The State of the Church 2025

The church is more than a building or weekly gathering—it's a living community where every believer plays a vital role. Using Paul's metaphor of the body, we see that just as each body part is essential, every church member has unique gifts that contribute to the whole. No one is insignificant, and everyone is interdependent. True church membership means moving beyond attendance to active participation, supporting ministries, and serving the community. When we embrace our role as part of the body of Christ, we strengthen the entire church and become more effective in serving God's purposes in the world.

Transcript

We're going to be talking a lot about facts and figures today. I want us to start off with reading some scripture because I do believe that the church is more than just a building. And oftentimes we think that church is one hour a week on Sunday morning. For those of us who go to Sunday school, it's two hours a week. But friends, God has called us to be something that is different than a building.

We are a group of people that are called to make a difference in the world. So let's read Scripture together. Coming from the book of First Corinthians, chapter 12, verses 12 through 27. If you don't have your Bible with you, you follow along on the screen. Here is the word of the Lord for us today.

Verse 12 says, Just as a body, though one has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one spirit so as to form one body, whether we were Jews or Gentile, slave or free, and we were all given the one spirit to drink. Even so, the body is not made up of one part, but many. Now, if the foot should say, because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body, it would not for that reason stop being a part of the body. And if the ear should say, because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body, it would not for that reason stop being a part of the body.

If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact, God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If there were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts but one body.

The eye cannot say to the hand, I don't need you, and the head cannot say to the feet, I don't need you. On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable, we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it.

If one part is honored, every part rejoices with it. Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you Has a part of it is a part of it.

So I got to do a lot of research over the last couple of weeks as we've been preparing for charge conference and as we've been preparing for worship today. And I hope that you guys are excited about charts and graphs, because that's what you're getting. So for those of you who don't know, we began our church, it was October 28th of 2018. So we are a relatively new church start. For those of you who did not know that, we are just eight years old.

Is that right? I don't do math. Seven. That's what I said. Seven.

In our eighth year. Right? We are in our eighth year. Thank you, Jeff. So we are in our eighth year.

And here in 2025, we have seen for the first time a demographic shift that we've not seen since COVID And we'll talk a little bit more about that this year today. So I want to talk a little bit about our programming ministries. I want to show you our budget. This is what our programming budget looks like. So the programming budget consists of anything that we do as a church.

So it's children's ministry, it's you ministry, it's small group. And this is how much money we spend. You can see our total. And I've got a laser pointer here. So, yeah, so this is roughly what we spent in 2025, 14,000 ish dollars on what we do to support the ministries of our church.

The majority of that you can see, went to worship. And that means that all of the bread that we buy, every donut we've purchased, the coffee, the everything that we use in this side of the building, our paper towels that we need for washing our hands when we're done, all of that falls under worship. It also includes the backing tracks that we purchase. It includes cords and cables, all of the things that we need to make sure that Sunday morning runs. Well, the second biggest expense, if you'll notice, is our young people.

Because as we all know, once we start having children. Right. But the great news is this money was an investment. The youth ministry budget that we see here, the vast majority of those dollars went to go to sending our young people to Youth Force. And we'll talk a little bit more about that.

So if you did not know this, we in this tiny little church have one of the most gifted and talented children's ministry programs in the entire state of Oklahoma. I believe that fully. I would put our children's ministry up against any larger church's children's ministry any day of the week, because I have that much faith in Ms. Amanda. And if you have not spent any time with Ms. Amanda, she is a gift to our church. And I mean that in incredible, incredible ways.

That is absolutely worth a clap. So many of you don't know this, but Ms. Amanda also has a pretty great squad of volunteers. Some of you are on that squad. I will tell you, if it's been a while since you've been back in the children's ministry and you are one of her volunteers, please jump back in there and go serve our children. It is fantastic.

If you, over the last 12 months, have been a volunteer in our children's ministry, would you just raise a hand?

Right. Thank you, Gloria. There are other people who are currently back there, and I know that Mr. Frank, who is not here today, is one of the most dedicated children's ministry volunteers that we have, and the kids love him. So thank you so much for your service. Thank you for everybody.

This should show you the need that we have. We have a lot of young children, and depending on the week, there might be zero or there might be 12. We don't know. But we always need all hands on deck when possible. So please, if you've been a volunteer over the last few years and you've not been back there, volunteer to sign up and be a part of it again.

