That’s For The Children, You Monsters!

Unfortunately, things can often get screwy with small rural churches. The thing is, everything is basically being worked on by volunteers, and those volunteers are not necessarily professionals. There can also be very little oversight or built-in accountability and generally iffy organization. So, you get the occasional person who in other locations might be the petty HOA board tyrant and tries to throw their (nonexistent) weight around, people who feel proprietary because they’ve been with the church so long, etc. And because it’s a social community instead of a business, people get leery of calling people out because it’ll cause drama (or at least pop the top on all the preexisting simmering drama).

I went to a tiny private high school that was affiliated with a nearby church. Some guy died, and in his will, he left some money in the trust of the church to be used for the school.

A decent amount of the congregation decided that the money should go to the church instead, and apparently, the church meetings got spicy.

I didn’t go to the church, but I got to school and even my unperceptive self could recognize the palpable aura of people being pissed off. (School staff had been at this meeting, and a decent amount of other students did attend this church. I mostly got details from a friend and my dad since he was part of the school board.)

Then, to make it worse, the church treasurer’s mother for some reason had access to the church safe. She took out the inherited money, which was for some reason physically in said safe, and had herself a shopping spree.

That didn’t de-escalate things, but it did get a lot of the details hidden from us students since there was now a question of pressing charges, so I’m actually not sure how it ended.