GIVING
SUNDAY OFFERING
During the pandemic it has been hard to offer church members and attendees an opportunity to give as part of our worship. In our morning service you can give with cash and contactless donations of £30 or less during or after the service or click the buttons below. Gifts greater than £30 cannot be processed this way, so please use the link to our Stewardship give.net account.
We believe in the Biblical concept of stewardship, which teaches that everything we have (money and possessions) and everything we are (gifts and talents) belongs to God, our Creator. It’s our responsibility to manage what He gives us in line with what He wants. In the Gospels Jesus teaches extensively on money, so it’s clearly very important in our following Him.
A Special Project
HBC’s Old High Street congregation has two full-time reverend ministers for whom it provides manses. We have for many years had a single manse and now we have taken on the challenge of purchasing another, or more accurately the property is purchased in 2021 and a minister together with family are installed but the church has taken up loans and now needs to pay them off. Some loans are scheduled for repayment within 10 years and one is planned to take 20. Additional giving can be directed to this Special Project which uses its own HBC bank account and it would be great to reduce those timescales.
How can I give to HBC?
Cash or Contactless
If this suits you
We can receive cash or contactless payments during or after our morning service. These gifts are for £30 or under, allowing us to use GASDS (see below) and keep our systems working well. For gifts greater than £30 please select another option.
By Standing Order
Best way!
This means you give an instruction to your bank to pay into one of HBC’s bank accounts until you say stop. This has many benefits: it saves you forgetting, it gives the church a regular income, and it makes it easier for HBC to reclaim tax through Gift Aid if you want us to do that. You can start or change standing orders very easily at any time by doing it yourself online or by completing the following form and passing this to your bank.
Suitably completed the form can instruct a one-off payment.
Gift Aid may be applicable if the donor is identified.
Online one-off gifts
For your convenience
You can give one-off gifts via Stewardship at give.net. This also allows for more ongoing giving. Just click the link below.
HBC has a policy that only the Treasurer and if requested our annual accounts inspector know the details of any gifts.
We can apply GASDS to recover tax on anonymous gifts of £30 or less collected as in the first column above, but a total value limit per year applies and we give thanks that this is normally reached. Therefore rather than giving anonymously even for small amounts it’s better to follow other options if applicable.
HBC does reserve the position of not accepting gifts from sources of which we are unsure or that the giver wishes to be spent on purposes not already in our general budget or which the Trustees consider incompatible with our charitable purposes.
How can I increase the value of what I give to HBC?
If you pay UK income or capital gains tax, thanks to the Gift Aid scheme the church can probably* claim tax back from the government. The church can only recover tax at standard rate, which is of great benefit as at present this releases resources for our ongoing ministry and mission to the tune of an additional 25% of such gifts.
Please just download a Gift Aid form, authorising the church to reclaim the tax on your giving.
*Some “small print”:- Please read the information on the form fully. In outline, the “you” has to be a named individual who in the present or previous tax year has paid amounts of these taxes to cover the claim that HBC would make.
Also available from the Treasurer’s pigeon hole in the foyer.
So that an original signature is held in our folder it needs to be passed to our Treasurer as an actual sheet of paper, either by post to the address on the form or by hand into his pigeon-hole.
The Gift Aid form need not be completed if you are ONLY giving via “online” options in the third column. All gifts to HBC are just that and no extra payments are needed to make Gift Aid applicable to them.
BEQUEST TO HBC IN YOUR WILL
You might consider providing for a monetary bequest to the church in your will. This could help with inheritance tax (IHT) on your estate because HBC is a registered charity and your executor(s) can take off the gift before computing the IHT payable. The gift has to be treated as capital and is not eligible for HBC Gift Aid. The treasurer can supply a suggested form of words which not only unambiguously identifies the Trustees of HBC but also covers various possibilities such as our registration number altering were the church to be reconstituted as a CIO.
In conclusion
Many thanks in advance if you decide to give to HBC, but should you wish to contact our Treasurer on the subject please use the following form. One use might be that a tax-year summary of giving is not routinely distributed to each donor but may be requested on a one-off basis.