Other Troubling News

My usual correspondent in these matters reports on the finances of St John the Evangelist Calgary:

The campaign to raise the down payment on the church property is now scheduled to end in December 2016. This would be five years after they were given five years to exercise an option to buy the building from the Anglican diocese, so I am not sure why the campaign was originally supposed to run to December 2017. But the new brochure requests that all pledges be paid up this year. In the meantime they have let their full-time assistant priest go, the rector and his family have moved out of the rectory (this could be for any number of reasons), and most significantly, to my mind, the parish no longer posts the weekly bulletins, which previously provided a look at attendance and givings. The former had plateaued at about 140; the latter was healthy, but by my calculations not enough to enable the parish to meet its budget of about $260,000 annually and also raise $165,000 for a down payment on its property. In fact, while the Anglican diocese is only charging them $1500 a month rent, they need a much larger down payment than the 10% minimum to keep mortgage payments from being many times that.