All right? While we are still not regularly seeing as many children as we did before the pandemic, our children's ministry has become more vibrant. We have split into two areas that are age appropriate for our young people. With this secondary space, Ms. Amanda has been able to expand to curriculum that fits them well. If you did not know this, Ms. Amanda is certified in early childhood education.

She has a master's and is incredible at equipping teachers to meet the needs of kids of very specific ages. And she is amazing.

Even though we've seen less regular children this year, we've seen more individual children than we ever have in our youth ministry or in our children's ministry. So every week, she offers biblical foundational Christian lessons, videos that support those lessons, crafts, and even worship and dance in our children's ministry. And I'm very proud of the fact that some of our adults are helping to volunteer in that area. Our youth have also volunteered in that area. And we could not have a vibrant children's ministry without you.

So please be involved. So next, let's talk about our young people that are youth aged. You guys, this is a pretty good representation today. We had to add a Chair on the row here. Not just that, but we have a few scattered around the rest of the room.

Our youth ministry continues to grow. We've set records in attendance multiple times in 2025. Our average last year of young people that came to our church on Wednesday night programming, Our average was 15. Our average in 2025 has jumped to 17.9. So here's some more numbers.

The more numbers for that is that is a growth of 19.3% over the last year. That's a big deal. This year, we brought more students to Youth Force than we've ever done. And what's crazy is Youth Forest was two miles away from us this year, and we had churches from St. Luke's to Altus to some other pretty large churches. And out of the hundred and let's say 150 to 170 ish that we brought to Youth Force or that were at Youth Force Community, Brookside was the third largest church in participation.

That's a big deal, guys.

So that includes the church that hosted us. We brought more kids than they did. So that's a big deal. Last week, you might have been here, and we saw two of our young seniors join our church. So that was also a big deal.

So, and I will tell you, currently we're going through confirmation, which is a way that our young people, especially if they've been baptized when they were infants or children, it's an opportunity for them to say yes to their baptism and to accept their call into ministries in whatever aspect that looks like. It doesn't necessarily mean they're going to become pastors. It means, yes, I am a follower of Jesus and I'm going to serve the world as Jesus has called me to. So through confirmation, young people get to do that. But when you're 18, you have a decision that you can make and you can join the church on your own.

Both of these young men are 18, and they said, you know what? I don't want to wait until we're done with confirmation. I want to do it now. And that, to me, is beautiful Sunday School. So we continue to see pretty decent Sunday school attendance each week.

Our youth Sunday School is led by Price Vargas. If you don't know Price, he is fantastic. Our kids love him. And I don't know why.

He just is. It's something. It's something. He very much loves our kids, but doesn't treat them like he loves them. And for some reason, that works.

So not only do we have a youth Sunday school class every single Sunday, but we have Two adult Sunday school classes. One that's led by Chuck and Andrea on this side, and then one that's led right. Right now by Alan Wallace. All of our adults who have invested in Sunday school class are wise. They're fun, and then they're price.

So there's that when it comes to small groups. So we have done something over the last year that we have not done before. We have shifted all of our budgetary dollars away from our small group. And because this is something that's external to the church, we don't want to use the church dollars to fund it. And.

And so we basically have turned it into a weekly potluck where everybody brings their own food, they bring their own wine or drinks or waters or whatever, and we have a great, great time together just spending time in fellowship. We shifted from Kim and Kyle's house because they moved to Kansas, right? Yeah, it's pretty much in Kansas. Barnesville. Yeah.

Same, same. Anyway, so we have shifted from their house regularly to my house, which is just a couple blocks away. And luckily our house is a little bit bigger because we have seen a growth. Oftentimes we have between 10 and 15, just about every week. But we've had more than 24 in my house, which gets a little crowded at times.

But it is so much fun on Thursday nights. Again, come and see. So we usually do potluck. Everybody brings their own favorite thing. It's pretty easy.

But let's talk about worship this year. So this year, we saw a shift in our worship from paying somebody to lead our worship team to all volunteer led. So that means Kim and Debbie have taken up a huge responsibility in choosing the music and making sure that they're rehearsing with our band members. It is a big, big deal. We are so thankful for their leadership and the amazing volunteers that we have.

And it's not just our worship team that's on the stage, but oftentimes it's a lot of people in the back that you don't see. And Harry, Isaac, Levi helps back there. Molly does an incredible job every single week making sure that people online can see us and hear us. Bill is also not here, but he. Yes, we've got incredible vocalists.

