Someone calls the church office asking for help with a utility bill, and the person who picks up has to decide, in the next few minutes, whether the answer is yes. If your church has never settled who actually holds that authority, the person on the phone is making it up — and the next person who answers will make up a different rule, for a different amount, with no way to compare the two later.
“Who approves benevolence requests” sounds like a small question next to the bigger one of how much a church should give and to whom. It is not small. Get the approval structure right and the harder questions become easier to answer consistently. Get it wrong — usually by leaving it to one person, undefined — and every request becomes its own negotiation, decided under the worst possible conditions: someone in front of you, in need, right now.
The short answer: never one person alone
Whatever else your church decides, do not let a single individual hold unlimited, unwitnessed authority to approve benevolence disbursements. That is true even if that person is the pastor, even if the church is small enough that everyone trusts them completely. The risk is not that a good pastor will suddenly become dishonest. It is that a single approver has no one to check the story against, no way to catch that the same family already received help twice this quarter, and nothing to point to later if a decision gets second-guessed. A second signature is not an accusation. It is a seatbelt.
Most small churches settle on a version of the same shape: one person can approve small requests alone, up to a stated dollar line, and anything above it needs a second name attached. A church of 90 people might set that line at $150. A church of 300 might set it at $400. The number is a local decision. The principle — a ceiling above which one signature is never enough — is not.
Who typically holds that second signature
Three roles show up most often as the second approver, and each has a different reason for being a reasonable choice:
- The treasurer — already reconciling the benevolence fund’s balance, so they are positioned to notice when a request would overdraw it or when the fund is running low for the month.
- A deacon or elder — carries pastoral standing without being the one who took the original phone call, which gives the requester a second, less emotionally loaded set of eyes on the situation.
- A designated board member — useful in churches without deacons, where the governing board itself names one or two people who rotate as the standing second signer.
Any of the three works. What does not work is leaving the choice open-ended, where the second signer is “whoever’s around,” because that quietly becomes whoever is easiest to convince rather than whoever is best positioned to ask a good question.
Why the board should set the threshold, not review every case
A common mistake runs the opposite direction from a single unchecked approver: requiring full board approval for every request, no matter how small. That sounds thorough. In practice it means a family waiting on a $60 grocery gift card waits until the next scheduled board meeting, which can be weeks away, because nobody wants to call an emergency session for a small amount.
The board’s real job is upstream of any individual request: setting the dollar threshold, naming who holds solo and second-signature authority, and deciding what counts as routine versus what needs the full board’s eyes — typically requests above a higher ceiling, or ones that fall outside the fund’s stated purpose. Once those lines exist, the board’s ongoing role is reviewing totals and patterns later, not voting case by case on whether a specific family gets help with rent.
What the threshold is actually protecting against
It helps to name the specific failure a threshold prevents, rather than treat it as a rule for its own sake. Without one, the most common problem is not fraud — it is drift. A pastor who quietly approves a $50 request in January finds it easy to approve $75 in March and $120 by summer, each step reasonable on its own, none of them ever run past anyone else, until the fund is depleted by October and nobody can point to a single decision that caused it. A threshold forces a pause at a fixed point rather than relying on one person to notice their own gradual drift.
A threshold also protects the approver, not just the fund. If a request is ever questioned — by a board member, by a donor asking where their designated gift went, or simply by the approver’s own memory a year later — a second signature on anything above the line means there is always someone else who looked at the same facts and agreed. That is a better position for a pastor to be in than having sole, unwitnessed discretion over every dollar the fund ever spends.
Naming a backup before you need one
Approval authority written for exactly one person breaks the first time that person is on vacation, out sick, or — awkwardly — the one asking for help themselves. Name a backup approver by role, not by person: “the associate pastor, or in their absence the board chair” survives a staff change; “whoever Pastor Dave asks” does not. Churches that skip this step tend to discover the gap at a bad moment, when a request sits unanswered for days because the one named approver is unreachable and nobody else has the standing to say yes.
Recording who approved what, not just how much
Approval only means something if it leaves a trail. Each benevolence case should record the date, the amount, a short description of the need, and the name of whoever signed off — ideally both signatures if the request cleared the dollar threshold. This is less about suspicion and more about memory: six months later, when a new board member asks why the fund ran low in March, the answer should not depend on anyone’s recollection of a phone call.
This is also where it helps to separate the transaction from the pastoral context. The dollar amount and approver belong on a record the treasurer can reconcile against the fund balance; the reason, the conversation, and any follow-up belong in a discreet case note the pastor can find later without digging through a spreadsheet or a group text thread. If your church’s giving records and pastoral notes currently live in different, disconnected places, keeping giving records that respect the giver covers the same instinct from the money side of that split.
What the approval trail should never expose
Recording who approved a request is not the same as recording who received it in a place the whole board can see. A workable pattern keeps the approver and treasurer aware of the recipient’s identity, since the treasurer has to account for every dollar, while the rest of the board sees only a count and a total for the period. SundayBridge keeps pastoral care cases separate from the giving ledger for exactly this reason, but it is worth saying plainly: it runs on one login per church rather than staff-level permissions, so a written confidentiality rule — not the software — is what actually decides who learns a name.
It also helps to decide whether a request is tracked against the individual who called or the household behind them, since a second request three months later from a different family member is often the same need resurfacing under a new name. The distinction between household and individual records is worth settling before you write a repeat-request rule into your approval process.
Put the approval structure somewhere it will actually get checked
None of this holds if it lives only in someone’s memory. Write the approval ladder — who can say yes alone, up to what amount, who the second signer is, and who the backup is when the primary approver is out — on one page, and put a date on it for the board to reread once a year. If your church already has a rhythm for the recurring admin work that otherwise slips through the cracks, a regular admin rhythm is a natural place to hang that annual check, rather than inventing a separate process just for benevolence.
The families asking for help will never see the approval ladder. They will only notice its absence — the delay while someone figures out who’s allowed to say yes, or the inconsistency when two different people in the same month get two different answers to the same kind of need. A short, boring, named structure is what keeps generosity from depending on who happened to pick up the phone.