2021-04-05-accounts - Emmanuel Church (Bramcote)

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Emmanuel Church (Bramcote) Combined Trustees and Directors Report 06 April 2020 – 05 April 2021

Introduction

Emmanuel Church (Bramcote) is a Registered Charity in England and Wales (1157080) and is registered as a company limited by guarantee in England and Wales (08898983). It is governed by its memorandum and articles of association. The charity also uses the name Emmanuel Church Bramcote.

Registered Charity and Company Office: 10 Crummock Close, Bramcote, Nottingham, NG9 3BG.

The Directors: Richard Adam, Edward Bowerman, Philip Carter, Brian Davies, Richard Hopkins, Brian Kruger, Alexander Slowey

The Members: Richard Adam, Edward Bowerman, Richard Hopkins, Brian Kruger, Alexander Slowey

New Members and Directors are appointed by the current Members. There were no new Members or Directors appointed during the time covered by this report.

The Directors normally meet five times per year, and the meetings are fully recorded with agendas and minutes. A sub group consisting of the Directors, but excluding those who are also paid members of staff, sets pay and remuneration, using the Teachers Pay Scale as a guide. The Directors are assisted in the day to day care and running of the Church by a body of Elders comprising the Members of the company, which meets roughly fortnightly. Induction to the role of Director and training are provided on a personal basis as appropriate.

The Directors ensure that policies and procedures are regularly updated and reviewed. Legal advice is sought when necessary. A register of Directors’ interests is held to ensure that we are aware of conflicts of interest and manage them appropriately. This is updated regularly. The trustees have a clear procedure that if there is a potential conflict of interest on any matter, the trustee with the potential conflict of interest is asked to leave the room and take no part in the debate or decision. The Church had three paid employees during the period of this report, of whom two were also Directors: Richard Adam and Richard Hopkins. We are heavily dependent in all our activities on help voluntarily given by members of the congregation, including a full time member of staff employed on a voluntary basis.

The company is affiliated to three organisations: The Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches (FIEC), the Midlands Gospel Partnership (MGP), and the Evangelical Alliance (EA). These affiliations have no impact on the operating policies adopted by the company.

Objectives and activities

Our charitable purposes:

to advance the Christian faith in accordance with the Statement of Faith;
to relieve sickness and financial hardship and to promote and preserve good health by the provision of funds, goods, or services of any kind including through the provision of counselling and support;
to advance education.

On 23[rd] March 2020 a national lockdown was announced by the UK government to combat the spread of COVID-19. This meant our regular activities could not continue, and our objectives for the year had to be reconsidered.

Our key objectives for this financial year have been:

to run weekly online church services to advance the Christian faith in Bramcote, and to develop these services to better achieve this objective.
to develop additional online meetings and activities to advance the Christian faith in Bramcote, including activities for children and young people.
to maintain contact with regular members of the congregation, providing support and a sense of ‘togetherness’.
to find ways to maintain communication with those outside the church living in the Bramcote area.
to provide regular online events to which unbelievers can be invited to hear about the Christian faith.
to raise, through prayerful reliance on God and regular reports to the congregation, sufficient funds to cover our activities for this financial year.
to establish a ‘hardship fund’ to help those within the congregation who are particularly affected by the pandemic.
to use a minimum of ten percent of our non-trading income to support partner organisations in advancing the Christian Faith in Bramcote, the UK and around the world.

The Directors have had regard to the Charity Commission guidance on public benefit in planning the activities of the charity during the year 20-21. This report notes identifiable benefits to the public in line with these purposes.

The national lockdown meant that we could no longer run weekly church services at Bramcote College. Instead, we moved to providing online services that could be accessed at home. Initially, these involved a selection of pre-recorded videos and music videos from Youtube. These services, like our previous services at Bramcote College, seek to advance the Christian faith through teaching, singing and prayer. As we grew more confident with the technology, we moved to creating our own music videos for services, and began providing the option for services to held live online using Zoom. In October 2020 we began exploring the possibility of holding small physical gatherings in a hired venue. Further lockdowns and restrictions delayed these plans, but from March 2021 we were able to hold a number of small services at Beeston Free church. This paved the way for our return to Bramcote College in June 2021. Our services are open to all, and we sought find ways to promote them to the Bramcote area. We were pleased to see that numbers accessing our pre recorded videos at the start of the pandemic exceeded the total number of households in our congregation, and were thrilled that some of our live services were joined by people living in different parts of the UK, and around the world.

From the start of the national lockdown, we provided resources for use by families with children to explore the Christian faith together each Sunday. We also began providing online meetings for our children and youth groups, and in-person meetings at points of the year where government restrictions allowed.

A central part of our strategy for keeping in touch with the church congregation has been our nine ‘Connect Groups’. We moved quickly to ensure all Connect Group leaders had accounts with Zoom, and all regular attenders had technology that would enable them to access Zoom, as well as our online services. We have kept regular contact with Connect group leaders to support and equip them, and they in turn have kept regular contact with their group members, thus keeping the church congregation together through this national crisis. The central aim of these groups

remained the same as when they were able to meet in person: to help advance the Christian faith and to provide counselling and support to those in the church community and beyond.

