How To Protect The Treasury (and How Sherwin-Williams Could Help)
What does Sherwin-Williams have to do with parish stewardship? Plenty.
One asset worth protecting is your church building. Painting your church building is one of the most financially prudent things that a parish can do because when everything goes to rot or awry, it often could have been prevented with just a little bit of paint throughout time. That’s both an actuality and a metaphor wrapped up all in one.
Basic building maintenance should be a priority for any parish because it ensures that your building won’t fall in on itself. Because once you’re stuck in that continuous rut of needing to spend $10,000 on a new roof or $5,000 on paint restoration, it can be extremely difficult to climb out of that hole. Those are big ticket items that you should create a plan to fix, but also start focusing on a more forward-thinking approach of defining the preventative small ticket items that you can do now for much less in order to avoid it becoming a major structural issue later on.
Another asset is your parishioners’ talents.
While the Finance Council is typically tasked with the treasure aspect, our duty should also involve the other aspects of stewardship—time and talent.
At a previous parish of mine, we found a firm that would handle the safe disposal of several oil tanks and the dirt around them that were used to heat the church decades ago, but had been left underneath the parish campus.
Being underground posed an environmental risk because they had not been used for so many years. There could be soil contamination and clean up that would be costly for the parish. The low estimate was $50,000 but we knew that the task could potentially cost much more. However, we discovered a parishioner whose job was to clean up a Superfund site. He had all the equipment, knowledge, certification, and, more importantly, a safe disposal location. He completed the job at cost to the parish for significantly less. By leveraging this parishioner’s time and talent, we reduced the cost because he was able to use his talents and company to benefit the parish.
There’s a gray area where Finance Councils are responsible for not only looking into how money is spent, but also look at the assets that parishioners bring in terms of time and talent so that it can find a better solution in protecting the parish that doesn’t involve money.
Another example of a financial pain point might be a struggling faith formation program. A parish might be spending a ton of money on books and materials, but discover that a parishioner is a curriculum writer for Scholastic or Seton Homeschool. The writer has a particular talent that might allow them to advise or create their own resources to improve the program. The parish not only lowers costs, but also gets that writer more involved. A parishioner that is involved will always contribute because they love the Church, Jesus, and their parish. As a steward serving on a Finance Council, or as a pastor or Pastoral Council, your duty is to present parishioners with those avenues and engage with them.
Protecting the money aspect of stewardship, for the most part, stems from best practices from my background in banking.
Throughout my career, I was constantly involved in working with churches and served in an advisory role to various parishes. In that role of just being the banker guy who is trying to do right by his clients, I eventually moved into a more formal role within the parish’s Finance Council—or if a parish didn’t have one, I became the finance guy who advised the general Parish Council (and simply make those comments about the importance of painting your church building).
Within a parish environment, there’s a lot of trust with the people around them. In my experience in banking, I trusted every single one of my tellers, not just with my money and other people’s money, but more than just that. They were my trusted go-to group of people.
That being said, I never sent anyone into the vault, where all the money is stored, alone.
Dual control is one of the basic practices of handling money, and one that a parish should implement to protect its assets. That basic aspect is often lost because we tend to trust the priest or someone who has worked for a parish for thirty years. We think that a person is beyond reproach and can always be trusted with the parish’s money.
But when things go wrong with someone entrusted with money, there’s a three-way metric that organizations who fall victim to theft or fraud can use to help make sense of their actions:
- Reason
- Opportunity
- Access
Financial hardship is one reason that a trusted member of your parish would be tempted to steal. The Finance Council’s role is to eliminate the opportunity for someone in that tough situation to embezzle from the parish. The Council should be entrusted and empowered to eliminate or reduce access for embattled individuals to money, and serve as a final source of auditing while maintaining a shared role with staff in ensuring that funds are not being misappropriated.
