From Mark Welch, Ministerial and Member Services

We appreciated having Julie Brown here last week at the home office to present an overview of the results of the recent Attendee Survey. The presentation was recorded and will be shared in a future eNews with a link for ministers and members to view the presentation.

We continue to make progress toward pastoral assessments of our U.S. ministers in conjunction with their regional pastors, considering feedback from the Attendee Survey. Our goal is to complete all evaluations by the end of the year.

The Feast of Tabernacles is still three months away. Originally, the Feast site for our deaf brethren was going to be in Jamaica, but it has now been moved to Lake Junaluska, North Carolina, due to COVID-19. This has caused me and, my wife, Barbara, to change our plans so that we can serve them. While changes may be made as we draw nearer to the Feast, the most important thing to know is that we will be keeping the Feast as God commands! These conversations are ongoing and we will keep everyone posted as decisions are made. We greatly appreciate your patience and understanding during these challenging times.

From Rick Shabi, Treasurer

The Church's fiscal year ended Tuesday, June 30. It is always an exciting time at the end of a year, as you can see the results of an entire cycle of operations and related budget. June ended the fiscal year with income more than 20% above budget for the month. Income for the fiscal year ended on a similarly high note, somewhere around 5% above budget. With everything going on in the world these days, the only explanation for this is that God has seen us through and blessed us greatly. We are grateful and owe everything to Him.

Now begins the task of our year-end closing procedures which comprise most of the month of July.

The required annual external audit of the Church's financial records and system of internal controls has been scheduled for the week of August 17, the same week of the next Council of Elders meetings. With the new restrictions in place, the auditing team will be doing some of their work remotely. This year we have requested our audit firm to mix up their staff a bit, so that we have a different "set of eyes" on our books and systems.

From Peter Eddington, Media and Communications Services

The latest issue of Beyond Today magazine features articles dealing with anxiety, weariness, depression—and even suicide—as a result of the economic slowdown and COVID-19 health crisis. There has definitely been a rise in the number of people dealing with these problems. The articles point our readers to God and the hope of His Kingdom.

We had a fantastic number of calls for our Beyond Today TV program on Sunday—the most for one day this entire fiscal year, and one of the best in our history. Also, the program last week will be in the top five for responses this year.

Roku live streaming (such as for our Sabbath webcast) is not currently working. It appears to be since Roku updated to version 13. We are working on getting it fixed through our app developer and Roku.

From Ariana Del Signore, United News Editor

The July-August 2020 issue of United News was sent to the printer on Wednesday, so it should be arriving at the home office within the next few days for distribution. This issue covered content related to the GCE meeting and ABC graduation, as well as the graduation of high school and college seniors from around the U.S. We also published the Beyond Today reader survey results.

You may have noticed that the January-February 2020 issue looked different. In honor of the 25th anniversary year of UCG, the United News was updated and redesigned. Clint Porter and Matt Hernandez helped a great deal with the redesign. We switched from a primarily blue color scheme to green to match stylistically with the Members website, since it's primarily a publication for members and coworkers. To draw more attention to the content itself, we used clean lines, page headings and an updated page number placement to improve issue navigation without distracting from the actual content.

A major goal of this publication is to connect members and coworkers and create a sense of church community by publishing events and updates from local church areas. However, this issue, I did not receive local church updates since no one was having services or social activities for a time. So this issue includes feature article with reports from brethren all over the world. Matt Hernandez worked on maps of each of the countries being featured, and we included them in the printed reports. I received reports from over a dozen countries, representing over half a dozen languages.

Circulation right now in the U.S. is about 14,800 copies, with a few thousand more copies being circulated internationally. U.S. circulation is up by about 150 since January 2020.

The next issue goes to press in late August, so hopefully there will be more church news to report as services and church socials begin again.

From Tory Trone, Information Technology 

Drupal (our website platform) had planned to stop sending security updates for Drupal 7 at the end of November 2021. Due to COVID-19, this has now been pushed back to November 2022. This will allow us extra time to get our UCG websites updated and moved to Drupal 9. It is nice to have some more breathing room to make this change.