LEADERSHIP BOARD MEETING SUMMARY
PUMC’s new Leadership Board held its inaugural meeting on Monday evening, January 30. The Leadership Board is in the Simplified Accountability Structure, combining the Endowment Committee, Finance and Stewardship, Staff Parish Relations and Board of Trustees into one Leadership Board. The advantage to this structure is that these functions have accountability for finance and stewardship, strategy and aligning all of the work of the church with our Mission, Vision, Values and Goals. When we meet as a Leadership Board, we represent all of those areas collectively not as individual committees. This is a real culture shift, but we can already see it working!
As a reminder, the members of the Leadership Board are Raphael Aryeetey, Charles Bass, Ida Cahill, Chip Carstensen, Heather Hadley, Iona Harding, Lori Pantaleo, Ed Sproles and Emelia Timpo. Pastor Jenny is the staff member supporting this Board.
Please see below the highlights of our discussions:
● Our first meeting had one primary focus: the 2023 PUMC budget.
● We approved a budget for 2023 that right now has a $75,000 deficit. All churches in GNJ have seen a decrease in attendance and pledging since COVID. We know this is not sustainable, and the budget will need to be revised during the year as we find ways to increase money coming in and decrease expenses.
● We agreed on the importance of our amazing programs, especially for our children and youth, vital worship, and having every person regardless of age engaged in a small group. These and all of our programs are important in GROWing in numbers and spiritually! And it is critically important that we prioritize, driving by our mission, vision, values and goals.
● We also discussed the current relationship between Princeton and Kingston UMC and the Wesley Foundation and the impact and opportunity these relationships have on finances as well as our Mission.
● We did charter four initial task forces to focus on finalizing the 2023 stewardship campaign and increasing pledges for 2023, reviewing the budget in detail to identify possible expense savings, exploring how we are currently operating to see if there are opportunities for reducing expense, and formalizing the reimbursement amounts from Kingston and Hopewell UMC and Wesley Foundation for the staffing and other services we provide.
● We will be reaching out to you to get engaged to help in this and in many other areas of the church.
● Also, at the meeting, we approved two important Trustee expenditures. The first is to repair the ice machine in the kitchen – this is used weekly by Cornerstone Community Kitchen. We also approved replacing and upgrading our fire alarm system. This replacement is critical and overdue.
● Between now and our next Leadership Board meeting on February 13, the staff, Leadership Board and Discipleship Board will be prioritizing the short-term goals that are in our Strategic Plan. This is really important so that at our next meeting we can begin to talk about aligning our resources (money, people, space, programs, etc.) with these priorities.
If you have any questions, please reach out to any member of the Leadership Board.