Jody, Valerie, Nicole, Alyssa, Kim. We could not be where we are without Kyle on the drums with Debbie's guitar or John on the piano, Guys. And we always need more help. This year, we lost Joshua. He's no longer coming to our church.

He's going with his family to a different church because he thought his family was important or Something. And so we need someone to replace him on the bass. So if you know somebody who plays the bass guitar, we always could use an electric guitar. If you're a screamer vocalist, we would love to hear that too. So there's always a room, a place for you on our stage or as a part of our worship team.

Because of these great changes made in 2024, leading up to 2025, we have really been able to save some money as a church without having a paid worship leader. We are finally making headway on making sure our finances reflect the kind of church that we want to be. So this year, we also have to report on the fact that we have more lay servants as a part of our church than ever before. And that's mostly because we have a new family that joined our church just a couple weeks ago. So the Harlan family.

Would you give us a wave? Carrie, we saw you on. This is Carrie, who was the very first person to ever join our church via FaceTime. So Carrie and Kristen and Chandler are all in the lay ministry programs in our conference. Kristin, will you tell everybody what your role is for the conference?

I'm the annual conference director of lay servant ministry. Yeah. All right. Yeah. So it's a very long name, and I never remember it, but we are thankful that we have a representative, another representative from our congregation that is on the conference level speaking to the lay ministries of the church.

If you don't know anybody, not know what lay ministries are, it's okay. Raise your hand. Don't be ashamed. Lay ministry is basically any person who is not a paid clergy member is a lay person in the church. So that's all of you.

If you're not being paid to be here, that's all of you. God has called all of us to be in ministry wherever we are. And that doesn't necessarily mean it's paid ministry. It can be. It doesn't have to be.

But God is inviting very specific people who have gifts and talents to speak in front of others to do that. And there's three right here. Not just to mention those three, but. But also we have Erica and we have Debbie Wallace, are all in the lay ministry program of our church. We have four certified lay servants, and then we have Kristin is a lay speaker.

So all of this language is really, really cool. It means that they have been trained to go fill pulpits, they have been trained to deliver sermons, They've been trained to lead in worship. That is a big thing. And. And not very many churches have lay ministers or lay servants.

And lay speakers on their. As a part of their congregation. And we have so many here. It's an incredible blessing so that, guys, thank you for your work on all that. Do what?

So you passed your.

Right. Okay, so I have to announce it like it was when I did the work, but you're moving that direction, so. Right. Already a lay servant. Okay, then I've got to fix some things here.

No worries. It's fine. But here's the thing that has shifted this year. I talked about the demographics that we've not seen since COVID Here's what they are. This is our average attendance by year.

Okay? This is average attendance. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. This is our. This is why I got confused with eight years.

So when we started in 2018, that's where we were. That was our average, which means that oftentimes we had 20 and we had 70. Right. So average is the average number. And these numbers are as accurate as I can possibly be with the statistics that we have.

44 jumped up the next year, growing. That looks really good, right? And then we all know what happened between 2019, 2020. There were weeks in our church in 2020 where there was six of us, where there were eight of us leading worship online. I pray to God we never have to do that again.

But in the midst of some of the most demanding and troubling parts of our church's history, we didn't close our doors. And there were tons of churches, not just in Oklahoma, but all around the country that closed their doors during the pandemic and never reopened them again.

So you can see here the numbers. Right? 21. Then we start shooting up. 31, 36, 48, 55 last year, and then that's where we are today.

This is the first time since COVID we've seen a decrease in our numbers. Now, it's not terrible. It's not a sign of something awful. I'm attributing it to two different things. Last year, we had an opportunity to do an outdoor worship service for Easter.

We've done that for years and years and years. That kind of pads our numbers a little bit. We have between 20 and 50, usually around 35 is our average out there. That's 35 that we just didn't have because we couldn't have worship out there because of the rain and the gross. Also last year, we did a really big push to get 100 people in worship, and we had 119.

Right. We have not done that this year. Maybe we can do it between now and the end of the year, which will boost those numbers up a little bit. But those two things, I think, are the things that have caused us to go down. It is important church.

If we want to prove to the conference and to our denomination that we are a church that wants to exist, that wants to be here for our community, then we have to be here. We have to. So I encourage you, if you are a once a month or maybe this year, bump it up to twice a month. Let's make a commitment to be a little bit better this year than we were last year so we don't have any more of these downward trended numbers. Okay.

