Year-End Wrap-Up 2025

This month (February), we have completed our annual End of Year reports and submitted them to the East Ohio Annual Conference. I won’t bore you with all the details, but I did want to share some of the highlights that may help us to understand where we are and how we did over the past year. The first thing on the list, and the easiest to grasp, is the number of members that we have at Christ Church and how that has changed in the past year.

We ended 2024 with 285 members and 2025 with one less than that. To get there we added two new members by profession of faith, removed one by transfer to another United Methodist congregation, and lost two to death. While we would like to be growing, this is better than many churches with similar demographics. The highlight of this is that we are bringing in new members which, despite our overall loss, is a sign of health. Less hopeful, is that our average attendance dropped from 72 in 2024 to 67 in 2025. I’ve noticed this as I look over our congregation on Sunday mornings. It isn’t really that we’ve lost members, as much as many of our members and regular attenders are attending less often. I am uncertain how we can address this, but I am certainly open to any ideas that you might have.

Another bright spot is in our children’s and adult Sunday school ministries. While it may be difficult to see from what you see week-to-week, total number of children and adults in these groups has increased from 75 to 79. The number of children (age 0-11) has stayed the same, but as those children have grown, they have moved from one age bracket to another so that overall, the number of children, youth (12-18), young adults (19-30), and adults (age 31 plus) has increased. Overall attendance for Sunday school, however, stayed the same at 46, which, I would add, is still quite respectable as a percentage of our church attendance compared to the averages I heard discussed at other churches in our Annual Conference.

Financially, we are in decent shape for the moment. While our giving and income was down a bit from last year, our spending was also down. At the same time, our missions giving, both through the United Methodist connection, and outside of it, increased. We did not, however, do as well in our collections for the United Methodist Special Sundays as we did in 2024, so this is an area where we can, and should, spend a little effort to better in 2026. Looking forward, our budget for 2026 is lower than what we budgeted in 2025 so we are hopeful that our financial footing will remain stable, at least in the short term. Longer term, our declining attendance is a concern because attendance and giving normally shift in the same direction. This is why it is so important for all of us to continue to invite others to visit, and to join, our congregation whenever possible, and to be warm and welcoming to every visitor that we meet.

So, what does that mean overall? Overall, our church is healthy and remains connected and committed to doing the work that Jesus has asked us to do in our community and in the world. But, at the same time, the road ahead continues to have challenges that will continue to require the work of every one of us if we are to grow, and to continue the work that our church has been doing in this place for the last century. I hope that we will all recommit ourselves to doing whatever it takes to make next year’s report better than this one.

Blessings,

Pastor John