What to expect
Town Hall | November 10, 2024 | Immediately following Worship
Town Hall is where you will hear about all of the 2025 Proposed Ministry Budget and information on our Board of Deacons. On this page, get acquainted ahead of time with our Board and the Budget Summary linked below, and read Pastor John Jay’s Budget Companion (aka a long-form narrative of the numbers) so that you can come to Town Hall informed and ready to roll. This meeting is the time set aside to hear questions, offer clarity and dig into the numbers and proposals.
If you are a member of First Baptist Church of Pasadena and want to participate in these meetings, please read through the entirety of this page. If you aren’t a member, this page might still be helpful to see a little more about the process of how things run. Most of your initial questions will be addressed below.
Gratitude Night
November 24, 2024 | 6pm in the Gym
Our church business is shared in the context of worship and a family potluck meal, and we affectionately call this annual meeting: Gratitude Night. It’s a time when we join together as a church community to affirm key recommendations from our standing leadership teams. The main items to consider this year will be the 2025 Ministry Budget and any updates to our leadership Boards, and we embed this business in worship and reflection as we acknowledge God’s faithfulness this past year. The FBCP Choir will lead us in singing, we’ll hear from Board members and pastors, share in communion as a church family, vote on a few business items and enjoy the feast of this pre-Thanksgiving meal. Based on your last name, as you’re able, please bring salad/side (A-G), dessert (H-M), or main dish (N-Z) of about 10 servings to share with your FBCP friends and family. We hope you join us.
BOARD MEMBER NOMINATIONS
Charles Corlett | Jessica Henson | Rich Laski | Judy Sutterlin
Continuing Board Members
Jason Ellis | Saskia Pallais | Brian Young
DEACON BOARD OFFICERS
Moderator | Jason Ellis
The Moderator oversees the Board, consults with the Lead Pastor and Vice Moderator in setting the priorities for the year, and runs our meetings.
Vice-Moderator | Saskia Pallais
The Vice Moderator is a partner to the work of the Moderator, offering support and running meetings in the absence of the Moderator. The Vice Moderator is consulted on planning and agenda setting.
Clerk | Judy Sutterlin
The Clerk helps us with meeting minutes as well as official membership records in our Book of Life (fancy name for our membership roll).
Treasurer | Rich Laski
The Treasurer is a key leadership role, serving as the liaison between the staff offices and the congregation on our financial health. The Treasurer interprets the fiscal picture to our Board in ways that allow us to make informed and timely decisions.
2025 Ministry Budget
You can use the link below to see our proposed Ministry Budget for fiscal year 2025. This is in summary form, and expanded budget details are available for those who would like to see deeper into the numbers. We strongly recommend you read the budget companion linked below. This is a narrative of our process and priorities, allowing everyone a transparent view of the vision behind the numbers.
2025 Budget Companion
Given the fact that these numbers represent a story we are telling, I want to share some thoughts about how we arrived where we did with our planning. We will discuss this budget and other leadership news at our upcoming Town Hall on Sunday, November 10th, and then vote on our budget and leadership plans at Gratitude Night on November 24th at 6pm. On this page above you can find links to both a 2025 Budget Summary and a Detailed Budget. These will also be available as hard copies at Town Hall. Now onto the details, stories and joys of our budget process…
The TL;DR version
We are doing really well financially. Good cash reserves, great giving trends, solid widespread generosity throughout the community, wise use of funds by staff and leadership, thoughtful increases in our budget planning for 2025 given the health we experienced in 2024.
We are increasing our budget from $1,314,300 from 2024 to $1,546,100 in 2025!
We budgeted this with a deficit of ($38,100) projected revenue to expenses. This continues the trend of decreasing budget deficits, which each year have turned into revenue surpluses.
We anticipate finishing fiscal year 2024 with a revenue surplus that can more than cover the projected budget deficit.
Our financial giving is trending higher than we budgeted this year. That trend is only increasing month to month.
Our building revenues are higher than we anticipated for 2024, much of that in the parking garage.
Our operating expenses for 2024 are under budget, but some of that is being understaffed which we plan to remedy in 2025.
We are increasing our staff in the budget for 2025, adding around 1.5 new positions to support the needs of our church.
We are adding two new International Missions partners to our Missions budget this year! One is replacing a retiring partner, and the other is moving us from 4 to 5 IM partners on receiving monthly support. You can read about those new partners by clicking here for Faye Yarbrough and here for Eliberto & Molly Juárez.
We completely eliminated filming as a revenue source, so any film revenue will go to deferred maintenance rather than budget expenses.
The Foundation is contributing $60k to our revenue for 2025 to support these staffing increases, with the goal of rolling those costs into our budget in 2026.
