Joplin Today

Today, Leslie and I will go to Joplin for a meeting of congregational pastors and CFOs. There we will learn about a "new" way of coming up with our Mission Center assessments. That way will be volunteering just exactly how much each congregation can afford to donate toward the Mission Center budget instead of being assessed according to the number on our rolls. Assessing according to the rolls has never bothered us at Crossroads since we have our rolls cleaned up. Cleaning up the rolls means transferring inactive members that you cannot get activated to the "general" rolls instead of congregational rolls.

When a member has been inactive for three years or more and been visited and encouraged to attend without any response on their part, they qualify for being transferred to "general" and the congregation is not assessed for that member.

Nine years ago, when we had districts and our congregation had a CFO that was the DCFO for the entire district, that's the way he handled assessment and it worked beautifully. Congregations did the best they could to donate as much as they could afford to donate and the budget was always made. Then he died and we changed to Mission Centers and the next Mission Center MCFO went back to the old way of assessing congregations according to the number on their rolls.

Some congregations struggled with this. They had never made the effort to clean up their rolls. And it is an effort. It takes visiting inactive members regularly to encourage and invite them to full participation. Only when all efforts fail are they transferred off the congregation rolls. Congregations may have been assessed for 40 members when they only had 20 attending regularly. That put a hardship on the congregation. So now they have decided to go to a "new" method of assessment. Some things never change.