7 Things Lead Pastors Don't Like to Do: They're All About Money

For more than thirty years I have had a seat most people never get. I have sat beside lead pastors as their CFO. In the board meeting, in the lender's office, in the quiet conversation after everyone else has gone home. I have watched gifted leaders do remarkable things with people. And I have watched many of those same leaders go quiet at the same handful of moments, every time, in every church.

The moments are always financial. A pastor who can preach to a thousand people without notes will stall when it is time to explain the monthly statement to nine board members. A leader who has walked families through the worst weeks of their lives will lose a night of sleep over a conversation with a banker. It is not a character flaw and it is not a lack of intelligence. It is that nobody trained them for it. A large church in the DFW area gave me my education in this, and seminary had not given those pastors theirs. Seminary teaches theology and shepherding. It does not teach fund accounting, debt service, or staff compensation benchmarks.

So pastors avoid those tasks, understandably, and the avoidance is quiet. It rarely looks like a problem until it becomes one.

Over the years I started keeping a mental list of the financial tasks lead pastors least like to do. It came to seven. This series walks through all of them, one at a time, in plain language, from someone who has sat in both chairs: the pastor's and the CFO's.

Here is the thread that ties them together. Every one of the seven is about money. That sounds obvious until you sit with it. The thing pastors are trained to handle, people, and the thing they are not, money, are not actually two separate things inside a church. Every dollar in your budget represents someone's time, someone's work, a piece of who they are and what they believe. In the church, money is never just money. That is precisely why these seven deserve your attention rather than your avoidance.

The Seven

1.     Reading the financial statements you were never trained to read. The monthly reports, what each one is actually for, and the single page that tells you most of what you need to know.

2.     Asking the congregation for money. Building a culture of generosity, and why teaching people to give is a discipleship issue long before it is a budget one.

3.     Sitting across the table from a lender. Borrowing capacity, debt service, and what a banker is reading long before they say yes.

4.     Setting what you pay your staff. Compensation as a share of the budget, the benchmarks, and the traps that sit on both sides of the line.

5.     Building a budget by ministry, not by line item. How much cash to keep in reserve, and why a budget exists to free the church to fund what matters, not to be the reason a good idea gets a no.

6.     Putting guardrails on the people you trust. Internal controls and fraud prevention in a place built, by design, on trust.

7.     Funding the building without mortgaging the mission. Capital campaign versus debt, and how to pay for growth without spending the next decade paying it off.

It Was Never Really About the Money

You do not need to become an accountant to lead your church well. You need to stop avoiding the seven things on this list. Each one is smaller than it feels. Each one gets heavier the longer it is ignored. And each one, handled well, frees you to lead from confidence instead of dread.

Because this was never really about money. It is about stewarding what your people have placed in your hands, telling them the truth, and leading the church God gave you with clear eyes. The numbers are simply where that work shows up first.

Every one of those monthly reports is full of your people's treasure. And their hearts are never far behind it.

Kerry Jones is the founder and CEO of Healthy Church CFO, a firm providing fractional CFO services to the local church. He has served churches as both pastor and CFO for more than 30 years.