Monday Matters: The Annual Report

Monday Matters: The Annual Report – an update

By Jim | January 5, 2009

It’s that time of the year again. It’s time for our congregation to produce its report for the upcoming annual meeting. The following is an excerpt from something I posted last year about a few changes we were making to our Annual Report:

1.) Since we have a mission statement, I suggested that instead of organizing our annual report around our committee activities, maybe we should frame it around our mission statement. So, as a session we are working together to prepare a summary report of activities for the previous year and dreams for the coming year that we hope is reflective of the mission of our congregation.

2.) We are summarizing our various budget/financial reports, so that people will get a broad brush strokes overview of the financial activity of the church. I honestly don’t think folks need to know how much the church spends on office paper or on janitorial supplies, so why report it?

My hope in making these changes was to get us closer to producing an annual report that takes the stewardship of our resources seriously by not generating useless stacks of paper and not spending anymore time on the project than it is worth. I also hoped that the report would better reflect the mission and ministry of our congregation.

Too some extent I think we succeeded on both fronts. I really felt like organizing the activities of the congregation around our mission statement was a great way to report our activities for the year. Also, we also reduced the amount of paperwork we generated, and people seemed appreciative of the new format.

Still, I think something is missing. After all the annual congregational report at its heart is focused on the institution and its particular activities. So, we report membership gains and losses. We report things that we accomplished. We report financial and budget information.

All of that is great. But the deeper question needs to be asked: Are those things really Christ’s purpose for our congregation? Are we really just about the ABCs of maintaining an institution: (A)ttendance, (B)uilding, & (C)ash?

I think the Annual Report, in its current form, communicates that the primary focus of our congregation is on maintaining the institution. And so, I am left to wonder what would have to change structurally so that our annual report focused instead on discipleship and mission? What would such a church look like, and what would its annual report look like?

Chris Hubbs

Wow, Jim, those are good questions. I'm going to have to do some thinking there.

Jennifer

We are so blessed to have you help guide our ministry and mission - very insightful questions! I don't have any answers but I'm willing to help in the discussion :-)

Andy James

Great questions, and timely for me -- you reminded me that I need to write the pastor's report this week for our annual meeting at the end of the month!

To a certain extent, I wonder if every institution is always going to have to have this sort of thing in its life. A mission-oriented church is still going to have a mission statement or something like it, and there is always a need for some sort of governance and accountability.

With that in mind, I suspect that the Annual Report is always going to be at least a little bit about the institution. If that's the case, I think the *content* of the report(s) is going to distinguish a "missional" report more than anything else. The idea of shaping the report around the congregation's mission statement is a great thing, and perhaps that could be extended by asking the entities that report in it to talk about how their work is (or is not) reflective of the congregation's missional priorities.

In all this, you're probably still going to have to have the numbers, statistics, and the like -- but they are almost secondary. They could even be an appendix to back up the content shown elsewhere.