Illinois South Conference

1.  Annual reporting allows you to update your church’s contact information so that the UCC Yearbook & Directory, Access UCC, and  Find A Church on ucc.org are accurate.

2.  When planning your congregations future plans or when your congregation is in the search process, an eleven -year membership and financial report for your church will be available from the data that you submit during the yearbook process. You can see what money was spent on salary, housing, pensions, etc. to understand and prepare a package for the proposed candidate. If your church doesn’t report the information, you cannot easily benefit from that statistical information. It also helps your conference understand your congregation from a statistical perspective, in order to provide appropriate support and resources. If you’d like to see your church’s 11-year report, let me know and I’ll run it for you.

3.  When you report the membership numbers, we keep that number to determine how many delegates are allowed to represent your church at Annual Meeting, Ecclesiastical Councils, and any other official meetings. So without that information, we cannot determine your representation accurately.

4.  The numbers you report help to determine how many delegates your Conference can designate for General Synod, which is one of the essential ways your voice is heard on important issues.

5. The information given about ministerial support is anonymously combined with other churches’ information to give a suggested compensation package for any pastor. These statistics are a benchmark to determine appropriate church staffing configurations and compensation guidelines. It will be helpful for your congregation when in the search process or when establishing your budget.  (Individual data is not published but is used to accumulate the final statistics for the benchmarks.)

6.  Reporting your church’s OCWM and special offerings giving allows conferences and the national setting to recognize and thank you for your support of the wider church and to encourage future support.

7.  The trend of attendance gives you one way of tracking the ways in which you have an opportunity to “do church.”

8.  This information allows the UCC Center for Analytics, Research and Data (CARD) to conduct advanced statistical analyses that contribute to important research for all mainline denominations, like some of the research reported on CARD’s  weekly blog.

9.  For new and renewing churches that receive funding from the national setting, annual reporting helps to ensure continued financial support, as it is a requirement for churches that receive these grants.

10.  For churches seeking loans through the Church Building & Loan Fund or Cornerstone Fund, annual statistics are viewed by these entities for verification and clarification of information provided in the loan application.

11.  You’re creating a historical statistical record for your congregation that will long outlive current generations and that historians will be able to learn from in the future.

12. The data you provide contributes to the reporting of denominational trends in the annual UCC Statistical Profile, which tracks overall membership, ministerial compensation, and church finances over time.

Please decide who is responsible for this at your church. If it is not in your job description, please forward to the person responsible. Don’t assume someone else will be doing it. If you choose not to enter the information online, just fill out the attached Yearbook Data Entry Worksheet at the end of the Church Instructions and send it to me. I will be happy to do it for you.  I am also sending an additional copy by snail mail to all church offices.

Data Hub opened January 8 and will remain open until midnight on March 4, 2020. See the Instructions for how-to. Thanks.

To receive instructions, contact Lynnette Schuepbach  at email.