Letter from the Church Council
Arusha Community Church, our faith family and Body of Christ, was founded on and continues to uphold four core pillars; worship, Christian education, support to those most in need, and evangelism. Our four main committees, Worship, Christian Education, Projects and Benevolence (PBC) and Evangelism and Outreach (E&O), are mandated to organize and provide these ministries. All of these ministries are funded through your offerings and tithes. The role of the Finance Committee is to ensure that your offerings are spent in the way you designate at our Annual General meetings and that those funds are accounted for in a transparent way.
Two of these ministries are internal, focused on nourishing ourselves through worship, learning and providing education for our children, and social activities organized by E&O internal. PBC and E&O are primarily ‘external’, in that funds are distributed outside of our ACC community.
Our internal ministries are dependent on volunteers, or they would not run. Our external ministries are dependent on your offerings. And of course, your offerings are needed to pay our staff, and for more mundane things like utilities, security, insurance, office supplies etc. These latter things are ‘mandatory’; we have to pay salaries and electricity and administrative costs. Our internal ministries of worship and education do not need a lot of money to run; these ministries primary need is for volunteers. However, both external ministries of supporting those most in need, and financial support for evangelistic efforts run by others, are dependent on how much ACC receives through your offerings.
Each committee and the administrative team have trimmed expenses, saved every shilling possible and found other ways of doing things which did not cost too much. Evangelism and Outreach committee are now granting much smaller amounts for the requests they receive from various organizations. The Projects and Benevolence committee spent much time looking at who can most be helped with limited amounts of money and revised their guidelines for accepting requests accordingly (see below).
Through these past years, your offerings have been enough to pay for our mandatory items and for internal ministries, for which we thank God. However, even with all these belt tightening and cost cutting efforts, there has been little left over to support our external ministries.
I know that this article has been dry and rather uninteresting! Just an explanation of how we at ACC organize ourselves, use our offerings, and what are our needs. But it can lead to a much more interesting place of considering our relationship to God; how we can, both individually and collectively, follow more closely in Christ’s footsteps, and be more reflective of Christ in our lives and through our church. Can we offer more of our time, more of our talents, more of our limited financial resources to the faith community we belong to?
May each one of us prayerfully consider this question.
Susan Simonson ACC Treasurer