We also took advantage of the opportunities given by Zoom to hold regular online prayer meetings, Church Members’ meetings, and monthly meetings for both men and women in the church. We have noticed an increase in attendance at all our groups and activities since moving them online, presumably because online meetings are easier to access. This is something we will need to consider as we come out of lockdown.

Other activities we ran have had to stop. Our two weekly groups for preschool children could not be continued in the lockdown. Our monthly visits to run services at a local Care Home also had to stop, though we were able to make contact with residents during the summer and at Christmas. Community events that we would have normally been involved with were cancelled.

But we have not stopped efforts to reach out to the community and advance the Christian faith with events aimed at the general public. We were able to run two quiz nights, each including a short talk about Christianity. We have held regular services designed to introduce guests to the Christian faith, including special services at Christmas and Easter. We have sought to publicise these through personal invitation by church members, through Facebook advertising, and through leaflet deliveries in the area. We also delivered 1200 copies of ‘Life Magazine’, a magazine seeking to advance the Christian faith, to local residents. During advent, 24 households in Bramcote created window displays to tell the Christmas story. Each display contained a letter. And a prize was offered to children who managed to decode the message. This was very well received by the community, with many from outside the church taking part. At Easter 2020, we organized an easter egg trail around Bramcote, which saw fifty households, half of which were from outside the church, take part. We also ran an online holiday club for four days in the week following Easter, providing songs, activities and teaching on the Easter story on our website. We have also run three online courses covering the basics of the Christian faith.

In January of 2020, the Leadership Team of the church identified the need to appoint a new Children’s and Youth Coordinator on a paid, part-time basis. This was necessary to maintain our work in advancing the Christian faith amongst children and young people, and to allow another member of staff to spend more time in ministry amongst women. These plans were delayed by the pandemic, but were taken to a church members’ meeting in June and approved. Applications opened in September, an appointment was made in October, and the new member of staff began their employment in January. We thank God for providing both the individual to fill this post, and the finances to fund it.

We continued to support the work of the Midlands Gospel Partnership and the Midlands Ministry Training Course which seeks to provide practical training for biblical ministry. We supported this both financially and through releasing staff members to teach on the course. This year the course has been running online.

We continued our support of a local charity, Crossteach, both financially and with staff and volunteer time. Crossteach teaches about the Christian faith in schools, through lessons, assemblies and lunchtime clubs. We are pleased that Crossteach were once again able to run interactive experiences in Bramcote College, even though Covid restrictions meant that volunteers from the church weren’t able to be involved this year.

We have also provided financial support to charities and individuals working in Argentina, Germany, South Sudan, Nottingham, Oxford and Wigan seeking to advance the Christian faith. We are pleased that we have once again been able to meet our objective of giving 10% of our non-trading income to such partners. To reduce any risk of fraud, all gifts to those working overseas are made via charities based in the UK. We also support these individuals through regular contact and prayer.

Although it has been a strange and challenging year, we do thank God that he has sustained us and enabled us to do so much despite the pandemic. As ever, we are particularly thankful for new members of our congregation who have heard of us through our publicity, including some who were not Christians when they first came, and for the many who have had the opportunity to hear of the Christian faith through our events and activities.

Financial Review

Although many charities struggled financially through the pandemic, fortunately, our income was maintained and our expenses reduced during this time, thus we had a significant surplus at the end of the financial year. We are very thankful for the continued generosity of many members the church. Some of this surplus has been used since to purchase audio-visual equipment to allow our services to be live-streamed to those unable to attend.

General Funds:

Income:

This increased by 7%. This was mainly due to a number of one-off donations from supporters. Our regular committed giving was very similar to previous years. We continue to have a high uptake of Gift Aid declarations from those donors who are tax-payers.

The total amount of donations without conditions received from Directors during the year amounted to £39,810. They were no donations received from the Directors with conditions.

Expenditure:

This was reduced by 26%. This was due to the delayed appointment of a third paid member of staff (see above) and not being able to hire venues for our events (Nil v nearly £10,000 in the previous year. Other expenses related to holding in person events were also reduced. Staff salaries remains our biggest expense. None of the employees earned more than £60,000 during this financial year. We spent a little more on licenses to allow online events (copywrite and Zoom).

The two ministers were both Directors of the company, and in addition to their salaries totaling

£73,463, received employer pension contributions of £8,816 and were reimbursed £1,165.43 for their expenses.

The non-staff Directors did not receive any remuneration, nor receive any expenses apart from being reimbursed for purchases they made for the charity.

We are pleased to have been able to meet our aim of giving 10% of our non-trading income to support partners in Bramcote and around the world who share our objectives.

Balance:

These led to a surplus of £44,024. This meant that our total general funds were £76,152. This equates to 5 ½ months of our normal (pre & post pandemic) expenditure. This is now just below the upper limit of our reserves policy of aiming to have between 2 – 6 months’ of running cost in the church’s bank account. The graph below illustrates our end of year funds and includes our two restricted funds.

Restricted Funds:

Our building fund was not used in this financial year. The donors to this fund are happy that it is kept by us for the future.

We opened a hardship fund at the beginning of the pandemic. In this financial year it had an income of £7,743 (including Gift Aid) and grants totaling £4,409 were made.

Signed by

On behalf of the Trustees and Directors Date approved: 29[th] November 2021

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