Chris Miller, President of Miller Management, is the guest host of this week’s episode. He is joined by his colleague, Tyler Foster, co-Owner of GLS Insurance: Grow, Lead, Serve.
While we can’t realistically eliminate all risk, we can mitigate the risk with best practices. This week we will look at the goals of insurance in the church.
How does Insurance help?
How does insurance help us when something does happen? Four ways: Retain, Transfer, Reduce, Eliminate.
Retaining the risk, we know it’s there and we are okay with it. Those are the things we do every day – like driving to work.
Transferring risk is transferring the ownership of the risk to an insurance company.
Reducing the risk involves practicing good stewardship through our actions.
Avoiding or Eliminating risk is not doing anything – like selling your car and not walking on the sidewalks as to avoid being close to a car, ever.
Inviting people onto your property is a risk. But maybe you only have a playground, but not a skatepark. There is always risks, but you have to live your life.
What are the goals?
Sometimes churches miss the long-term goals of insurance. It’s not to see how much money you are saving, but what coverages are not covered now? Or, said another way, what risks are you now retaining? When the goal was mitigating or transferring the risk. Yes, that does come at a cost.
According to our guest, the goal of Insurance Advisors is to help people understand the principle of stewardship. Stewardship isn’t spending less money; it is gaining the greatest value or return on your investments. They look at facilities, personnel, and finances and identify good practices and risk management that ultimately leads to good stewardship.
We’ve been entrusted with much, now we need to use it in a responsible way to ultimately see the kingdom come.
Final Thoughts
All insurance isn’t the same. All agencies aren’t the same. You want someone who knows the niche of church insurance. Unfortunately, there are cases when a bad policy is bought, or a misunderstanding of what was actually covered was not clear.
“Good stewardship doesn’t mean choosing the cheapest premium.”
When insurance companies are digging through your assets, facilities, and processes, they are looking for separation of duties. We have to eliminate the opportunity of fraud.
See our Fraud Triangle posts for more information on this.
Listen to our other podcasts on Reducing Fraud in your Ministry.
Coming Up
Join us next week as we continue our series on Insurance.
Join the conversation, see behind the scenes, and learn more on our Instagram and Twitter.
Special thanks to our guest, Tyler Foster, and our masters of all things Podcasting, Chris and Lauren Miller, for this first episode in our Insurance series.