Transparency and Accountability
As church administrators, our goal is to manage the business affairs of the church according to biblical financial principles. It is not a common practice for churches to submit themselves to the scrutiny of an audit. However, in 2007, we contacted an auditing firm to conduct an independent financial audit and have had one performed each year since.This process helps to ensure that the church stays above reproach in the area of finance and administration. Our most current audited financial statements are available online for your review and consideration. Thank you for your continuing faithfulness and generous support of the Jesus Mission at COMMUNITY Christian Church.
What is 70/20/10?
As you can imagine, the more locations you add, the more complex a one-church budget becomes. We have recently adopted a new financial model this year that we believe will allow us to operate strongly and more effectively as a reproducing church moving forward. Here?s how it works...
- 70% - Campus Operations: Each campus will be working towards a financial model that will require all campuses collectively to operate on 70% or less of annual offerings. This 70% will be used for staffing, facility and ministry budgets. The Campus Pastor and Staff will closely monitor their offerings and expenses and make adjustments accordingly. Operating at 70% takes the guess work out of future staffing, facility usage and expenditures as budgets are being established each year.
- 20% - Catalyst Operations: The catalyst is an agent that propels momentum to the campus operations. The catalyst operations includes our creative arts catalyst for adults, students, and kids content as well as our business catalyst for things like finances and administration. Campus operational costs have always been the easier of the two to predict and manage, but how to operate and grow the catalyst operations has been less predictable and at times, reactionary to the many requests and opportunities presented in past years. Operating our catalyst organization on 20% or less of all campus offerings has and will continue to refine and improve the way we do things. More than ever, we?re asking questions like: ?Is there a better way to do it??, ?Why do we do it like that??, or ?What if we stopped doing it and started doing something else?? We believe that in order to operate efficiently and responsibly as a reproducing church, we need to reduce (as we have begun the process of already) the amount of our catalyst operations from 40% to 20%. Many of those changes happened earlier this fiscal year, and we are already seeing the efficiencies that result when we start to think in this way.
- 10% - New Endeavors: In the spirit of helping even more people find their way back to God, every year for the past 19 years Community has been committed to reproducing ? ministries, celebration services, and campuses. In years past, with just one or two campuses in place, it was pretty easy for all of us to all decide how monies would be budgeted and allocated for new endeavors. But grow to nine locations without a 70/20/10 model in place, and it gets increasingly difficult to remain missional about new endeavors with so many good yet potentially competing interests for budget dollars. We believe that by allocating 10% of all annual offerings to new endeavors, we will be in a better position to reproduce in new endeavors responsibly.
We estimate that it will take us the next two fiscal years to effectively work into our new 70/20/10 model, but we are definitely heading in the right direction and have already made considerable progress in budgeting for this next fiscal year. Thank you for joining with us to accomplish this task.