David Lee, who will co-present and moderate this webinar, is a ministry development officer who has been serving ministries at ECCU for 20 years. All those years plus one he’s also served on the pastoral staff of a Denver-area church. On the banking side, he’s a Certified Treasury Professional^® who is committed to equipping ministries to be more effective at reaching their communities with the gospel.

Mark Jones will co-present with David. He’s a vice president and senior banking consultant at ECCU who has spent 25 years in banking and, like David, is a Certified Treasury Professional^®. He has also served on the governing board of his church as elder/treasurer, currently works as the finance director, and is on the leadership council for Missionary Athletes International. Mark specializes in helping nonprofits effectively manage their finances.

Jim Clark will join David and Mark for this webinar. He’s the pastor of business and stewardship at First Evangelical Free Church in Fullerton, California. Jim brought a business background to the church staff in 1999. He leads the areas of finance, human resources, information systems, campus operations, risk management, and stewardship education. Jim is passionate about leadership and organizational development.

The webinar these three will present is called “Cash Reserves: Why you need them. How to build them.” I should mention that you’ll have access to all their expertise at no cost; the webinar is free. You can follow this link to register.

Three seminars are scheduled for May (each seminar will start at 11:30 a.m. and end at 2:00 p.m.):

May 10 (Thursday)
Crossroads Bible Church
1670 Moorpark Ave.
San Jose, CA 95128

 May 11 (Friday)
Cornerstone Fellowship
348 North Canyons Pkwy.
Livermore, CA 94551 

May 18 (Friday)
Epic Bible College
4330 Auburn Blvd.
Sacramento, CA 95841

All ministry executives are invited. CMA members attend free and cost for non-members is $40.

To reserve your spot, register online at www.sjcma.org/events.html. If you’d like to learn more about this seminar, visit www.eccu.org/resources/events or email Pam Boersma at pam.boersma@cmanational.org.

In a blog that Frank wrote this year, he identified two organizations that reached the conclusion that musicians are employees of the organization engaging them.

Several years ago, my church went through and changed the status of all our musicians and performers from independent contractors to employees after I read the IRS rules outlining the qualifications of an independent contractor.

While I certainly got some pushback, our decision aligns with the more recent cases affirming that most musicians and performers engaged by ministries are employees, even if they only perform for the Easter or Christmas program.

If you think you might need to make same changes, be sure to look into the IRS’ Voluntary Worker Classification Program, which allows your organization to reclassify these employees with a minimal payment to cover past payroll obligations. (There’s more information on this topic in my blog from November 15, 2011.)

How has your ministry handled this issue? Any difficulty in your decisions?

Here’s an example. No school teaches the lessons ministries have learned over the past three and a half years. This has been an invaluable educational experience. One lesson has been that cash reserves are essential. Without them, you may not be able to pursue your mission. And in the worst-case scenario, which has become reality for too many churches, your ministry may be forced to downsize dramatically or cease to exist altogether.

A lot of ministries have been paying attention to this lesson. Since we first published an ECCU white paper on cash reserves in 2007, it’s been downloaded hundreds of times from our website, and hundreds more copies have been picked up at conferences and other ministry events.

The learning will continue on May 31 when we present a webinar titled Cash Reserves: Why you need them. How to build them. By attending this free webinar, you’ll learn from people who’ve built up their ministries’ reserves how to do it. Specifically, you’ll learn:

• What constitutes reserves and why they’re so important for every ministry
• About the process a ministry goes through to set a cash reserves target
• About the struggles and benefits ministries have experienced as they worked to achieve their cash reserve goals.
• How an ECCU member ministry builds and manages cash reserves

All three presenters have hands-on ministry experience. I’ll introduce you to them in my next post.

Speaking of lessons learned during The Great Recession, what are some you’ve found to be invaluable?

—Pastor Rick Warren, Saddleback Church

More than 2,000 adoptive and foster parents, pastors, orphan advocates, and other Christian leaders from across America and beyond will gather at Saddleback Church in Southern California May 3–4, 2012 for the Christian Alliance for Orphans’ National Summit.

Now in its eighth year, Summit has become the global hub for what Christianity Today recently labeled “the burgeoning Christian orphan care movement.” Christians are re-earning a reputation as people who “defend the fatherless” (Isaiah 1:17) through adoption, foster care, and global initiatives. Summit is both a catalyst and measure of this trend, growing from 38 attendees in 2004 to more than 50 times that number expected this year.

Sessions include Pastor Rick Warren (author of The Purpose-Driven Life), Kay Warren (author of Dangerous Surrender), Francis Chan (author of Crazy Love), Ambassador Susan Jacobs, and Grammy-winning musician Steven Curtis Chapman performing the closing-night concert.

More than 80 workshops will offer instruction from top national experts on topics such as:

• Parenting and attachment issues in difficult adoptions
• Engaging in local foster care
• Building effective global church-to-church partnerships.

Summit also features a special students-only conference, a training day for government social workers, extensive resources for adoptive and foster families, more than 75 booths and exhibits, a marketplace of global arts and crafts, and a bookstore—all designed to inspire, connect, and equip families and churches to become communities known for adoption, foster care, and global orphan initiatives.

“At many of the best moments of Christian history, churches have been especially known for the ‘pure and faultless religion’ that seeks out and cares for the orphan in distress,” said Jedd Medefind, president of the Christian Alliance for Orphans. “It’s thrilling to see Christians rising to this call once again. We join together at Summit to learn how to do so wisely and well, and in a way that reveals God’s heart to a watching world.”

For registration information, visit www.summitviii.org.

