2022 Stewardship Letter

Dear Families and Friends of St. Andrew’s,

Each November St. Andrew’s targets an area or items around the church that either need to be repaired or need enhancing, in order to make the experience at our church a more rewarding one. Some previous campaigns made improvements to the sanctuary. Others were for furniture and amenities to make meetings more functional and welcoming. There were also appeals for needed structural repairs. Other years, it was to help pay the monthly mortgage payments.

As most are aware there has been significant deterioration of our parking lot by the sewer drain by the York St entrance. We originally talked of fixing it earlier this year but could not find anyone who could do it until the fall. We started our search again in September and finally have a firm quote of $7,345.00 to dig up the sewer, make the repair and replace the asphalt. The project will start in early November and should last about a week. This has to be done before the cold weather hits so we do not have severe damage and have to block that end of the driveway off once winter comes. 

Dealing with the driveway repair is only half of the request that we are making. The past two years has been difficult for many churches and St Andrew’s has been no different. Unlike a lot of other churches we are in a relatively stable financial position for now but there are definite concerns. With declining attendance comes declining revenues. While we continue to pay all of our bills in a timely manner, to the end of October we are down approximately $13,000.00 on our operating budget. We have had larger deficits than this before and managed to recover quite nicely. But we need everybody's participation to make it go away.

In conclusion, we are setting our Stewardship goal at $20,345.00: $7,345.00 for the parking lot and $13,000.00 for the operating shortfall. It is aggressive, but the congregation of St Andrew’s has stepped up in big ways for the church in the past and we are sure it will continue to do so in future.

Yours in Christ,

Bob Puffer, Church Treasurer