Yes, question. Yes.

So I will tell you this. The numbers that we are showing today are as best as I can get them because we are in November. This is not a December 31st report. Right. This is not January 1st to December 31st.

We are doing our numbers here based on October. Sorry, November 1st through October 31st. So it's not quite the same, but it's similar. Right. You'll see this later on when we talk about our budget numbers.

I'm going to. I can't wait for you to see that. So you can tell that we are not done with our year yet. And so some of These numbers reflect January 1st to where we are now, and some of them reflect November 1st through October 31st. So you'll have to give me a little bit of grace on that.

So thank you. That's a really good question. This number is. These are the same numbers that I presented at Charge Conference last. Excuse me.

Last year. So these are numbers that are November 1st through October 31st? Yes, sir. Does this account for online? No, no, no, no.

I don't ever count online anything because I. Friends, I love you. Hear me when I say this. I don't want to pat our numbers or skew them in any way. Our conference has a multiplier and they say every time that you.

You can weekly check your numbers and you add a multiplier. So 1.3, I think. 1.2. Jeff doesn't care either. Right?

So we don't do that. Since the time that we began, I was reporting all of our numbers to a group in our denomination called the New Faith Communities Committee. Every time the United Methodist Church plants a new church, we have to tell them the dollars that we get and the number of people who are in our seats. And then we tell everybody how many people we had worshiping online. We multiply that by 1.3 and then we give them those Numbers dumb.

I just don't like it. And so I never gave them a multiplier. I always gave them the actual Facebook numbers that we were showing. Now we do both Facebook and YouTube live every week. So you can see us on those two locations and we just add those numbers together and we don't add a multiplier.

Those are our numbers. You'll shoot. We'll see those later on. But these are in person only numbers. So.

So that's a good question. Yes, ma'. Am.

No, this is a count every single week. So Erica counts us every week. It's a good question. So if you don't sign in, you should, because it helps us do better at tracking. But just know that we rely on counting heads every single week.

So there you go. Any other questions before we move to the next thing this means? So between 55.6 and 52.5, we are down 5.5% year over year. I don't like it. Let's not do that again for 26.

Okay. So that means it relies on all of us to invite friends to tell people about our church. And you'll see later on some things that we can be excited about, the things that we should be telling other people about. Okay, new members. So over the last couple of years, we have seen that this is what's weird.

We did not in 2018. We started in October 2018, but we did not start accepting membership until the middle of 2019. I believe it was June. And we had our very first member, which was Adrienne James, was the very first member of our church. And she set a record because in that first year, we had 20 new people join our church.

Joining is different than attending. Just so we're aware, joining means you agree that you want to support the ministries of our church, that you're going to be faithful to our church, and that you would potentially be open to serving on committees and finding ways to dive deeper into ministry in our church. As a regular attender, you can be as flexible as you want and all that. But we hope that becoming a member means something deeper. Right, so here are the numbers.

21st year, drop down to 5, then 4, then up to 22. Right? So again, you can see that was 2020, 2021. We still were not open all the time, right? We were open, then closed, then open for a month and closed for two months.

Like it was weird. But then you can see in 2022, our numbers dropped back up. So we had 22. We had 16, 15, 7 so far this year. But we're going to change that because we have four new members that are joining after worship today.

So that is our trend. Right?

Don't wait for me to remind you to join our church if you want to join our church. Because I am one of those guys. I don't like to be pushy, okay? There are times I like to be. At times I like to be pushy.

But if you have thought about joining our church and you've not done it, just say, matt, you know what? Tell me more. And I'd be glad to tell you any information you want to know. You'll see at the end of worship. It's not.

We don't ask you for your blood type. We don't need your checking account ledger. We just want you to serve your church in the kingdom of God. That's why we have our church. So to join the church officially you have to be an adult, so 18.

But you as a family can join and your child will then have to go through confirmation to become a full fledged member before the they can. Yes, she will be a full fledged member with no stipulations. So very good. All right, so we have to talk a little bit about the space that we're in. So we recognize that this is community Brookside.

We are the United Methodist Church in Brookside, but we also rent the space next door that we call Brookside Collective. So Brookside Collective is a great way for us to increase the footprint of our church so that we can have Sunday school classes, we can have education for young people and adults, and then we have our offices over there. Initially, when we first started, we didn't know what to expect. And so we rented this 3,600 square foot space and immediately we outgrew it. Right again.

