“The development of the 2024-2025 budget and the decision to approve a budget that is significantly higher than the current year has been a long and prayerful process.
Last year during my very first session meeting we were presented with the budget from the trustees. This began a very thoughtful process of evaluating not just our spending but also how that aligned with our church’s core values of being faithful disciples, living a life of love and extending that love to our community and the world.
To oversimplify a bit, four main things make up the bulk of our budget for the coming year. The first is staff salaries. We have a staff-focused rather than program-focused ministry approach. We focus on finding the right staff and then releasing them to lead and equip us for the ministry and mission to which God calls us.
The second, smaller part is programming. During the first three months of 2024 the staff went through a planning and evaluation process looking at their plans and ministry through these lenses. That included developing a proposed budget to support that ministry vision. The total amount of that part of the budget was not appreciably different from past years.
In addition to that, the Session and the Trustees together with Andrew Patton and Rob Donaldson began to look at our philosophy of compensation and how we are called to implement that.
Over the past ten years, our staff received cost-of-living increases some years, and other years in which they received bonuses, and still others in which their salaries remained unchanged. We believe that inconsistent support of our staff is not in line with our calling of living out love within our body.
Part of the increase in this year’s budget is a cost-of-living increase for everyone, which we are committed to continuing every year. Also, while we are very conscientious about pay levels, the market has changed over the years. Andrew spent hours evaluating staff member by staff member to make sure that their compensation was appropriate, and part of this increase is to bring greater parity to our various staff positions.
Lastly, looking at our location here in West Lafayette, so close to Purdue, we have long felt a call to reach out to the campus with greater intentionality, particularly international and graduate students. Even before Covid, we believed God was calling us to add a staff person to help us fulfill our calling to that part of the Purdue community. As World Welcome grows, we feel confirmed that the next step is adding a full-time staff member. Funding for that role is included in this budget.
With all of this in mind, we feel God is inviting and challenging us as a whole church and also as individual members to pause and consider what living a life of love means, and how that will reflect itself in the way we generously steward our money, our time, and our abilities.
As Franki shared, for the past year or so, we have had a sense that God was wanting to form a deeper heart of generosity in the Covenant family, supporting both the ministry of the church and its mission in the community and world through the generous giving of our time, our abilities, and our resources. We see this as part of the way God is inviting us to trust Him and to follow Him.”
Lightly edited for clarity.
