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Faithful Stewards
December 2011 - Volume 3, Issue 7A (Year End Edition)
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The Stewardship e-newsletter of the Vermont Conference
You are our marketing department! Please forward this newsletter to others who might benefit from it.
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Extra Year End Edition! | |
This extra, year end edition is sent with timely reminders and information you may need as you close out the calendar (and for most of us, fiscal) year...
Peace,
Jim
Jim Thomas
Business Manager/Stewardship Associate
I welcome an opportunity to speak with your church about our future. For help in your congregation about Stewardship, budgeting, investments, or church vitality, please email Jim at thomasj@vtcucc.org |
Deadline for Contributions to count for 2011! | |
All contributions sent to the Vermont Conference that are to be counted for 2011 must be received by the Conference office no later than January 9, 2012. All monies received after that date will be applied to 2012.
Oh, and it's OK if you want to send them in earlier!
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Do You Know What Your Church Contributes?
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Has your church sent in its contributions for Per Capita and Our Church's Wider Mission (OCWM) for this year?
Here's how you find out! Each month we publish a financial report, and in addition to detailing income and expenses, it also lists the year-to-date contributions to Per Capita and Our Church's Wider Mission from all of our churches.
The November report has been published. You can reach it by accessing the Stewardship page of the website, or click here: http://www.vtcucc.org/docs/stewardship/monthly_reports/2011/financial_report_nov_2011.pdf
OCWM contributions by church, with a year-to-date comparison to 2010 giving begins on page 11. The same data for Per Capita begins on page 14 of the report.
If your church does not appear on the list, that means you have sent no contributions to that line in either 2010 or 2011.
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Updated Church Finance Handbook Available!
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The Massachusetts Conference has done a complete re-write of A Church Finance Handbook for Church Treasures and Finance Committees.
This is an exceptionally helpful resource for all church leaders and pastors. Need to know the right way to pay your pastor? How to report and file taxes? The right way to accept and acknowledge gifts? Mange your investments? Do proper bookkeeping? All that is in there and more. To download your own copy, visit the Conference Stewardship Page.
http://www.vtcucc.org/stewardship.html
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Revised Contribution Remittance Form
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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.
The form is available on the Church Finances page of the Conference Website.
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Did you know...
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Your OCWM (Our Church's Wider Mission) contribution to the VT Conference makes this email newsletter and the numerous missions and ministries of the Vermont Conference available to you and your church.
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Don't miss our other newsletters!
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If you enjoy this Emailing don't miss out on our other free e-newsletters. Whether you are involved in Christian Education, Mission or are just looking to keep up-to-date about what's happening around the Conference, we have a newsletter for you.
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