We are able to increase our budget for most ministry categories, especially youth and spiritual formation.
Town Hall is November 10th immediately after church. We discuss the budget and planning at this meeting.
Gratitude Night is November 24th at 6pm. We vote to accept the budget and leadership recommendations at this meeting.
All are welcome at these meetings. Only members of the church vote on the recommendations for budget and leadership.
If you have been considering membership, email me at johnjay@fbcpasadena.com to get that process going.
Longer version
This has been an encouraging year for our church community. We have seen our congregation growing in all kinds of ways. This alone is cause for celebration and gratitude, especially since we are thriving despite being in a cultural time of religious decline and polarized conflict. I believe that these cross pressures serve to clarify who we are rather than threaten it. I anticipate this clarity will only deepen as we move into 2025 and all that it will call forth from our people. Our generosity is a function of our underlying conviction that God’s abundance exists within each of us and is outwardly expressed in trust and full participation in our life together. Said another way: we show up for one another and believe in the healing power of our community, investing our resources of time, money, and presence to nurture health and sustainability for our church.
We have had a steady trend of growth over the last couple of years. This is resulting in increased financial generosity and increasing ministry needs. In order to best minister while growing, we need to expand our leadership capacity. We have been in the process of realigning our staff while also creating new roles to balance the ministry priorities into the future. We continue to seek our next Family Pastor, grateful to Lindsay and Mary for straddling multiple responsibilities in the short term. Lindsay has been slowly shifting to her new role as Pastor of Spiritual Formation, an area of ministry that is receiving more funding this year in response to our community needs. We are grateful to Mary for her willingness to help us maintain stability in our Family Ministries while we search for our next full time staff member. The 2025 budget for staffing also anticipates the need for more leadership around our local partnerships and missions work, as well as the need for more administrative capacity to support our growing ministries and membership.
As stated above, we are increasing our overall budget by around 17% from 2024 to 2025. If you have been around a while, you might notice that this growth has been steady and sustainable year to year. Our budget has grown by 68% over the last six years, all while navigating covid, becoming inclusive, and ministering through increased cultural polarization and fracture. I am really proud of our church community. A budget is mainly a spending plan, responsive to the needs of the moment. So as I notice a steady increase in our budget needs across these last several years, I see a pattern of health and generosity feeding back into one another. We have stayed clear about how God has called us to organize ourselves and care for one another. We have clarified who can belong to our community without hedging or withholding. And we continue to embrace the unique vision God has given us to be a community of moral formation shaped by the presence of Christ in our collective body. If the church is the constitution of Christ’s body in the world, then we might understand our fiscal health as a sign of deeper health and vitality in our body. So what do we DO with this vitality??? Glad you asked.
Speaking from the edge of my own discernment as your pastor, I sense that we are turning a corner together as a church. For years now we have been refining our sense of identity in the midst of a shifting Christian landscape. As we reflected in our listening circles a few weeks back, we heard a lot of desire for more outward facing ministry. Knowing who we are as a church, we are compelled to engage more purposefully within our city and neighborhoods as outgrowths of our Christian practice. We plan to finalize our staffing structure through the first half of 2025 to create leadership stability heading into the summer, at which time I will be taking my sabbatical (more on that as we get closer!). In the Fall of 2025 I anticipate a palpable expansion of our ministry practices, both in depth and reach. We will be building out ways to enter into formative relationships with one another as well as opportunities to minister with one another for the sake of our surrounding neighborhoods. We are planning, staffing, budgeting and praying about this emerging vision. As always, we are staying curious about how the future unfolds and remain open to unforeseen shifts and opportunities.
One of the blessings of a growing budget is a growing Missions focus. We are proposing the addition of a fifth International Missions partner this year, which brings us from four to five receiving ongoing support from our church. Thanks to Judy and Lindsay for their work on this part of our budget. We continue to find creative ways to use our building as a path toward greater mission work through space partnerships. If you dig into the budget detail, you will see these as “room donation” on the expense side of things.
Some other changes to note in the details. We are increasing our Leadership Development section, which the Deacons prioritized as a way to keep our staff healthy and growing. We have also introduced a line for “sabbatical reserve” to prepare for both my sabbatical and our other ministerial staff in the years ahead. The Worship section has a newly included line for discretionary use, where we shifted an unused line from Personnel into a more flexible category so our worship leadership can explore ways to expand our liturgical expression.
