About Me

So who am I, and why am I so interested in risk management and the church?

Let's start with me: I'm a recent MBA graduate from Dalhousie University in Halifax, NS. I'm also a lifelong churchgoer, having been raised in a Presbyterian church before moving over to the United Church for a few years; I also have Anglican, Roman Catholic and Evangelical experience. I've sat on a variety of committees and councils within those denominations and done everything from singing in choirs to leading entire services. I genuinely like church, for a variety of reasons: in addition to the spiritual nourishment and great fellowship every week, I'm a complete sucker for a traditional hymn played on an organ and can't help but be amazed when inside a large cathedral with gorgeous stained-glass windows.

It was this interest in church that led me to do an independent study as part of my MBA, focusing on church management and consulting, and investigating the ways that business practices can be implemented in religious institutions. Working with a local church in Halifax, I analyzed its operations and finances to determine ways that it could increase revenues, lower expenses and run more efficiently; most of this focused on the church using its excess space for rental income, as well as cutting unnecessary expenditures from the budget. When I was finished, I submitted a hearty report to the church's council and stayed around to help with some outstanding budget work.

The next semester I signed up for a class in Enterprise Risk Management, where I was required to write a journal-worthy paper for a final assignment. My professor--a tough, demanding genius in the field of risk--knew of my interest in church management and encouraged me to write about risk in the church. I thought it was a great idea, so I took to the internet to find other journal articles on the subject, only to find that there weren't any.

Despite the prevalence of churches and the clear need for risk management in any sort of institution, there has been an incredibly minuscule amount of writing done on the two. A search of online journals and databases yields nothing; journals that focus on risk management have no interest in the church, and vice versa. Having read published papers on ridiculously-detailed topics ("Feminist-structured group leadership in a post-modern world: An equatorial supply-side economic developing nation case study," for example), this came as a large surprise for me.

So I wrote a 2000-word paper of my own, giving an overview of risk management and how it would apply to churches, and submitted it to my professor. He loved it, gave it a good mark, and told me to get it published.

That brings me to where I am now: having reworked the paper several times for different publications, I have a handful of articles set to be printed in national magazines and journals in the next few months. I plan to write several more, with a greater focus on particular areas of church risk management. But the conversation can't stop there, which is why I've created this blog. It's time that we really started thinking about how we manage risk in the church. And in the next entry, I'll explain just why it's so important.

And that's me: I love church, I love risk, and I love the idea of throwing them together and seeing what happens.