That was before COVID One of the last Sundays before 2020, we had two baptisms. It was Neo got baptized and Justin Giddens, who was an adult at that time, got baptized. And we had 83 people in here and it was crowded and it was wonderful and, and it felt alive. And then two weeks later, the world shut down. Right.

So we were growing, growing, growing. And then what are we going to do? Well, we have to rent some more space. And it just so happened that we were able to rent the space next door. It was everything we needed broken up already for Sunday school spaces.

We can move our office there and have all of our children's ministries in this room or in the rooms back there and make everything congruent. And then we can have education on the Other side. And so we rented that space. We took possession March 1st of 2020, and then 15 days later, the world shut down. So we were more than doubling our rent to take over that extra space.

And then we immediately dropped to eight people coming to worship on Sundays. It was tough, but we made it work this year because we decided we can't just have the space that we use one day a week or, you know, just for my office and Erica's office. And at the time, we had a worship director over there. We can't just use all that extra 3,600 square feet for them. We've got to do something different.

And so we decided we would open Brookside's first co working space, Brookside's first and only co working space with Brookside Collective. And this year we received $43,241.64 in rent. That helps us offset the amount of money that we spend next door. We also have Josh's Snow Shack, which, if you've been out here in the summer, you've been able to experience some of their delicious snow cones. And the rental that we received from both Josh's Snow Shack and the rent that we get from the office tenants next door paid for 72.43% of our rent for that side.

So while it does not provide for its own existence, 72% of the rent being paid by tenants that aren't us is a good deal. Right? So it helps us offset our costs and helps us to be able to spend church dollars on church things rather than just space. Overall, the income that we receive pays for almost 40% of our total expenses for when it comes to rent. Do you see how much money we spend a year on rent?

That's crazy, right? There are churches who own tens of thousands of square feet that don't pay this amount, but they also aren't in Brookside. So you can see this is what we pay for the church side. And then this back here is what we spend for the other space. So we more than doubled our rent when we purchased or when we got access to the other space.

This is expenses for what we do over there. So we provide snacks and copying paper, and we pay for utilities next door. Like, everybody has free WI Fi. We have drinks in the refrigerator. We had to buy things like pots and pans.

No, we didn't. It was like dishes and forks and knives and things like that. So we have coffee that we put in over there. That's about $9,000 a year on expenses. Utilities between both spaces.

Is 16,800. So this is office supplies that we use for our church. That's mailers, that's staples, and all the things that we use. So this is a complete breakdown of what we spend to make church function. Okay, so let's talk about how many people we reached last year.

This is an incredible number for the size of church that we have. Okay. And that's not telling you the whole picture. The number of people that our church have served this year has gone up quite a bit. If you remember, we ended up doing our Easter egg hunt and our barbecue on the same day this year.

It was a change that we weren't really excited to make because we knew the weekend was going to be terribly rainy. But I think it worked out so well that the staff came together and we said, you know what, we should do that every year because it increased the size of our guests. Right. So we had a great time. We fed a little over 100 more people than we've ever fed for our barbecue dinner.

And I think that's a result of having the Easter egg hunt on the same day. This year we have attracted many new followers to our social media pages and to our podcast. Did you know we do a podcast? Probably not. We do a podcast every week.

I take every week's sermon and then upload it to Buzzsprout, which is our hoster, and they send it out to Spotify, to YouTube, and to Apple Music. So we have a podcast that's basically our sermon shorts. We've done some special events where we have done interviews with Jeff James. We've done interviews with former staff members with other church planters. It's fun.

Okay. So we have started posting with more regularity video content to Facebook, to Instagram, to YouTube. And this year we picked up TikTok because we're that cool. So anyway, the number that you don't see here, you can see the breakdown. Whoop, wrong button.

You can see the breakdown here of how many people we reached just via our live videos. So this is from our Sunday morning worship service. That's just Facebook and YouTube on our videos that we post every week. Okay. Boohaha.

We reached about 13,000 people last year. We don't know for sure. It's always somewhere between ten and a million. I don't know. But we always take a rough guess here.

Guess. Sunday school. We have an actual Sunday school attendance of 589. That is for all of our. Oh my gosh, it's already really late.

Sorry. I'm getting so excited about these numbers. But you can see our actual numbers of people in Sunday school 589. And then this is a total number of people that we have had come to worship with us every Sunday. For the last year we've had 2,142 people walk through our front door.

