Sunday's Advisory Council Meeting

Sunday was our monthly Advisory Council meeting and I'm pleased to report we made some significant decisions for our church. As I've been sharing, the new direction for Trinity Family is to commit ourselves to Simplicity, Community and Generosity. Here are a few of the decisions from Sunday that will help move us in that new direction.

1) Simplify and enhance our website I'd been thinking that our current website is too 'brochure-like' and not set up for community building. We're also paying $50/month for web hosting. We're going to switch to a server that only charges $12/ month, rewrite the content to fit our new direction and integrate Church Community Builder into our current site. It's going to take a few months to make this happen; first we'll redo our current site and then we'll launch and integrate CCB.

2) Refreshments Not a huge financial decision and we're already doing it, but we formalized the decision to redirect some of the money we're now saving on rent toward Sunday morning refreshments.

3) Giving to the under resourced This is what has me the most pumped. TFC is already modeling generosity in the fact that we give away 13% of our offerings; 7% is for for local ministry through our district and 6% goes to our overseas mission work. A part of our denomination's mission funding goes toward Nazarene Compassionate Ministries.
But beyond that 13%, we're trying to find more ways to give. Decisions such as cutting rent and using a cheaper web service are all ways to cut expenses so we can give more. We're cutting as much operating cost as possible so more money can be given away!
We haven't finalized it yet but we're currently considering allocating these newly freed resources in this way; %30 for helping people within our own congregation, 60% given to organizations that serve the poor in our local community, such as Gardner Multi-services Center and 10% will be given to efforts to serve the global poor. We'll also continue to have special offerings to serve the world's poor, such as the offering we took in July for World Vision.

And this is just the beginning of the larger impact TFC is going to have on our local and global community.