I suspect many of you couldn’t have found Gays Mills on the state map previously, but the sad news of fiscal shenanigans in the parish there and the arrest of the pastor, Fr. Robert Chukwu, may have gotten your attention.  [By the way, Gays Mills is about forty-five minutes south and a little bit east.]  It’s one sadness piled upon another, for a community that is still rebuilding from the terrible floods a couple of years back. 

Because of the nature of what we are as “faith-based organizations,” churches have been historically sloppy at handling money.  It’s sort of counter-intuitive—as communities which grasp that by nature we all carry an original wound that can tempt all of us think we are the center of the universe—that we at times we operate with sort of a “family business at its worst” attitude, failing to create and maintain good systems of reporting and control.  While not unknown in larger urban parishes, this attitude especially hangs on in smaller and rural communities where people are proud of their knowledge and trust of one another … and may feel they don’t have the resources to put in a structure of checks and balances.  It does cost a lot of time and money to oversee how we administer our time and money.  As long as I have been a pastor, Bishops Paul, Burke, and Listecki would occasionally have “come to Jesus” talks with all of us priest/administrators about implementing procedures for pre-counts, immediate deposit, gift verification, and review of fiscal statements.  I sense another one of these little scoldings will be coming our way soon!

The members of our own Finance Council have helped me and our secretary/bookkeeper, Linda Elsen and her helpers, good fiscal procedures for everyone’s sake over the last several years.  It can seem like a lot of unnecessary work at times, and then something like this happens and I am relieved that we do what we do.   It helps keep honest people honest.