This is the evergreen explainer. The specific dollar figures for any given year are a per-year instance (shown below), not baked into this page.
A little vocabulary
- Apportionment — each church's requested share of the ministry the conference does together. A portion asked, not a bill.
- CFA (CF&A) — the Council on Finance and Administration, which builds the budget and sets apportionments.
- Collection rate — the share of the apportioned amount that actually comes in. The conference remits to the General Church only what it collects.
- For Conference Action vs. For Information Only — whether the body votes on it.
The North Georgia picture
Apportionments have fallen for seven straight years, made possible by responsible funding mechanisms — the Barnes Fund, reserves, investments, and external grants — that carry core conference functions while keeping the burden on local churches low. CFA calls this its All Source Model for income. Even so, North Georgia remains the third-highest conference in the United States by apportionment giving to the General Church.
The year-by-year reductions CFA reports:
- 2020 — −7.8%
- 2021 — −19.0%
- 2022 — −5.0%
- 2023 — −4.0%
- 2024 — −10.2%
- 2025 — −25.0%
- 2026 — −5.0%
The 2026 approved apportionment budget is $10,493,931. The 2027 recommended budget is $10,663,773 — an increase of $169,842 (+1.6%), the first rise after that long decline, driven by the end of Lilly Foundation funding for regional-developer positions (June 30, 2026) and the impact of church closures on collections. It is presented as a North Georgia–only budget: if the Georgia Unification Plan is approved this session, a new unified budget would be built by the CF&A teams of both conferences and brought to a later 2026 special session for 2027 implementation.
The 2027 budget is up for a vote this year — see Up for a vote → 2027 Conference Apportionment Budget. The audited received-apportionment figures and trend are below.
(A 20-year apportionment history and a net-assets history are printed as charts in the handbook, §208.b–c; the figures here are the text-stated budget and collection numbers from §208.d–f.)