UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH OF NASHUA

REPORT TO THE CONGREGATION

John A. Sanders, President

June 17, 2004

Our church has turned a corner this year.  Last year at this time, we faced significant financial problems – both a short-term problem with a large budget deficit and a longer-term problem with over-dependence on the endowment to pay for our operating expenses.  In our very painful annual meeting last year, we decided to balancing the budget by eliminating all our outreach for the year.  And we decided to hire consultant Michael Durall to help us address our longer-term financial problems.  However we soon discovered that, in eliminating outreach, we’d converted a financial crisis into a moral crisis.  For we were left questioning our moral values, our purpose in being here, our reason for calling ourselves a church community.  This was reinforced when Michael Durall visited us in November.  His main advice was to first solve our moral crisis, and then the solution to our financial crisis would naturally follow from that.  He argued persuasively that our church should concentrate on providing an authentic spiritual experience that supports and gives expression to our moral values.  And once we do, then our financial support for those values will naturally grow more generous. 

Your Executive Board and church leadership spent the remainder of the year doing their best to follow that advice.  We started Sunday collections whose proceeds restored $20,000 to cancelled outreach grants.  We conducted a period of discernment to focus on our core values – values that are expressed in the Church Roles statements that we’re coming to agreement on as a congregation.  We committed ourselves to a five-year process of increased pledge income to free our endowment from supporting operating expenses so that it can be used solely to support major outreach projects and our historic property.  And our Fundraising Committee put this process into action with an enormously successful auction and a canvass that not only increased pledges by 20% to 25% but also began regularly collecting information on what we value in our church life.

We’ve turned a corner.  And we’ve come a long way in addressing our problems.  But we’re not done.  In the coming months, we need to agree as a congregation on our goals.  We need to agree that the things we most value in this church are clearly reflected in our church roles statements.  We need to agree that we want the proceeds of our endowment to support those goals and values.  And once we agree on that, we each need to decide how we’re going to help make that happen.  Gary Lerude will discuss this in a fair and balanced way later in the meeting.  But in my opinion, we have only two viable ways to free up the endowment.  We can pay for it out of our pockets with substantial yearly increases in our pledges.  Or we can help get and retain new members to help us pay for it.  Or a combination of both.  But increasing our membership will mean turning around a four-year decline in membership.  So if we don’t want to pay for all of this ourselves, then each one of us will need to become much more active in welcoming new members into our church life.

I like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who’s helped make this such a good church year.  But I can’t.  There are too many of you.  So I will restrict myself to just a few.  Thanks to Ellen Fisher and the Cemetery Association for the Memorial Garden.  Thanks to Burns Fisher, the Sabbatical Committee, the staff, and especially Jackie Clement for such a vibrant sabbatical.  Thanks to Ellen McCormick, Karen Leonard Jan Schwartz and all the auction volunteers for the most successful Service Auction ever.   Thanks to Steve Ladew, Linda Donaldson-Guidi, the Fundraising Committee and all the Canvass volunteers for setting new directions and high standards in stewardship.  Thanks to the current Executive Board for providing such effective leadership at this critical point in our church’s history.  And a special thanks to retiring board member Dan Murphy for four years of such thoughtful contributions to the board’s deliberations.

I have been your President for four years which were filled with many challenges, but which were all the more rewarding for the way we came together to face those challenges.  And we have much to look forward to in the coming years under Gary Lerude’s gentle and very capable leadership.

 

Respectfully submitted,

John A. Sanders, President