Creating a Pastor’s Guide to Church Financial Operations

Thursday night, I begin teaching a six-week course that provides a guide for future Christian ministers and pastors on understanding church operations and financial principles. It is for a Worldwide Christian Leadership University (WCLU) program.

This will be the third college course I am teaching this semester. While I enjoy every minute of the student interaction, the preparation time has become a huge undertaking, causing me to limit my future college teaching. I hate to cut back, but while I am teaching content I am thoroughly familiar with, I need to prepare weekly three-hour class sessions that will engage, teach, motivate, excite, and have the students want to attend the sessions. This takes time. Besides the class prep time, I also need to assign homework and set aside time for one-on-one student Zoom meetings.

Presently, I am teaching a graduate course on Auditing Concepts for accounting students on Zoom for Fairleigh Dickinson University, and an undergraduate Introduction to Managerial Accounting in the classroom at Baruch College. The latter doesn’t have the convenience of the Zoom course, and I need to leave my house at 8:30 a.m. and return home at 4:30 p.m. to teach the three-hour class. However, the exhilaration of spending time with bright and interested Baruch students makes the trek to Manhattan well worthwhile, and I get to relax on the bus and catch up on article reading without the hassle of driving. I also have an office at Baruch where I can work.

I took on the WCLU course because it is something I never did, and it seemed challenging while putting me in the position of being able to help prepare people for their professional service in their ministry. The University aims to prepare its students with market-ready skills that will help them succeed personally and professionally. While I lack the specific religious commitment of WCLU, I am firmly committed to providing my students with the knowledge, insight and tools to be highly successful. I think I have a proven track record in this, and this opportunity represented a way to reach and empower a new group with financial skills.

The lesson plan for my first session will cover understanding financial statements and a lesson on investment risk. Each student will be asked to obtain a public company 10-K and will use it to learn the structure and purpose of an audited financial statement. I use this technique in all my accounting and many of my financial courses. I find that most people, even accounting students, do not really know how to understand and appreciate the information in a financial statement. Without this foundation, they will not be able to grow properly or as quickly as they can or need to. My technique provides subtle added awareness that becomes ingrained and can be drawn upon as necessary in their future positions. Since the students will be Christian ministers, I will use the Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25:14-30 to teach investment risk, asset allocation, risk-reduced investing, inflation, financial expectations, and balancing individual attitudes toward risk.

I am feverishly developing the curriculum for the remaining sessions and am looking forward to how it develops. Teaching for me is a way to give back, and it is also an opportunity for me to grow, learn, and interact with young people, get their perspectives, and hopefully positively influence them in their future careers. I wholeheartedly recommend teaching to anyone able to.