ChurchMerger

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 ...

Even before seated as a deacon, we were warned (literally at the end of a wagging finger) that a church wasn’t a business.   I wrote this down in September of 2018 as a result of that accusation. I had been asked to serve on the board of directors for an organization that was failing both in its mission and (as symptoms of that) financially and in terms of human resources retention.  The CEO of this organization certainly must have been aware of these fundamental failures, as he was reporting them to a larger entity in the conglomerate (the denomination).   He abruptly chose to leave in the fall of 2018 upon the election of myself and a few others to the board.    After 13+ years at the helm of the corporation, he un-apologetically left a demoralized and directionless workforce and a financial disaster in his wake.    At that same first board meeting, a long-term shareholder decided to deride the incoming board for running this "like a business"...

In September of 2018, I was elected “Deacon” of a small suffering church in North Carolina (average Sunday attendance ~30).  At the end of that same week (and before the new deacons were seated as a board or had a meeting), the pastor of over a decade decided to retire.   The week after that, we started really trying to figure out how bad the finances were (very bad).     Like most of the 4,000ish churches that will close this year, the congregation was largely unaware, or in severe denial.   They were hurt, angry, and grumpy.    My fellow deacon board (also the “board of directors” and I set out to keep the church open, in the same denominational tradition and keep our congregation together.   That turned into a “merger”.   This blog will address the past nearly two years of what happened and how it all turned out. I’ve been a church attender nearly all my life.   I’ve got kids, though, so I attended, taught a little Sunday school, ch...