This blog is about an average middle aged American guy who found himself trying to steer a church family out of a ditch. I got elected (that’s the first problem in the church) in Sept 2018 to help run a church that all the structural integrity of an Indy car has just hit the wall at 200 miles per hour and the slo-mo camera guys are getting highlight reel footage. Parts flying everywhere! This is one guy’s perspective on what happend, why it happened, and how you can hopefully avoid the same mistakes at your church. Along the way I discovered what a decade of ‘starvation mentality’ can do to a church family, what a denomination in crisis looks like to a member church, how the Evangelical church in America has completely come off its moorings and is adrift in consumerism, materialism, overly-simplistic and flawed theology. And you’ll hear how Jesus is at work anyway.
Some churches still have NO policies and procedures in place. Some are worse - they have "unwritten" or "tribal knowledge" where only the chosen few are allowed to know anything about how finances are handled. Of course, this leads to a lack of trust and mismanagement of funds. No less than the treasurer for Jesus and his disciples was swayed for a few pieces of silver to betray the Living God. So here's a *start* to how your financial policy might be improved, based on things I've actually lived through as a lay leader in a church. (Yes, each one of these was a real world issue in 2018.) 0. Your budget should have foretasted income, not simply expenses you think you're going to get to by "faith". Especially in smaller churches where cash flow is critical, if people don't want to pledge, then the budget should look very small to accommodate. Sorry Pastors, this is something that just has to happen so you're going to hav