That's you, that's friends, that's neighbors, that's everybody who came to our church. And then you can see our podcast. We served just over a thousand people this year. One of the things you don't see is that TikTok seems to be where we get most of our views now. We had over 80,000 views over the last year.

That's a big deal. So what else? We got to go. Okay, let's talk about finances for a second. This is where.

Bless you. This is where we spent our mission giving dollars over the last year. So this does have the Restore Hope gift that you as a church sent out just a couple of weeks ago. So you can see that there. Because that that hit November 2nd.

I thought it was important for us to talk about it today. Boohaha. We spent about $1,300. The marathon. We buy donuts.

That's pretty much it. Thanksgiving meals, you guys did this. That is a. In lieu of cash kind of monetary value and what the church spent kind of combined. You can see how much money we spent just on registration for youth force.

That doesn't cover transportation. That doesn't cover the things that our youth like ate, snack wise, things like that. You can see how much money we spent on our barbecue. I think this year we reached 330ish people for our barbecue. So I think $954 for brisket, for chicken, for all that stuff.

Worth it, right? You can see our Easter egg hunt. We spent just under $1,000. That included bouncy houses, that included all the candy, all the eggs, all of your volunteer hours of stuffing them. We could not do that without you.

You can see the angel tree there. That we made a difference in the lives of the. I think it was 18 people last year or something like that. For our Elliot stuff. Just an update.

Our elevator, Hallelujah. Has been mostly functional for about 12 months. It was December of last year that it finally got fixed. We are still working on the details of our new building that we're going to be moving into. We had an incredible meeting this week where we got to talk about what the inside of that building will look like, how much space we need as a church.

Are we going to be one floor only? Are we going to be two floors? Are we going to have, I don't know, stuff? Right. So we are excited about what that means because we will be spending money on our own place rather than money on rent for a building that we don't own.

So we're hoping that the dollars work out in such a way that the vast majority of the gifts that you bring to our church don't stay in this building, but go to help do the things that the church should be doing. There's no reason that people are going hungry in our state when there are so many strong churches. There is no reason for people to be homeless, Homeless without resources, when we as a church should be supplying some of those things. We can't meet all the needs of all the people. But we are one church among many, right?

And we have to be doing the work of our church.

See here, total budget. Now, this is going to be. Oh, sorry, you should see this. These are the number of hours that we spent in volunteerism. So every person who helped pick up, offering, and help serve communion, that is all a part of this.

This is also a part of the volunteer hours for every event that we've done outside of the church as well. So here is our pledged giving that we have received. Right. When we talk about the importance of these cards, you can see here what it looks like. And again, nobody knows what's happening in 2021 because 2020 was such a mess.

The pledges that we got here in 2020 were actually pledges that we got in November of 2019 for what was expected to be 2020. Right. So, yeah, we were excited about the state of the church. It's growing. It's great.

It's wonderful. It's heading the right direction. And then over the next year, in the next November, November 2020, we don't know if we're going to exist in 2021. So in November of 2020, it affects what it looks like. Right.

So you can see every single year, we've received an uptick of those planned giving numbers. So we're hoping that that continues on in 2026 too, that you believe enough in your church that you will help us to make sure that our budget is met. So this is the actual received giving. Right. So I'm going to show you a graph in a minute that shows how much money we spent, how much money was pledged, and how much money we received from those pledged gift dollars, all in one graph.

But this is really interesting to note. You can see here that we have a year of Data that is just missing. If you don't remember this, we were a part of the First Methodist Church downtown when we first started. They did all of our financial reports, they did all of our financial data and all that. And then when they said, hey, you guys are on your own now, boop.

They deleted all of our information before we could even get some of it. So we have a year of received giving that we just can't account for. And that's going to be a part of our data till Jesus comes back because we'll never have it. Okay? But you can see how our received giving has gone every single year.

You as a church have believed more and more in the ministry of our church and it makes a huge difference. So here's our money that we spent year over year. We tried to start off as frugally as possible. And then you can see our spending when we were paying for worship director got kind of out of control, right? Not so much out of control, but we knew we were spending deficit wise.

We had the money in the bank and we were able to do it. We were thankful for the gifts that our, you know, worship directors were to us. But now we are able to do this significantly different. This is what, this is kind of where we are right now. You can see we expected in 2025, we built a budget where we were going to spend $328,000.

We are not even close to that. This is good news. So I want to share this information with you. I'll do it here in a second. So now you can see kind of spending the red line, which we don't want to do, versus what was pledged, which is yellow.

