It’s great when an organization like a church has money set aside to help people in the community who are struggling to pay their bills.

What isn’t great is when there are a lot of hoops they have to jump through to get the help they need.

In today’s story, a pastor and church Elder disagree about who should qualify for help from their benevolence fund, so the pastor finds a way to make sure everyone gets what they want.

Let’s read the whole story.

Only help the people that actually come to the church? No problem!

Background: I am the pastor of a small church in the SE United States.

We have a “benevolence” fund that church members contribute to and is designated to help people in need, such as help with power bills, water bills, rent, etc.

At the time this took place, we had about $6000 in that fund, and we had about as much money coming in as we had going out, so the amount was more or less staying steady over a period of several months.

The person in charge of the fund wanted to restrict who they would help.

The Elder who was in charge of deciding who got help and who didn’t somehow got the idea that we were going to run out of this fund if we were not careful (not likely).

Therefore, he came to me and said, “Pastor, I think we need to restrict our benevolence help to those that physically come to the church, not just those that call in via the telephone.”

He and I debated this back and forth.

They did not agree about this issue.

There was no issue about people calling in being less likely to be legitimate cases, he was just simply trying to reduce expenditures.

His line of reasoning was that at some point, one of our members might need some help for something big, and we needed to make sure that we had plenty of money on hand if/when they needed it.

My position was that 1) this money was given with the expectation that we use it to help as many people as possible and not just sit on most of it.

And 2) we had a really long ways to go before we spent so much that we didn’t have any left in reserve.

The pastor found a workaround.

Not wanting to die on this particular hill, I acquiesced to his suggestion.

However, when people started calling in saying that they needed help with something, I told them, “Ok, here is what I need you to do: bring your bill and a photo ID to the church between such and such hours, and someone will at least talk to you. I can’t promise anything more than that, but someone will at least sit down with you.”

Never had a single one object to coming in, and they would usually show up shortly thereafter.

The church secretary (who agreed with me on this one), overheard me telling this to someone, and started laughing, knowing exactly what I was doing.

The Elder never caught on.

A few weeks later, the Elder mentioned to me, “You know, we are getting a lot more people coming directly to the church, instead of calling in. Word must have gotten out about how we are doing this.”

I just replied, “Yep, it must have,” and then I would just smile, and move on.

The Elder passed away about 4 years ago, and I don’t think he ever clued in as to what I was doing.

That worked out well! Everyone got what they wanted.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This person thought the Elder meant something else.

This was a hill worth dying on.

Not all churches are generous.

It wasn’t really malicious.

He did the right thing.

Bless him.

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.