ONLINE GIVING
Our Westpac account details:
Account Name: Extreme Life Church
BSB: 033 263
Account Number: 446 849
WHY WE GIVE
God does not need our money…he wants our hearts…and he knows that our hearts and our finances are very strongly linked.
The Bible teaches us to bring the tithe, to give offerings, to sow into the kingdom and to live generously.
Doing so reflects that we have finances, but our finances do not have us.
OTHER WAYS
You can sow into the impact of the church by bringing your tithes and by giving offerings or contributions to our apostolic team or building fund or any other projects we run from time to time.
To give cash in our meetings, please use the secure box mounted to the wall at the left of the main entrance as you exit. This will be checked and cleared after every service.
If anyone still write cheques, they can be written out to: Extreme Life Inc
what to know
There are a number of misconceptions with regard to finances in Australian churches.
The first is, that people think the Australian Government gives money to churches. This is untrue. No church in Australia receives a cent from the Australian Government for church purposes. Australian churches are entirely self funded. Members of local churches contribute into the church funds, which releases all of our combined contributions to be more effective than our individual funds could be on their own. All of these contributions are made, by individuals who have all paid tax…meaning that all contributions are from funds that have already been taxed…to tax these contributions would be double dipping as the funds were not “spent” on a provided good or service, they were given so they can be combined and spent on resourcing the needs of the church community and other organisations the church may contribute or donate to. Despite not receiving a single cent from the Australian Government, churches are required to report the spending of every single cent to the Australian Government.
A question churches are often asked, is “Where does all the money go?”. The simple answer for most churches is “All what money?” There is a misconception that churches are rolling in money and don’t know how to spend it all. Remember a church only has, what the people in the church have chosen to give. As a local church here in Warrnambool, we are committed to more than $60 000.00 per year in building leases for buildings (because we don’t have the resources to buy our own building) where we conduct our Sunday and other meetings and our administration. We haven’t opened a door or turned on a light or a heater yet…we also need to add to our expenses, all the running costs of our leased buildings…power, water, telephone, gas, fire department inspections, land tax, council rates as well as all landlord outgoings and expenses. As you can imagine, this all adds up quite quickly, so our $60 000.00 is now well over $100 000.00. On top of all that, is the operating costs of running an organisation plus the money we release to other organisations that assist in local and global community needs.
There is also the idea that “the pastor” is living off the church’s massive bank account. As mentioned, most churches don’t maintain massive bank accounts, but even if they did, the Australian Government’s reporting requirements mean that it is not possible for pastors to live off those accounts…even if the pastors wanted to. All our pastors salaries are set by an external advisory team, that factors in things like: average local income, total church income, total church expenditure, available funds, experience and qualifications of the pastor as well as cost of living in the area where the church is based. Pastors do not have the ability to live on the church income, but like everyone else, must live on their own provided salaries (which are usually much lower than the same person could be earning in their own field of expertise, training or education). Pastors are given some tax breaks by the Australian Government, because it is recognised that churches cannot pay the pastors enough to attract people from the business world, but neither can the Australian Government contribute to the local community in the way the local church can with the budget that the local church has. Pastors incomes are not tax free, they just have a different tax free threshold because of this recognition of the positive community work that churches accomplish. We must remember too, that while pastors cannot increase their standard of living if church income is up, that none of our building, service or operating costs can be left unpaid to pay our pastors…so when church income is down…guess who gets to go without!
Everyone who attends a church, contributes to incurring the running costs…so it is reasonable then to expect that all people contributing to incurring the costs, would be happy to contribute to covering the costs they helped incur. It is also reasonable to assume that most people who attend the church, will take the opportunity to contribute to all the other areas of church and local and global community needs that their church is assisting with.
There is never a stockpile of huge amounts of cash within this local church, because we are always, actively using any donated funds to resource our local and global communities. We are involved in the feeding of primary school children, building orphanages, sponsoring children, building hospitals and of course building churches as well as many other local and global community projects. All donated funds are utilised for these purposes and are not sitting building up in a bank account or making our pastors rich.
Despite having increasing pastoral needs, Extreme Life Church currently only has one pastoral couple on our pay roll as this is all we can currently afford to pay. We have many helpful people that are required to work in other fields to generate their income, which means they are not as accessible during the week as we would like them to be. We would love to be able to increase our full time staff into the future, but this is 100% dependant on funding being available through the donations and contributions of those in the local church.
