From John Tate @ Holston Conference: Financial Matters

During the past couple of years working with local churches, I have discovered that we appear to have difficulty sharing information about changes that impact the local church, especially with regards to financial information.  Therefore, I am attempting to communicate important issues that will have a financial impact on the local church for 2010, with you and your local church treasurer.  Unfortunately, in checking our database of information, we do not have the e-mail address for your Church Treasurer.  Therefore, please forward this information to them and also encourage them to update their records with the appropriate District Office, so that we may communicate important information to them.

As part of our emphasis on communication, we are attempting to share information about the Conference finances and automate our collection processes on our website at http://www.holston.org/finance.  The information referenced can be located under the “forms and downloads” section of our finance page.  As a part of this we have published several items that we believe are relevant to your life in the local church.

1. Status of goals report.  This report lists all churches within the Conference, by district, including their apportionment amount due and the amount paid by each church.  This report is updated each month by the 5^th.
2. Conference budgeted financials.  We publish this report on our website on a monthly basis that includes all line-items that are supported by your apportionment payments.
3. We are receiving electronic payments that include church payments for apportionments, advance specials, AFLAC premium payments, health insurance, and other various payments that you would make to the Holston Conference.  We are even providing discounts on the church portion of the health insurance to provide additional incentives for churches to remit these payments electronically.
4. We also have posted the 2010 premium rates for health insurance.  Each amount increased 4% from 2009 to 2010.
5. The details of the workers compensation insurance plan are posted on our website and include the rates and details of this plan that was adopted at the 2009 Annual Conference in Lake Junaluska.

If you do not have access to the internet, you will find all of these amounts and these details reported each year in the Conference Book of Reports and Conference Journal.  I would encourage you to seek out these resources as you plan your budgets and to stay up-to-date on financial issues and changes which have been approved at Annual Conference that will impact your church budget.

As always you can contact me at (865)293-4125 or e-mail me at johntate@holston.org.  Our entire staff is available to assist you in tax issues, finance committee structure and responsibilities, insurance and property matters, budget planning, and other financial matters that pertain to your local church.  Starting in January 2010, we will begin a monthly blog that will detail all upcoming events and new initiatives that may impact our partnership in ministry related to financial initiatives of the Holston Conference.