Fall Town Hall
Last Sunday we gathered in person and online for a town hall where we shared updates on our finances, venue search, our values, and the all-church survey! The following is an overview of what we shared or you can watch here for part 1 and watch here for part 2 (since we got disconnected for a moment)
The Staff and Leadership team went through a process this year to update our Vision and Values
Much thanks to Jillian Nulton who served 3 years on the Leadership Team and is now rolling off. Phil Dickens who has served 3 years will be rolling off at the end of the year.
We just onboarded 2 new Leadership team members: Rhema Boyo & Adryan Wallace
You can nominate LT members here
Interesting or Encouraging Stats from All Church Survey
119 people took the survey
101 people (85%) said they consider Forefront their church home. While 15 (13%) said they were unsure and 3 (2%) said no.
Insight/speculation: Likely because people are deciding if they want to be involved in church again.
60% of the church comes alone to church
50% of the church is between the ages of 25-34, 30% 35-44, 9% 45-55+
50% of the church identify as white, 48% identify as POC (people identifying as Black, Latino, Asian, West Indian, African American etc.), 2% as other/mixed
41% say they attend church in person for community/relationships
These stats left us wondering and continuing to ask… If “community” is what is most important to people, why didn’t the majority of survey participants choose small groups and community events as the most important things to them at Forefront?
Are people primarily looking for community only on Sundays?
One other survey question revealed that half the church participates in activities outside of Sunday services either less than once a month or not at all.
Summary: a little less than half the church says they feel moderately or slightly connected. The other half feels very or extremely connected. The challenge for us moving forward is how to get half of the church to feel a proper sense of belonging.
There was a Pew Research Center survey with Churches across America with similar results to ours: In the United States, of churchgoers, half of them attend once or twice a month. Outside of weekly services, if people aren’t connected to small groups or other church activities during the week, it can be hard to feel a part of a community. In Josh’s sermon about Making Friends as an Adult, he encouraged us to be intentional about making connections. In addition, Kinship cafe in-person and virtual discussions have provided space for people to make deeper connections with other Forefronters on Sunday mornings.
Practical Ways We Are Looking to Improve Community Belonging:
We are working to be more intentional to provide more opportunities for folks to plug into the community.
Events Deacons organizing regular community opportunities
More small groups: BIPOC, Manhattan, Flatbush, manifesting change, reconstruct, ENM, mom/dads, parents discussion group
More community partnerships (Environmental justice, Greenpoint kitchen, migrant clinic, etc.)
Pastoral staff making themselves accessible for one-on-ones
Reintroduced name tags for greeters and coffee/bagels
Folks feeling moderately satisfied with the church may be because of church trauma as this often can hold people back from engaging more deeply. In 2024, thanks to a grant we are going to partner with a therapist who specializes in church trauma, to offer a workshop on family systems and creating boundaries with family that we are misaligned with around values.
If you want to lead or be apart of group or event (let us know) by emailing the staff
Venue Search Update
In March, we got a lot of questions and comments about the potential of finding a different venue for meeting on Sunday mornings. We also included a number of questions in the church-wide survey to help us with the direction of what types of venues we looked into.
Some major insights that we took into consideration from the survey:
An overwhelming majority highly preferred sticking to a morning service time
We asked if folx would still attend if we had to switch to an evening service time, and only 33% said yes, leaving us with 67% who either were unsure or definitely would not attend an evening service.
We asked what your top attributes are that you value in a church venue, and an overwhelming majority/tie for the top 2 were proximity to public transit and a short distance/commute time.
Thank you to our Venue Search Committee members: Salima, Jose, Regina, Amber
The committee looked into 35 other venues and of those, only 2 seemed like possible options to follow up with. But at the end of the day, while both would save us money, neither met all of our needs both as a staff as well as what you as a congregation expressed was most important to you. We are very lucky with the quality the Roulette provides us, and while that does come with a cost, it remains our best option for a venue. Roulette was kind enough to offer us a temporary contract extension as we figured out what was best for us financially, and we officially signed our contract renewal last month. So thank you Roulette for your patience and collaboration with us through this period of financial struggle.
Current Financial Update
As many of you know, after our last town hall at the start of 2023, we made you aware that Venida & Josh would receive temporary 20% cuts to their salary, Mak would go to part-time, and Angela would receive a 10% cut. We also had to cut many of our budget expense lines and live very simply with only necessities for ministry. In the images below you will see both the budget we are living into with the cuts and the comfortable budget we are aiming for without the cuts.
While we are currently exceeding our current budget need with the cuts by 10k, we can’t live with these budget cuts in the long term. At this point in the year, we are currently short around 29k from our ideal comfortable budget without the cuts. For 2023, we have consistently been short around 5-6k most months (the need per month is 39k we usually bring in around 33k a month)
And so if we continue to fall short for October-December, it is plausible to assume we will add an additional 15k to that 29k shortfall. We will likely end the year with a 47k shortfall from our comfortable budget ideal.
If we could raise that additional 47k between now and the year's end, we would effectively be able to restore Venida, Josh & Angela’s salaries, restore ministry budget lines and live comfortably.
Fundraising Committee Update
While these sound like big deficit numbers, we have had really successful fundraisers that have reduced the projected deficit greatly!
GOOD NEWS:
Because we have been able to chip away at some of the budget shortfalls, we’ve been able to slowly restore Angela Lockett's (Worship Pastor) salary! We have also concluded our search for a new Kidstuf Director and hired Kevin Singh! He will be shadowing our Interim Kidstuf Director through the rest of the year!