Our past church budgeting has a few limitations. We use the previous year’s budgeting figures and just increase them. We often do not know how the money spent benefits different purposes of the church. Though this is a caricature, the need for a new way of budgetting is called for.
The new budget, of course, hopes to change previous shortcomings. Applying principles from zero-based budgeting where budgeted items will have to be justified by ministries, as well as narrative budgeting to increase financial transparency in the church about how and where people’s monetary gifts are being put to use. The “face-lifted” budget hopes to improve on what the previous budget was not able to achieve.
While we have new requirements for our budgeting process, we also want to empower our ministry leaders to better guide their ministries based on how God leads them. The ministry leaders will then have the flexibility in guiding the finances, especially when each dollar sets out to achieve different aims for God.
Justin Lim gave a briefing to equip all pastors, financial committee members, and ministry heads on the new budgetting process.
While we are hopeful of the fruits of the new process, we also understand that any new project will meet with teething problems and this, at the initial stage, may prove to be challenging. Do pray along with us as we attempt to revamp our church’s budgeting process. – Justin Lim