St. Mark's 2010 Stewardship Campaign:

Our First Step Into the Future

To Our St. Mark's Family, This Stewardship letter is a wrap of all the sermons, discussions and presentations we have made in the past month.  It is also our first step into the future.

Most of you know that the Finance Committee and the Vestry recently asked the members of St. Mark’s if we are still committed to having a full time Priest.  We want to let you know that the majority of the respondents to the question indicate that we still want a full time Priest at St. Mark’s. 

Given this commitment, we must work on increasing the income to pay for the everyday expenses of running the church with a full time minister.  We can no longer rely on a decreasing endowment to cover these expenses. We also want to remind you of the importance of filling in a pledge card with your pledge for next year.  That pledge card is what we use to determine the pledged income for our budget preparation.  If a pledge card is not filled out, and money is placed in the offering plate each week, we cannot include that amount in our budget preparation process.

 We also want to let you all know that the pledge card is not a binding agreement.  You need only contact the Finance Chair or the treasurer if circumstances change and your income rises or falls and you need to change the amount of your pledge. 

The budget preparation will be extremely important this year as we plan our way forward.  We will be adding a line item for fundraising, and work on paring our expenses where we can.  We must all work together if we want to have St. Mark’s available to meet our needs now and in the future.  None of us wants to think about the possibility of St. Mark’s not being available to us, so we must diligently work to ensure that our parish family will be spiritually and financially ready to continue to carry out God’s Ministry.

A new Mission Statement was presented to the parish at the Stewardship Breakfast. The statement: “St. Mark’s: A community centered in Christ; loving and serving one another through Christ; reaching out into the world by opening doors, minds, hands and hearts with Christ”, is the statement that will guide our parish family into the future.

We encourage each of you to pray about your commitment to St. Mark's in the coming year, and for the future.  Please fill out a pledge and return it to St. Mark’s by December 13, 2009.                                                                                    

Prayerfully Yours, The Vestry and Finance Committee