Unfortunately yes, some of the churches were what you would consider to be smaller, where one would think that there would be less of an issue with this. I live in a very wealthy area in one of the least-religious places in the country, so I think that has more to do with it than anything.

I should make more of an effort to find a small faith community, but my experience with the big church we’ve attended since 2005 has really put me off organized religion in general. They treated some of their own employees far worse than secular organizations would have, such as firing one employee 2 weeks before Christmas when they knew he was scheduled for a major surgery right after Christmas (so he had to pay COBRA insurance in order to cover it). When you’ve seen behind the curtain, it’s hard to regain that trust in their integrity.

Are there smaller churches? The big ones can sometimes have a tendency to have that exact problem, while smaller ones don’t have as much money and so aren’t tempted as much in the same way. Of course, small churches can have other problems.

Yes. But we’ve tried before and failed. All of the churches in my area are afflicted by what I call affluenza. We visited three local to our house. At one, they were having an open house at the pastor’s new custom-built home. At the second, they were giddy because they were getting theater seating (those ghastly pews are for middle-age peons). At the third, their complaint was that their full-sized grand piano, which was donated, was too big for their stage. And then a few weeks later, it was announced that they got a “great” deal on a compact grand piano for something like $17K.

I cannot even make this stuff up.

If you don’t believe you can trust your church to use money appropriately, shouldn’t you find a different church?

The French were much less gullible about what these people really are during their revolution, and nationalized all the churches appropriately.

When your auditors aren’t really auditors….

I’ve found CRA ratings very useful for the sell side with illiquid products like small town muni bonds… but my extremely large institution (you’ve heard of it) doesn’t even look at them on the buy side.

I agree. It’s a hard thing. There is no easy answer.

It’s not always easy – in some cases, the salaries are public information, but not most of the time. There will always be some overhead at these organizations, as they have their “rain-makers” who hob-nob with the wealthy and convince them to give large amounts of money. Whether that is how Jesus would have done it is certainly up for debate.

Besides giving money, I also give of my services and my time (mostly helping people fix their cars). This is probably closest to the gospel model of how we should live. But in this modern age, time is often what we have the least of, while we toil away to make money which some of us are blessed with an excess of. You are correct in that it is often very difficult to know for sure if our gifts are being spent wisely – I wish I had an easy answer for this.