You can learn more about the Alliance here.

That same principle can be applied to our efforts at work. If everything is important, nothing is. Maggie Fox, founder and CEO of Social Media Group, recently tweeted, “If you have more than three priorities, you have no priorities.” While I am not sure that three is the magic number, I have learned that by clearly focusing on fewer goals, we have a better chance for success.

We live in a world that is rapidly changing, with new opportunities around every bend. How does your ministry focus on the opportunities that can have the most kingdom impact?

Across the United States, the percentage of churches spending more than their income ranges from 22 percent (in the Pacific and New England regions) to 36 percent (East-South Central region). That means somewhere between a quarter to a third of churches are spending more than their income. Doesn’t that sound really high?

The article was meant to be good news, but I find it hard to believe that—even after coming out of the Great Recession—many churches still have not learned to live within their means. How is this possible?

Most likely, it boils down to one of two problematic methods of operation:

No contingency. Overspending can happen in a nanosecond when ministries create a budget without factoring in a contingency or savings component. It’s no secret: We can’t spend more than we make without forcing ourselves into debt. Yet churches somehow think that as long as they have a balanced budget, they are fine, even if that budget does not include preparing for the unexpected. In fact, churches that don’t have adequate cash reserves are often forced into survival mode and begin to take their focus off of accomplishing ministry.

Overly optimistic. The second reason churches find themselves in the red is due to overly optimistic revenue projections. Here’s what that looks like: Figure out what you want to spend, set the revenue number to match, and—Voila!—the budget balances. Little effort, research, or thought is put into the projection. (Stay tuned: Help is on the way. Look for our upcoming blog post providing a method of projecting revenue from donations that’s based on sound principles.)

Undeniably, overspending year after year puts a ministry in jeopardy. So, why do you think ministries often spend more than they take in?

Spear phishing messages, which appear genuine and often convey a sense of urgency, are ruses to get you to provide sensitive information (such as your login and password) or entice you to click on a link that contains an infectious virus. Often, these email “spears” pass through SPAM filters because they appear to be legitimate.

RSA, a security software firm, reported that about one in every 300 emails in 2011 was a phish. A growing number are being received at work email boxes as personalized “spear” messages addressed to specific employees, sometimes including details mined from social networks to make them appear valid.

Keeping your anitvirus software and spam filtering up to date will help weed out these nefarious emails. However, hackers are adept at getting them to pass through undetected. This is where employee training helps. Microsoft lists the following components of scam emails:

• Alarmist messages and threats of account closures
• Promises of money for little or no effort
• Deals that sound too good to be true
• Requests to donate to a charitable organization after a disaster that has been in the news
• Bad grammar and misspellings

A best practice is to only open email from trusted sources.

What is your ministry doing to guard against spear phishing attempts?

We received an alert from the Credit Union National Association (CUNA) this week that says, in the wake of this card breach, you’re wise to be vigilant about card security. Quoting from the alert:

In the wake of the card breach, the next several days or weeks are critical for credit union members to be on the alert for any suspicious emails, text messages or phone calls requesting personal or financial information, especially card data. The card information that may be requested includes, cardholder billing address, 3 digit CVV2/CVC2 code found on the back of the card, or enrollment criteria/passwords for Verified by Visa or MasterCard SecureCode. This card information was not part of the recent Global Payments breach. Criminals may ask members for this information to add to the other card data they may have obtained from the breach to perform card present (key entered) or card-not-present (mail/telephone/internet) non-magnetic stripe transactions.

Given this cautionary note, here’s a reminder: NEVER respond to emails, text messages, or phone calls requesting this type of information. If you receive a suspicious request, contact ECCU immediately at 800.634.3228. And be sure to monitor your financial accounts closely, and report any discrepancies.

Next up is Hugh Burns, vice president of operations for the Denver Rescue Mission.

MBG:     What top three priorities should guide the budgeting process?

Hugh:      First, make sure your budget is relevant to your organization. For the Denver Rescue Mission, this involves having a process that holds department heads accountable to their budgets month-by-month throughout the year. We require department heads to provide commentary on budget-to-actual variances over 10 percent every month. We have found that this makes the budget process truly a part of our organizational culture.

Second, make sure the budget has been filtered through a process of review and discussion. Each of our department heads goes through a process whereby they propose a budget and then attend a meeting with the controller and the vice president in charge of their area. The department heads’ budgets are projected on a screen. We go through them line by line and challenge them to justify the dollars they propose to raise and/or spend during the coming fiscal year. Adjustments and revisions are made on the spot.

Finally, make sure the budget balances on a consolidated level after all department budgets are rolled up. We make sure we our budget balances, including planned capital expenditures and with a 3 percent contingency fund. We believe that this is fundamental for us to have a sustainable business model.

MBG:     What are two or three major changes you’ve made to your budgeting process and what was the result?

Hugh:      We have utilized some helpful technology in our budget process. The most significant of these is SharePoint, which allows us to create an Intranet where budget templates can be saved and accessed. This assures that there is only one version of the truth at any point in time. We can also link all the spreadsheets together and consolidate them into a top-level budget with very little effort. As we make changes to department budgets, the consolidated budget is automatically adjusted.

MBG:     How can an attendee prepare to gain the most value from this workshop?

Hugh:      Come prepared to throw out the challenges and problem areas in your budget process during the Q&A time. Someone in the room is likely to have dealt with those issues before and will be able to offer a useful solution.                                                                                

Again, this budgeting workshop will be on Thursday, April 11, from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m.

To register for the CLA conference, visit www.claconference.org.