We are gearing up for our annual parish stewardship talk, which means we have prepared pie charts of last (fiscal) year’s finances, so that you can better understand where your money goes and how it funds our mission.
As you can see, nearly every dollar received by the parish comes from Sunday donations or extraordinary donations. The amount we raise from programs, liturgies (like weddings and funerals), and banking interest is nominal.
Regarding expenses, as is typical of most parishes, almost half of our expenses are salaries and benefits for the staff who work here. On top of that, categories like “Administration”, “Insurance”, and “Assessments” are further bureaucratic costs of doing business. The only way to decrease our costs is to decrease salaries by relying on more and more volunteers. But how can we find, for example, 35 hrs./week of volunteer time to manage our Faith Formation programs, or 30 hrs./week to manage our buildings?
Our parishioners have been borderline heroic keeping our parish open, stable, and financially solvent through the COVID shutdowns and subsequent years of rebuilding. However, my impression is that we are now hungry not just to maintain, but to grow. Since the ability of our parish to live out its mission is limited by time and money, a growth in mission will always require either more time or more money from our parishioners, or more parishioners in the pews to give time and money. We need to significantly increase one of those three categories if we want to break free of the status quo. I want to be as transparent as possible about our finances, since this is your parish and your money. If you have any questions, please send them to me (frmoore@assumption.org) or our parish administrator, Michael (michaelr@assumption.org).
Fr. Moore 