In general, churches waste more money than businesses. Please note that I said “in general.” Naturally, there are exceptions to any rule. But here’s what I’ve learned in my experience of working full-time for a couple of medium to large churches, and now full-time for one small business.
In business, there’s only one bottom line, money. Every dime you spend takes away from the bottom line profit of the business and can only be justified if spending it will result in generating more profit in return. For the most part, it’s pretty easy to measure if you’re making money. And, it’s generally pretty easy to draw a connection between the money you spend and the money you make.
But in church, there are so many purposes. Most churches would tell you that they have a single purpose. My church’s purpose, for example, is “to love all people to Christ and help them on their journey with God and each other.” But just because it’s a single statement, doesn’t mean it’s a single purpose. With a purpose statement like the above, it’s easy to make argument after argument for why we need to spend money on a certain project because it will fit our “purpose.”
I know this because it used to be my job to make these arguments and I got pretty good at it.
So, I’m not saying that churches shouldn’t spend money on stuff. They have to. And they have to do the best they can to determine what are the right things to spend money on.
I’m just saying that drawing the lines, the reports and the nice, neat return on investment graphs is much harder for churches. And if it’s harder to measure the results, then it’s easier to justify spending, even when the spending may not be justifiable.
NOTE: I think it might also be fair to say that huge businesses could suffer from the same issues that churches have in this regard.
