September 7, 2025
Dear Parish Family:
As part of my commitment to transparency and accountability, I present to you the Annual Report on our parish finances. I am pleased to report that our parish remains on solid financial footing. Over the past year, it was encouraging to see that offertory collections grew by 3 percent. At the same time, our operating expenses rose by 11 percent due to inflation and long overdue maintenance costs. I appreciate your continued generous support of the parish's operational expenses, ministry programs, and the repairs and maintenance of the church and school grounds. With this letter, I am also providing you the Income and Expense Report for the 2024-25 fiscal year as well as our budget for the 2025-26 fiscal year.
As we continue on our path to becoming missionary disciples, we are working on both the spiritual and physical plans for our parish and for St. Elizabeth Ann Seton (SEAS) School. Our vision sees these plans as complimentary to one another. As you may recall, we retained an architect to create a comprehensive master site plan for our parish and school campus to identify and prioritize our long-term facility needs to accomplish the spiritual goals in our parish plan. We are putting the master site plan in motion and you have already seen several projects underway, including repairs to the church roof, security and ADA improvements to the narthex and SEAS gate, parish hall/SEAS bathroom refurbishment, and the new kitchen stove, which we are using for today's fellowship breakfast. Over the next year, you will see other projects begin, including repair of the church ceiling, interior wall repair and painting of the church and narthex, refurbishing of the parish hall entry area, and other deferred maintenance projects for the parish and SEAS. Although Good Shepherd had a savings balance of approximately $1.5 million dollars at the end of last fiscal year, these repair, maintenance, and improvement projects are very costly. For example, we estimate repairs to the church roof will cost $348,000. Going forward, we will continue working on the projects listed in the master site plan, but we recognize that our savings is insufficient to accomplish all of these projects. Thus, we may need to seek your support to help us complete these projects.
Recently, we also adopted PushPay as a convenient and secure option for your electronic giving. PushPay simplifies how you make your weekly donations by setting up regular giving, on a schedule that meets your needs, in your online account. PushPay is relatively simple and easy to use, but if you need assistance, our parish staff are available to help. See the weekly bulletin or our website for more information about how to begin using PushPay. Going forward, PushPay will become our enterprise system for collecting payments for parish events as well as helping us with parish management. I ask that you prayerfully consider the benefits that PushPay offers to you and consider using it.
As we embrace becoming missionary disciples, we recognize that all we have is a gift from God. This recognition is when stewardship begins in our lives. A practical first step to incorporating stewardship in our lives is to devote one hour of your week to prayer, one hour of your week to service, and one hour of your weekly salary to the parish. As an example, your one hour of prayer could be praying 10 minutes every day or attending our Wednesday Adoration. For service, you could offer your talents to one of the many ministries at Good Shepherd, which range from serving at Mass or ministries such as Works of Mercy, Knights of Columbus, or another ministry that interests you. Visit our website for more information on our many ministries. Finally, I ask that you prayerfully discern your monetary tithing to the parish by considering whether you are able to give a bit more than you did last year. Every contribution helps the parish as our expenses increase each year due to inflation. As you offer your resources of time, talent, and treasure to our parish, your clergy, parish staff, and finance and parish councils also commit to being humble, holy, and serious stewards of the gifts you entrust to us. I look forward to continuing to lead Good Shepherd parish as we go, make, and become missionary disciples through our devoted stewardship. In closing, we pray:
Gracious God, source of all good things, we thank you for the gifts of time, talent, and treasure that you have entrusted to us. Help us to be faithful stewards of these gifts, recognizing that they are not ours, but yours, to be used for your glory. Guide us to use our time wisely, dedicating moments to prayer, reflection, and service to others. Inspire us to use our talents to their fullest potential, sharing our gifts with those in need and contributing to the well-being of our community. Help us to be generous with our gifts, recognizing that everything we have is ultimately from you. We ask this in your holy name. Amen.
Your servant,
Fr. Michael Vaughan, Pastor
