Stewardship & Giving

Last year we launched our annual stewardship campaign with a Narrative Budget. The narrative budget is intended to be educational and informative as it tells the story of how our resources are allocated for mission and ministry.

Unlike our line item budget (which is an accounting tool), our narrative budget calculates the proportion of each expenditure that should be assigned to a ministry area. These allocations are then added together within each ministry to provide an estimate of total expenditures for each major ministry area. In this narrative budget we have identified seven major ministry areas: Worship, Evangelism/Hospitality, Christian Formation, Outreach/Social Justice, Pastoral Care, Parish Life, and Support for the Wider Church. While our line item budget does not include Outreach in the operating budget (it is included in our non-operating budget), we have included outreach funds in the totals for our narrative budget as it is a significant area of mission and ministry at St. Luke's.

We are grateful for the stewardship resources of the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago, which provide tools on these widely used methods for narrative budgeting. For accounting purposes, a draft line item budget will also be available to the congregation during the stewardship campaign this autumn.

By nature, narrative budgets are directional. Narrative budgets point us toward the use of resources through which our various ministries support our engagement with God's Mission. It is through our giving that we express a living of our baptismal promises on the journey of faith. With a generosity of heart and spirit may we give joyfully in going forward together in mission and ministry.