How Pastors Should Handle the Church’s Money and Business

Recently I was asked for my advice about running the business side of church.

I’m not entirely sure what this means. I assume it has something to do with money and taxes and delegation and staff, etc.

Most of this stuff I didn’t deal with. I was the only “employee” of the church and our budget was small. We didn’t own a building, so I had none of those concerns.

The church I became pastor at was a little weird before I got there. The previous pastor ran the place. There was no board; he just had two guys who adored him backing him up.

When I became pastor, I took a look at “the books.” The largest expense category was “miscellaneous!” From what I knew of the place, “miscellaneous” meant all the times the pastor and the two fan boys went out to lunch.

The previous pastor self-published books. He gave money to the church and counted it as his tax deduction. Then the church paid for self-publishing the book. Then he sold those books to people in the church. It was quite the racket.

That’s the kind of stuff that was going on.

My first task was to get a board. I asked the two fan boys if they would be on it. They refused. They preferred to sit back and criticize everything I did rather than help, which was shockingly not at all helpful.

One of the guys I chose for the board had experience in banking and his accountant mind got to work on the books. The guy spent hours sorting through the books and getting things in order. This has always been appreciated by me and many others.

We established rules for who would handle the money with multiple eyes on every transaction. I never touched any of the church’s money.

So, there’s a couple tips right there.

1. Get good help. It does help to have someone with an accountant’s brain to do accounting! Don’t leave this to chance.

2. Put things in order and do everything above board. Have multiple people sign off on every transaction.

3. The pastor should never know who gives how much money. Nor should the pastor count or touch the money.

How many pastors have you heard of who got busted for doing weird money things? The above steps will eliminate all that temptation. I never wrote one check. I never bought anything with the church’s money.

The best way to be above board is to never do anything with the thing you want to be above board with!

As far as the day-to-day operation of the church, there were systems set up that took care of most things. I took care of a lot of “office work.” I did most of the copying, website stuff, mailings, and all that. Again, it was a small church with minimal levels of busy work.

I also am a person who hates busy work, and I was in a position to simply not do things that would require more busy work! If you eliminate busy work, you’ll be amazed at how little busy work you have to do!

Sure some people will get upset that you cut their thing they liked, but hey, if they aren’t doing the busy work of doing it, chop it. Most things that churches are doing that suck up time and other resources are not found in the Bible anyway. If you simplified your church to simply following the New Testament, boy howdy will your church be easier to run.

That’s my advice for the “business” side of running a church. It’s probably not helpful, but I also never thought the business side of the church was a big deal, and that’s why!

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