Church Finances and Business: Sad Story Out of Tampa

The Jury, by John Morgan

Christianity Today reports that a Baptist Church suffered a $4.75 million jury verdict because of a tragic accident in which a teenager was severely injured in a church skiiing accident.

Mark Russ, a senior vice president with Arthur J. Gallagher Risk Management Services in Itasca, Illinois, thinks megachurches are particularly vulnerable. He says their rapid growth and complex ministries, mostly geared toward reaching the unchurched, do not fit “off the shelf” coverage.

“I’m finding an epidemic,” Russ said of megachurch insurance shortages.

Lesson 1: Be sure your church has adequate liability insurance coverage. The coverage needs to be designed for a church, as churches aren’t like anything else.

GuideOne may be the largest insurer of churches. A representative is quoted as saying,

Since verdicts like Idlewild’s are rare, GuideOne Insurance executive Eric Spacek said churches should be more concerned with injuries related to inadequate property maintenance or the removal of snow and ice hazards.

“We see 10 times as many people being injured in falls on church property as cases of child sexual abuse,” said Spacek, whose Iowa-based company insures approximately 43,000 churches.

Lesson 2: The greatest tragedy is what happens to the injured person, and out of love, a church should proactively seek to protect their members and guests and not rely on insurance coverage.

And this proactivity means, among other things, keeping the premises safe and protecting children from abuse.

Lesson 3: 40 years ago, the idea of a jury popping a church for a large verdict was unthinkable. Who’d force a church to pay so much money? It would have been thought wrong.

But now that churches have gotten huge and the world has become vastly more secular, the risk of a large jury award is much greater. But, then, we should be concerned with child and member safety just as much even if there were no liability laws.