Note from Treasurer, Jim Connolly

St John Members:

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  I hope you and yours continue to be safe and healthy during this time.  I also pray that because of technology, you are able to take advantage of the devotions and services that Pastor Berg has posted to the website so that we are able to stay in the Word even though we are not able to worship at the church.  What a blessing it has been to be able to hear the message.  Hopefully, we will be able to return our church and worship together again.  Even though we cannot be at church, there are monthly expenses that don’t stop and we must continue to pay both at the church and the parsonage.  We still have salaries, utilities, insurance, office expenses, and other repairs that may occur.  Even though we are coming into the spring and summer where we will not be needing the have the heat on, we are on a budget program so that in the winter depending on how cold it is when our heat bill could exceed $5,000.00, we still only have to pay the budgeted amount each month.    Another fixed expense we have each month is our copier machine.  We lease the copier and pay a monthly lease expense for that.  There are a couple of reasons that organizations lease copy machines.  One reason is that because of new technology being developed all the time, copiers become outdated rather quickly and when your lease is up you can replace the copier with something new and updated. Also, if something goes wrong with the copier, we just have to call the copier company and they come and fix it and there are no charges.  Another reason that most organizations lease a copier is because it is more affordable to lease a copier that to buy one.  A copier like the one we have at St John would cost over $50,000 to purchase and we would also need to purchase a maintenance agreement in case something goes wrong.  Even though we are not making a lot of copies printing bulletins and other things, we still are required to pay the monthly lease.  This is why I am encouraging you to consider using your offering envelopes and make your contributions just as you would if we were holding services at church.  Some of our members have already decided to do that.  You can mail them to the church or if you wish, you can mail them to my home address.  My home address is 17151 Eagleview Way, Farmington, MN  55024.  The mailbox at church is a locking mailbox so they are safe.  I am also working from home in my regular job but I am going up to the church at least once per week to pay bills.  I will also take the offerings to the bank and deposit them into our account.  If you wish to mail your contributions bi-weekly or monthly to save postage, that is fine too.  I just want to be sure we are able to maintain God’s property.  Hopefully, this pandemic will be over shortly and we can return to our normal lives if there will ever be such a thing as normal again.  Thank you for your consideration. 

God’s blessings,

Jim Connolly, Treasurer