The first thing to say this year about Stewardship is thank you. You/we have done remarkably well Thank you for your support of the mission and ministry of the Church of England through your giving to St Nicolas. What we do when we give our money to St Nicolas is not support this Church, and I say this every year but it is worth repeating, is to support the work of the Church of England throughout the land. So, thank you from St Kildares in Upper Kidlington and St James in Upper Snodbrook and all those places that can’t afford, because they are in urban areas, right down town areas, or in the middle of the wonderful glorious areas of this land that cant afford much, thank you, because what we give supports the work of the Church of England not of St Nicolas.

The second thing I want to say is that we had spending of £72,135.00 as a Church. Our giving, that’s planned giving and from plates, so all the money we took in collections, was nearly £39,000.00. Now that’s about half of what we spent - 54%. If you add on gift aid of £7,400.00, you then get a total of about £46,000 which you will see is about 2/3rds, so the reality is then that we are bringing in about 2/3rds of what we are spending.

We have an electoral roll of 189. Some will say that not everybody on that Electoral Roll comes to Church and that is true, but there are a number of people that come to Church that aren’t on the Electoral Roll and any way the Electoral Roll is the only official membership number that we have so we use the figure of 189. Our giving is £38,933. If we divide that by the number of members we have, we will see that each of us on average gives just over £200.00 a year. If we divide that by 52, the number of weeks in a year, we give £3.96 a week. Now unfortunately our spending is £72,135.00 so if we do the same maths with that, we spend £382.00 per year which is £7.34 per week. Our income per person is £3.96, our expenditure is £7.34.

So my first point to you this year is we are not paying our way. We are spending about twice as much as we are giving. Thankfully we have the Church Hall which brings in about £13,000.00. My own view, and this is not necessarily shared by other members of the PCC, is that the Church Hall income should be the icing on the cake but it is not. It is one of the main ingredients in our cake. It is the ginger in the gingerbread. There may only be a teaspoon of it but without the ginger, gingerbread isn’t much. It is one of the main ingredients whereby we make ends meet.

The second point is that if we go back to this electoral roll figure of 189, some of you are not going to like this bit but I am going to do it anyway, assuming that each of us on the electoral roll, 189 of us, has on average an income of £10,000.00 per annum, if we multiply that by 189, we have a gross wealth of nearly £2m. If we look at that £2m and work out what our giving is in proportion to our wealth, we take the figure of 39,000 and divide it by the 2m and we multiply it by 100 in order to get a percentage, we get 2.06%. If our average income is £10,000.00, our giving is 2.06%. Now there will be a lot of people saying we have a lot of old people in our congregation and a lot of people that don’t work and that’s true. There are an awful lot of people that earn a lot more than £10,000.00 and let’s be honest about that. But I accept that the state pension starts somewhere between £2,500 and £4,500 and those who only live on the state pension get no more than that.

So lets do a bit more maths. Lets assume instead an average income of those 189 people at £7,500.00 per annum. We do the same maths and we come out with £1.5m as a gross wealth of us as a community and if we do the maths on that again as a proportion, we come out with 2.75%. So my second point is that however you want to massage it, really I suspect that quite strongly our giving as a community through this Church to the work of the Church of England is less than 3% of our wealth. The Bible, as you all know, talks about tithing as an ideal. Tithing is giving away to good causes, not just the Church, but giving away 10% of what we get in. So 10% of what we get in, in biblical terms, should be given away to good causes and if we take that figure of £1.5m, because that makes the maths so much easier, 10% of that is £150,000.00. We should as a community it could be argued, be giving away £150,000.00. The Church of England says give 5% of your wealth to the mission and ministry of the Church. If we were to do that, working on £1.5m, we should be giving the Church £75,000.00.

Now this next series of slides, I really want you to believe that I didn’t set out to come to the conclusion that it comes to. I set out to do the maths and this is what happened. £75,000.00 is 5% of our wealth. Current spending is £72,135.00. If we add on inflation and a little bit more for growth, say 4%, that’s £2,885.00. Next years spending becomes £75,020.00 and I promise you I did not set out to make those two figures match. But it did make me wonder if this figure of 5% that the Church of England has been talking about for the last 10 or 15 years wasn’t plucked out of thin air, which I always thought it was. Maybe there was some research backing it up that says in a Church in a wealthy area, an affluent part of the country with a lot of people doing very good jobs earning a lot money, well that kind of balances.

So my third point is, if we as a community gave 5% of our wealth to the mission and ministry of the Church, then we would become self sufficient and the income from the hall would become the icing on the cake. And so I then wonder what would you like your Church to do with £13,000.00? We are investing in the Church Hall kitchen. The PCC have appointed an architect and we are at the stages of beginning to discuss drawings and diagrams and plans. If we had that £13,000.00 we could walk more confidently into that discussion knowing there was the bedrock of money and we wouldn’t have to go scrabbling around for the money that it is going to cost, knowing there would be that income that we could set aside for that. Or to do something with the Church kitchen which is in a sorry state. Or we do something within here. What facilities would you like to see in your Church to make it more fit for purpose? Or we could invest in our young people or in the community, with younger people, or families or older people. £13,000.00 is a lot of money. It’s £250.00 per week. We could use that in so many ways. What would you like your Church to do with £13,000.00?

I want to end by going back to where I started from which is a thank you. What’s happened within this Church in terms of financially has been quite remarkable. The increase year on year in giving is astonishing. We have grown and grown and grown our level of income every year by somewhere each year between 10% and 20% which is remarkable although we did start off at quite a low base. So we are still looking and still needing that kind of level of increase in order for us to be self sufficient. We are doing really really well and thank you very much but this is not a poor community, a poor congregation in a poor area. We are a wealthy community in a wealthy area and we should be supporting St Ediths in Lower Kidlington and St James in Upper Snodbrook and we should be supporting St Marebegs on the peninsula and St James in the middle of Birmingham and a few others besides because if we don’t, if a community like this isn’t putting money into the pot, then really, well …

But thank you very much for your support of the Church of England through your giving to St Nicolas.