And the income that we received. You can see that every year our pledges were higher than, or, sorry, were lower than the money that you actually gave, which is exactly the way we want to be. We never want people to be like, I'm going to give you $4 million this year and then give $8. That is a big difference. So we don't want that to happen.

So these are good, solid numbers we're working to bring. And again, this, this number that you're seeing here, this 273,952. That is an estimate for a budget. We will finalize that today after worship. It may be that number.

It may be more, maybe less. But that's based on our spending for 2024 into 25. Okay, so there you go. Here are some things that I want you to be proud of. Church number one, we projected our expenses to be $328,000.

But we've only spent at this point 168,000. You know what that means? We are $78,586 under what we expected to spend. That is great news.

So one of the things you may or may not remember is that we expected to be at a zero dollar balance because we were deficit spending. And we've been deficit spending since day one. Just so we're clear. But the conference, the United Methodist Church gave us a big chunk of money to start. We expected to be at $0 November 1st of this year.

I was looking for other employment. No, I'm just kidding. I wasn't really. But we were afraid that our. $0, that's a big deal when your church hits $0 in the bank.

We have to kill every program. We have to kill every paid staff. We have to do all of it until we can get to self sufficiency. No, killing is. Okay, well, sorry.

Yes, there have been some days where I'm sure you guys have wanted to. Please don't. All right. So you can see that right now as of November 1st, we still have $76,000 in the bank.

We started this year with 70. That's not the same number, but it's strikingly similar. January 1st of 2025, we had $78,000 in the bank. November, we have 76,000. Now that doesn't include some other gifts that we've received since November 1st.

So we are guys in great financial shape compared to where we've been. You can see that we've increased our missional giving by 77%. So we. If you don't know this many churches, their budget, and this is established churches, their budget accounts for 10 to 15% of their budget for mission dollars. We are a tiny church.

We've only been in existence for seven years. Our mission giving is around 6% currently and we want to be way bigger than that. Eventually we've welcomed seven new members to our church. We're going to have more than that Today we sent 13 reps from our church to serve in mission in our own neighborhoods through youth Force this last year, which is up from 8 the year before. So that's a huge increase.

We hope that we'll do even more this year and youth force will change. We'll talk more about that later on. We also had not just our youth that went, but also we had four adults from the church come and help serve meals, help divvy up lunches. It was awesome. That was Valerie and Kessie and Gloria and Andrea and Molly.

So thank you guys for serving. It was nice to have it in our own neighborhood so our own folks could participate a little more. We've reached a ton more people than we have over the last few years. We have done more volunteer work, we've spent less dollars. We've done so much more.

We've got all these different lay and I guess this is incorrect at the bottom. Is it correct? So certified lay servants. Kristen is a lay speaker. Alright, so we're good things that we should be proud of again.

We have an elevator. Hallelujah. So yeah, we can now have people who are disabled or people who can't get around easily, like a Kent Jones, like a Mama Ruth that can get to our space if we don't have a reliable elevator. There are people who want to go to church who just can't make it happen. We signed a new two year lease that begins in December of this year.

And the great news is about that lease that, you know, we're waiting on our new building to build. It'll probably take around two years to get it done. We did not have any increase in the amount that we're paying in rent, which is a beautiful thing, especially in Brookside when that could have been like, oh, we're gonna have a 10% increase because it's Brookside. No, they left it the same way. We've been working on building agreements.

I can't wait to show you those things and tell you more about them and can't do that until we have things a little more finalized. Our goal is not to be trapped in a building. There are churches every year that shut down because they can't afford the maintenance on their facilities. There are churches even in the United Methodist Church that have facilities that were built in their heyday in the 1950s and 60s, built for 1200 or 1500 people that now serve 15 people. And churches of that size cannot sustain the buildings.

We never want to be in that situation. And so we've made a plan to allow us to be a church forever that helps offset the cost of our ministry and that will allow us to become missional as soon as we move in. So I can't wait for that. We've seen a rise in need in 2025. I think we all recognize that, that jobs are harder to get.

People are going hungry. SNAP benefits have been, you know, removed for a time. Things are hard and we want to be a church that serves people, not just the people who show up on Sunday morning.

So I think that Friends is all that I have for our church today. And I hope that you guys see the potential for hope coming in the next year or two. We are doing so much better financially. We're doing so much better just engaging our community, and I hope that you're excited about what's going on.