First of all, I want to thank all of you who made out your estimate of giving cards for this year. Going into this day, we've heard from approximately a third of those that we expect to hear from, and those families have pledged well over half a million dollars already to the operating and benevolence outreach of this church. This is wonderful--but we have a way to go.

The leadership of this church also has a lot of work to do, because budget requests are way over what the finance people estimate our income will be next year. Which is the way it should be. Those requests represent vision, what we ought to be doing to expand and improve our ministry to this community and to the world.

So the requests are in, the forecasts from the finance people are in. What remains is the third ingredien…