June 2025 – Mark Hagewoood, TWK Treasurer, reported at the annual conference that last year, the TWKUMC received over $8.18 million in connectional commitments from 477 churches.

“While slightly under budget, we’re incredibly grateful to the 365 churches that gave 100% or more of their connectional commitments. We utilized some reserves, as budgeted, but also earned interest of almost $200,000, which was not included in our budget,” reported Hagewood.

“On the expense side, our ministry teams and areas underspent their budgets by approximately $1.2 million. We are grateful for our ministry teams, who accomplished some incredible things last year while remaining mindful of their budgets and achieving significant expense savings.”

The result of these income and expense numbers is that the conference ended 2024 with a surplus of $809,000. The TWK Council on Finance and Administration (CFA), at the suggestion of Bishop Graves, enthusiastically endorsed a proposal to return these dollars back to the local church.

“We acknowledge the economic struggles that each of our local churches is facing and appreciate the intentional decision of your churches to continue paying your connectional commitments,” said Hagewood. “Therefore, CFA is recommending that all current active churches that made a connectional commitment payment in 2024 receive a check back for 10% of those 2024 payments.”

This means that if your church made a connectional commitment payment of $10,000 in 2024, your church would receive a check for $1,000.

The TWK Council on Finance and Administration recommended that the annual conference take a vote to issue a 10% rebate of Connectional Commitments paid in 2024 to all active local churches in our conference.

That recommendation passed, and checks were issued to churches later that day.

How will your church use this rebate? Please let us know by sending a note or story to communications@twkumc.org.