Congress begins appropriations process; Finding right insurance plan could save big money; Three signs of church decline

Good News for Today

The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) has released a letter urging Congress to consider three pro-life policy priorities during funding negotiations for the 2025 fiscal year.

With Congress beginning the negotiations process for the 2025 appropriations bills (the 12 bills which annually fund the government), the ERLC authored the letter to express its desire for both the House and Senate appropriations committees to consider several pro-life policy areas during the process.

The three pro-life policy priorities outlined in the letter include:

• Retaining and expanding existing baseline pro-life protections
• Ensuring conscience protections remain steadfast
• Resisting any expansion of taxpayer funding for IVF and establishing baseline ethical standards for its practice

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Selecting the right insurance plan is the first way to save money, says Harold Roe, a Nashville based insurance consultant. Consumers tend to seek insurance policies with low deductibles and high premiums. But generally, savings come through the opposite approach: buying insurance with high deductibles and low premiums, paired with a health savings account that enables tax-free spending on health care.

Roe cited as an example an employer he worked with recently. Employees could choose between a health plan with a $1,000 family deductible and a plan with a $6,000 family deductible. The high-deductible plan had a $10,000 annual out-of-pocket maximum for a family compared with a $3,000 maximum for the lower-deductible plan.

“The vast majority of the employees are enrolled in the [low-deductible] plan even though it would take $13,720 in claims or more for it to be superior financially to the high-deductible health plan,” Roe said. “We know statistically that less than 10 percent of the population in a given plan year will hit that level of claims, yet most people still opt for the low deductible and low out-of-pocket maximums because they have not been educated about health plan math and its particular variables.”

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Thom Rainer says church decline happens gradually and then all of a sudden.

Three common “gradually, but then all of a sudden” moments occur in churches every week in increasing numbers. The first of these wake-up calls was simply the decline in attendance. The pandemic exacerbated the numerical declines, but it did not cause them. A church with 432 attending wakes up, and over half the congregation is gone.

Second, related to the attendance decline is a financial decline. Fewer attendees are directly correlated to lower giving. For a season, many of the higher givers can keep the church financially afloat, but when they leave or die, the church’s financial health deteriorates rapidly.

It is the second “gradually, then all of a sudden” wake-up call.

The third of these moments relates to the physical facility of churches. It is common for churches to neglect the upkeep of the buildings and grounds. When money is tight, reserve funding for capital needs gets neglected first. The building deteriorates gradually, but then, suddenly, a part of the roof collapses. Or the HVAC system shuts down. Or the parking lot has so many potholes that it is unsafe for vehicles and those walking to and from their cars.