2024 Ground Breaking
Year EndREPORT
2024 was a "ground breaking" year for Loving God, Loving Others and Making Disciples. Just take a look and see for yourself!
SOCIALLYconnected
Our website and social media presence continued throughout the year to create new and better ways for our people to engage.
Between Facebook, YouTube, TheOrchard.life and Instagram, we worked hard to keep those digital connections as real and effective as we could.
FB followers watched
minutes of videos
.LIFE visitors logged
sessions
viewers watched
broadcasts
sharing the gospel resulted in
35 Baptisms
and 74 Decisions for Christ
MAKING THE GOSPEL RELEVANT
Stepping Up
by serving
Our church family really stepped up their serving in 2024! Teams continue to grow, increasing our serve capabilities across the board. We even added three teams, .Life, Orchard Women of the Word (OWOW), and Communications.
It was an incredible night! For the first time, 8 churches in Ellijay came together to form a multi-church worship team of musicians, vocalists, 50+ person choir, lighting and sound for one night of powerful worship with our community. With over 850 in attendance, it was standing room only at Victory Christian Center! ETC was there to record the entire night, so you can watch the whole worship experience HERE. Below is a short recap of the night.
A Ground Breaking Year for Gilmer
Thanks to all of our amazing volunteers, our church out did themselves for our community in so many ways this past year! Here's how we did that...
Loving God, Loving Others & Making Disciples
At Super Tailgate Sunday we had 20 LifeGroups and many attendees took advantage of the opportunity to meet them, with several making decisions on the spot to join one. Our youth ministry continues to grow. This past year they had the opportunity to serve at both the community food bank and at one of the nursing homes in Ellijay. Our youth also served as elves at Breakfast With Santa. The Orchard Guys continue to meet Saturdays for Breakfast and devotional. Plus, 10 men have competed Spiritual Fathers training, 1 has entered into a mentoring relationship and the others are seeking spiritual sons to mentor. Our new women's ministry, Orchard Women of the Word (OWOW), had their launch in November and are kicking off 2025 with a monthly study of women of the Bible. Celebrate Recovery celebrated their 8th year anniversary, began a jail ministry and continues to see Friday night's attendance grow.
20 LifeGroups are meeting weekly in homes! They're eating, praying and studying God's Word together.
Weekly attendance is now averaging 49 youth! 22 youth gave their lives to Christ in 2024 and 13 have taken the first step of obedience by getting baptized.
The Orchard Guys continues to be a time of fellowship, good food and study.
Our women's ministry launched in November, they enjoyed fellowship, food, and a bible study!
In addition to celebrating our 8th anniversary in the 1st quarter, our Inmate Outreach Program 4th quarter was well attended by an average of 22 female inmates per meeting. 13 of those inmates gave their lives to Christ and were baptized by Breaking Chains, N. Ga. We added 3 new leaders in the last quarter alone, and our male and female Step Studies continued meeting weekly. Our upper leadership T.E.A.M. welcomed a new Encourager Coach, Bonnie Bishop. Kristin Nunez stepped into the Ambassador Coach position. Receiving a CHIP is a call for celebration at CR. In the 4th quarter we gave out 27 six months, 22 nine months, 20 one year, 2 eighteen months, 2 three years, 2 five years, 2 six years, 1 seven years, 2 eight years, 1 fourteen years, 2 sixteen years, 2 nineteen years, 1 thirty-four years!
2024 Financial Report
2024 was a ground breaking year! Our Right Now building campaign kicked off in January, and we literally broke ground on our Highland property on November 3. 750 attended Easter in the Park, which proved to be an even better location than the football field. 20 LifeGroups were represented at Super Tailgate Sunday, also in the park. We even had 35 baptisms in the park that day! November 17th brought 8 churches together for the first time, forming one awesome worship team for an incredible night of worship with our community at Victory Christian Center. In between it all we worshiped, baptized, celebrated, studied, discipled, prayed, and served our church, each other and our community.
Yearly Budget
General Giving
General Spending
Fund Balance
2024 Allocation
Year To Year Contributions
2022
$885,149
Total Contributions
2023
$745,000
Total Contributions
2024
$798,025
Total Contributions
ForGilmer
Your gracious giving to ForGilmer and the General Fund allowed us to not only fund our usual outreaches, but enabled us to flex with the changes, so we could do what nobody else is doing to reach people nobody is reaching.
$5,553
Total Giving
$6,454
Total Spending
$1,910
Fund Balance
Orchard Student Ministry
The youth are our future! Your giving helped lower food costs on Wednesday nights. It also enabled us to provide student scholarships for DNOW and FUGE camp, assuring any student that wanted to attend, could.
$23,304
Total Giving
$27,961
Total Spending
$22,131
Fund Balance
Celebrate Recovery
Watching Celebrate Recovery grow is a blessing! Thankfully, even though their spending this year exceeded their giving, they had enough overflow from 2023 in their account to cover it.
$24,783
Total Giving
$32,832
Total Spending
$3,732
Fund Balance
Guatemala
Two elders and two deacons walked into a church building in Guatemala.
It is an old, run-down awful building. Pastor Secundino is trying to get his new church building built. His congregation has raised enough money for four walls and a roof, but still needed a floor, windows, and front doors.
We prayed about it, and funded the completion of their building by sending them $12,000 from our Guatemala fund in the first quarter so they could begin meeting there as soon as possible! We're happy to report that the church building is complete and services are in full swing. Their first service was December 21, 2022!
$1,167
Total Giving
$3,717
Total Spending
$478
Fund Balance
Building Fund
Your continued support helps us prepare for moving to our future home.
$4,642,231
Current Fund Balances
$3,657,210
Total Giving
$747,207
Total Spending
"Right Now" Pledge Progress
$1,996,342
Total Pledged
$1,569,401
Total Received
79%
Of Pledges Received
We hope that this information gives you a complete and well rounded look at how we seek to steward our resources. Your obedience and generosity makes all of this possible. If you have any questions at all, please do not hesitate to reach out to Larry Lynch through the button below. He manages our accounts and is more than happy to help!
If you would like to give towards our mission for 2025:
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