Your fall dinner cleared $4,200. The committee is pleased, the kitchen team is wrung out, and somebody has already said the quiet part out loud: we have to do this again next year.
That is the honest problem with most church fundraising ideas. They work. They also expire the moment the tables are folded away, which means the same six people are back in the same kitchen twelve months later, raising the same amount, for the same reason.
If you want the list first: a standing designated offering, a church cookbook, renting out your hall or lot, one hard-push dinner or auction a year, and a youth car wash. Those are the church fundraiser ideas that reliably pay for a small congregation, and each one is below with what it costs you in volunteer hours.