as the recipient of your gift. Planned gifts vary in type, but may provide benefits including: tax savings, an income for life, and the knowledge that ministries you value and support will continue to grow and thrive with your support.

The easiest way to make an estate gift is to use the beneficiary form of your IRA, retirement plan, annuity or life insurance policy to designate a portion or tithe to the ministry you wish to support. Bequests via wills and trusts also provide a very simple way to make a gift that will keep on giving after your lifetime.

If it is important to you to increase your income during your lifetime, during these times of very low interest on saving, you can take advantage of one of the UCC's Gift Annuity Programs to do so.

For more information on making planned or special gifts, contact Jim Thomas at the Conference Office or the Financial Development Ministry of the United Church of Christ at 800-846-6822 or email at giving@ucc.org.