We have split a previous grouping into two new categories to track under “Community Formation” and “Spiritual Formation.” We attached the names of the ministers overseeing these items as a way to reflect how each is functioning in our system. Community Formation represents the various ways we gather in large and smaller groups to strengthen our relational bonds. Spiritual Formation represents those gatherings and events that function to develop our spiritual and emotional lives. Spiritual Formation is an area of growth for us in this season, so we are also including a discretionary line so Lindsay has some flexibility in how these ministries get built out. The Youth budget is seeing a sizable increase, which is in line with the growth we have had in that ministry. A portion of the expenses for our youth are related to food for their regular gatherings on Sunday and during the week. We believe that eating together is a core practice for our youth, which is reflected in key transformative moments in Scripture. Our youth program has also grown large enough to shift how camps can happen, which you can see in that line increasing. As mentioned above, the Personnel category is increasing due to added positions, compensation adjustments, and cost of living adjustments. The Deacons have also added Disability and basic Life Insurance to the benefits package for our qualifying staff. Operation Expenses, Building/Grounds and Other Expenses all have increases related to higher market costs.
Process
In order to create this budget, we spend a couple of months behind the scenes gathering information, sharing plans, and analyzing trends. After the staff team do their internal planning and preparations, representatives from our Deacon Board and staff meet several times to flesh out the numbers. We budget against actual run rates for the fiscal year, with a nifty formula where we take the current set of actual months (January-August 2024), and then the last months from the previous year (September-December 2023), giving a tight estimate of actual trends. We dive into the data a little bit here to make sure we are understanding giving patterns, changes in membership, one time gifts vs recurring giving, and then prayerfully place a number that closely matches what we believe will happen in tithes and offerings. This is something like predicting the weather and having lots of faith, but also we know our people and trust our community’s generosity to be sturdy. We have seen a noticeable increase in giving this year, which matches the overall participatory energy of our community. This is an overflow of our general community health, and we are grateful for your generosity and God’s sustaining Spirit. Next we move to other revenue, like building rentals and the parking garage. We continue to be proud and grateful for our building revenue, a reliable source of funding that is managed well by our staff and deacons. Once again our parking garage partnership has taken in more money than budgeted, and even though we are budgeting an increase in revenue for 2025, we still believe that it is a conservative estimate and revenue will be higher than the projected $400k. The Deacons plan to move all revenue above $400k into a deferred maintenance fund for the garage so we are prepared for ongoing repair expenses.
For expenses we look at all of our fixed costs first, like utilities and standing missions commitments, then we go to each ministry area in collaboration with the pastoral team to fill in the picture. We adjust for inflation where applicable, identify and isolate unexpected spikes in spending that are one-time events, and see where the current budget is out of alignment with actual spending. You may notice that a large percentage of the budget is allocated in personnel and building costs. While we group personnel costs all in one category, we should also consider how the payroll costs are the lifeblood for ministry leadership across the community, so that each staff member is part of the costs related to specific ministry areas, like worship, formation or children. Last year we shifted all part-time workers and what used to be contract employees into personnel per local regulations, so those costs have moved out of various ministry categories (ie nursery workers and professional band members). We also seek to pay our part-time and full-time workers a fair wage in a high cost of living market. This aligns with our values, helps us retain strong leaders, and hedges against overwork and burnout. We have found that pastoral and staff health have a direct relationship to congregational health. We are grateful for how we support our staff in our budget and for the leadership they provide for our church community.
Our staff are not simply leaders, we are also community members who find joy in practicing financial generosity alongside all of you. Just like many of you, my own family pauses a few times a year to consider how we are contributing to this church. Giving is a practice, and like any meaningful practice, it is important to reflect and respond as life changes. Some of you are in a point in life where you feel an invitation to expand your generosity. Maybe you got a promotion or received an inheritance. Maybe you sold a large asset or bought a bunch of Nvidia stock a few years back! Some of you might need to shift your giving in response to job loss, industry trends, medical bills, or a disruption to your family structure. There is no definitive formula for financial generosity. I always tell folks to really consider what kind of practice brings them joy. I myself find that my trust in God is tied to my open-handed approach to giving. I find generosity to be an antidote to fear and anxiety. The posture of your heart is crucial when practicing generosity. There are various ways you can give, from texting from your phone to setting up recurring giving to dropping loose cash in the offering plate on Sundays. We outline our giving practices at fbcpasadena.com/giving and each time we invite one another into offering in our weekly worship gatherings. We are in a unique place as a faith community, able to dream and plan with faith that God will continue to provide. The most meaningful provision God gives us is one another, so remember that you are surrounded by friends practicing generosity through their own lives and values. Understand that you are the gift God is giving to the world, nurtured in your spirit by this church community. Truly, we would be…
Less without you,
Pastor John Jay in partnership with the Staff and Board of Deacons