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Thursday, 1 October 2015

Causes Of Problems In Church Financing

By Della Monroe


As much as the church is a place of worship, running it needs money. There have been so many cases of mismanagement of church finances that raises the question of whether people are doing this in the right manner. There are some very common mistakes that are made when managing church finances. The following are some of the most common mistakes that churches make and some solutions to church financing problems.

Lacking vision is one common mistake leaders make as one can go nowhere without a vision; there ought to be a vision to have a mission. In this aspect, churches should be managed as a business whereby there are financial plans and a laid out plan that is agreed by the congregation in order to have the support from every member in pushing these goals forward and realizing them.

Also in this regard, a financial plan should go into specific details on the expenses to be incurred on the running projects and the source of revenue. Given the projects that most churches tend to take up, depending solely on offerings is unrealistic and therefore other sources of their revenue should be created for the success of these projects.

There are churches that fear asking money from their congregation due to the various speculations that have been running around of churches that are only running for financial benefits. As much as this might be true, this should not deter one from requesting the congregation to contribute in realizing the vision of these institutions as it is for their own good and benefit.

In regards to asking for contributions, the management should at least reveal the plans that the money contributed is meant for and with time reveal the progress made which should be evident; a thing that most churches fail to do. As a result, the congregation loses the giving morale and start giving in to the theories that churches are meant to fleece them which is a mistake that should be avoided at all cost.

To encourage people to contribute, the leaders need to avoid making too many financial asks. In some churches, the congregation is asked to contribute towards too many projects at a particular time and this leads to a breach of trust. With time, people become less motivated to contribute and this leads to less income. The leaders must therefore ask for help only for the things that are essential.

Some of the mistakes made by the management are the same ones made by the normal businesses. For instance, they acquire debt that is too much too handle. This leads to a situation where all the revenue goes into the payment of the debts therefore stagnating the development; as a result, apart from being disappointed, people begin to lose faith with the leadership as they might feel somewhat fleeced even if the mismanagement was not intentional.

The best way to go about handling churches finances is handling them like one would do for a business; for this, the people chosen in the committee to handle finances should be qualified in this field in order to ensure they are competent enough to account every single expenditure and can make decisive decisions in handling these finances.




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