Our budgeting season began yesterday with a meeting of our Stewardship Team. Just thought I’d share a little bit of our process since I get lots of questions about it from pastors. I don’t think we have it down to a science, but we’ve really streamlined the process over the last few years.

First of all, you’ve got to have the right people serving in that stewardship capacity! So grateful for an amazing team. They have a great financial sense. They love God and believe in our mission. And they are a great combination of frugality and generosity.

We actually start the budget process with our personnel category. Our magic number is about 40% on personnel. We do a yearly review with every staff member and then adjust salaries accordingly. Every staff member has a salary range. And within that salary range, we give a COLA (cost-of-living-adjustment) and Performance adjustment. The Stewardship Team makes all salary decisions and I act as an advocate for and liaison with our staff. I feel like that setup takes a lot of pressure off of me!

This will sound a lot cleaner than it really is! But our next step is figuring our income for the next year. We do that by measuring year-to-year growth. Add in some faith. And come up with an income projection.

Then we have staff members put together and present budgets to our Stewardship Team. Our Stewardship Team reviews and approves. One thing we’ve done in recent years is create a category in our budget we call the wish list. These are things that don’t make the final cut, but if we come in over budget on income then we prioritize those projects.

For what it’s worth, we don’t set a lot of number goals at NCC. But I’m hoping we give $500,000 to missions in 2008. It is the one expense category where I love coming in over budget! I really believe missions giving is the engine that drives us financially. If we continue to give, God will continue to bless!