Dear friends
Free Will Offers to the Diocesan Common Fund 2024
Please download with this message a printable leaflet, 'Free Will Offer: How can your parish support ministry in the Diocese of York?' (PDF, 2 pages, pictured), to guide you and your PCC through the process of deciding your parish's Free Will Offer for the diocesan Common Fund in 2024.
Do please ensure your PCC members have sight of this leaflet - it can be viewed on screen or printed as preferred. Consider making it available to your congregation too, perhaps through your website or social media, and of course it could be printed for distribution or display on a noticeboard.
It is a 'big ask' to invite every PCC, led where possible by its incumbent, to pray together and discuss what Free Will Offer it is called and able to make for 2024, and to enter that number in the online system (see below) by the 20th September; but I ask because these are crucial decisions whose outcome really will be felt all across the Diocese of York. We need to hold each other in prayer as those decisions are made.
Once your decision is made about your 2024 Free Will Offer, the entry process similar to last year's - please go to www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/FWO2024, select the relevant parish from the dropdown list, enter your 2024 pledge and add any comment you may wish to make about your financial situation, by the 20th September. It really is as simple as that!
I’m sure that in your PCC’s own prayers you will remember all those others across the Diocese, sharing the task with you and equally dependent on its outcome. I know that these are difficult times but I am hopeful that as we respond to our calling to live Christ’s story in the places where we are, God will bless us richly and give us all we need for his mission in the world.
With my prayers and all good wishes
+Stephen Ebor: