Carva White possessed an unheavenly urge to convert his burned-up church’s ash to cash.

White was the music director at the Sunflower Missionary Baptist Church in Leavenworth, KS. He convinced the head pastor to help hatch a devilish plot: torch the place, fool insurers into paying for repairs, then extract large bribes from contractors who would submit inflated bills for the work.

Pulpit-poisoning insurance schemes by unholy holy men and women such as White are rare. But ministering to insurance fraud does happen, leaving trails of betrayed parishioners, fleeced churches, stolen insurance money and ruined reputations.

Preachers appear to rarely defraud their insurers and worshipers. There’s no known data on the frequency or severity of insurance crimes ministered by ministers, but devilish insurance cons do happen.

Insurance schemes by ministers exact a large toll on congregations who are betrayed by spiritual leaders in a high position of trust. Worshippers’ spiritual and personal lives are disrupted. They’re forced to piece together a damaged congregation when a church burns or the minister suddenly leaves after being exposed as an unholy insurance crook. Sometimes worshippers or bystanders themselves are fleeced out of thousands of dollars. White’s first fire came up short. It caused $20,000 to $30,000 in damage, which wouldn’t soak enough bribe money from contractors, White quickly decided. So he told head pastor Marvin Clay that he’d reload his matches and ignite a bigger blaze to line their pockets with more cash.

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Churches are approaching capital building projects differently and in more unique ways than ever before. The effects of the recession and the changing habits of our culture have driven a growing number to lay aside the more traditional 36 month campaign for much shorter options. While their reasons are greater than pure fund-raising strategy, the good news is that the results appear to be as good as the traditional approach when it comes to total dollars raised.

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Three years ago a large church of 4,000 merged with a smaller church of 1,500 people, and the pastor of that smaller church, Terry Crist, became the senior pastor. The other pastor, Gary Kinnaman, stepped into a pastor-at-large role with his own personal ministry. Word of Grace church of Mesa, AZ, and CitiChurch in Scottsdale, AZ, chose a new name, City of Grace.

The story of that merger was told in the January 2009 issue of Church Executive. In a time when mergers, in addition to multi-site expansions, are becoming more attractive [see sidebar article on another Arizona merger],we visited again with Pastor Crist to see how the merger was progressing.
“Pastoral transitions are difficult under any circumstance,” Terry Crist reflects. “In our case there were several layers to the transition. On the surface, there was the pastoral transition from Gary Kinnaman to myself. A little deeper there was a generational transition with Gary being a Boomer, and myself being a Gen-X-er. At another level there was a transition in our style of worship and teaching.

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