Metropolitan United Church

Running a church the size of Metropolitan United is a costly endeavour that cannot rely on faith alone. We depend on funding from a variety of sources and exercise due diligence and responsibility when setting our annual budgets.

You may be surprised to know that more than 40 per cent of our revenue comes from parking fees, while just over 1 per cent comes from cash offerings to the collection plate on Sunday mornings. On the expense side, we must spend more than 25 per cent of our revenues on maintaining the building and property.

If you're interested in more details, we've provided charts that show our planned sources of revenue and expenses for 2007.

Stewardship: A pledge of our faith

Stewardship is defined as the fiduciary responsibility undertaken when one person or group acts as an agent for another person or group. In the context of a Church, stewardship also means “the wise and responsible use of God’s gifts to do God’s work.� Metropolitan’s Board of Stewards is responsible for gathering and using the gifts of our congregation responsibly.

These gifts can take many forms:

• Our time, spent in worship and participating in the life of our faith community,
• Our talents, in service to God and the community, and
• Our treasure in support of the Church organization, our staff and musicians, and the maintenance and upkeep of this glorious house of worship.

Once a year, sometime in March, Metropolitan’s congregation is invited to take part in “Pledge Sunday�, a designated time in which we are called upon to pledge our gifts to the Church. Just as the Offertory is the high point of any worship service, it is hard to imagine a service that should be more significant in our Church community’s year than Pledge Sunday.

There main reason we are asked to make a pledge is quite tactical and prosaic. Met’s Board and Stewards are charged with balancing our revenue and expenses. For budgeting reasons, they need a clear picture of what revenues we can expect, so they can plan our activities and programs wisely.

Beyond this though, pledge time offers spiritual benefits.

By making a formal pledge to Metropolitan United Church, we are saying as a group that “this is where I choose to do God’s work�. Our members also say that this can be a prayerful time in which they evaluate their life and measure their response to God’s gifts. Taking inventory of what each of us has been given can be the hardest part of being a Christian and person of God. This is when we remember that our life and our possessions are God’s to do with as the spirit moves.

Pledge Sunday allows us to respond to the deep and historical need to give back just a part of what we have been given in grateful thanks. In this sense, we are each our own human sacrifice.