Preacher training costly for church
Thursday August 23, 2007

Church members enjoying themselves at the conference

The Methodist Church of Fiji says it will use the bulk of its collections from its 2007 annual conference to train its preachers.

So far the church has collected $2.22 million, more than the $2m it had targeted for the whole conference.

Meanwhile church spokesman, Reverend James Bhagwan says that last year their expenditure was more than $3.45m.

Bhagwan says the bulk of this money went into training.

"From a dollar, 22.1 cents goes to training for our preachers.

"We have our non-formal training and training at circuit school level for the vakatawa or preachers at the Theological College and also other training institutes."

Bhagwan said the church also spends

" 4.9 cents in every dollar for social outreach programmes and social welfare programmes.

" 10.3 cents in every dollar for outreach programmes both evangelism and spiritual.

" 11 cents in every dollar for management of properties and assets.

" 2.9 cents in every dollar for its finance department.

" 10 cents in every dollar for administration.

" 2.6 cents in every dollar for management.

" 2.3 cents in every dollar for annual church conference which is around $78,000 every year.

" 8 cents in every dollar for the Church president and vice president and 1.2 cents in every dollar for their travelling.

" 8 cents in every dollar for pension of retired ministers.

" 8.3 cents in every dollar for divisional administration and half a cent in every dollar for every church meeting.

Bhagwan said there was a surplus of $422,000 collected from the annual conference last year.

"That's 12 cents in every dollar which is being saved and the Methodist Church is a mission based church which we has a lot of responsibility not only to its members but the community at large," he said.

He said the church has been looking after the welfare, education, health and providing other services to the community.

The Methodist Church annual conference is currently being held at Furnival Park in Suva and ends this Saturday.