The 90-Day Church Insurance Audit: 10 Questions Most Pastors Can't Answer

Take the interactive version. The same 10 questions are available as a free 2-minute interactive audit at /day-90-audit/ — get your church’s score, see your top 3 gaps, and find out if your current agent is doing their job.

What’s inside

The audit is built for Georgia churches with 200+ attendees who own their building. It’s organized in five sections — 10 questions total. Each one is a question to take to your current insurance agent. The gaps tell you what to do next.

• Section A — Coverage adequacy (2 questions): Sexual Acts Liability, wire-fraud / social engineering.
• Section B — Limits (2 questions): property valuation, abuse coverage sub-limits.
• Section C — What your agent should already be doing (2 questions): renewal package, claims advocate.
• Section D — Carrier alignment (2 questions): direct appointment, denomination match.
• Section E — Process (2 questions): renewal timeline transparency, proposal format and timing.

Section A — Coverage adequacy

Is your current policy actually covering you for the risks that put churches in court?

1. Sexual Acts Liability Coverage

Sexual Acts Liability is a stand-alone coverage that responds to allegations of sexual misconduct or harassment involving a staff member, volunteer, or pastor. Some policies fold it into general liability at a small sub-limit; some carve it out as a separate coverage with meaningful limits and a separate defense pool for leaders who are accused but not at fault. The difference at claim time is enormous. A buried sub-limit can be exhausted by defense costs alone in a single matter, leaving your ministry self-funding the settlement and protecting accused-but-innocent leaders out of operating cash.

Georgia angle: O.C.G.A. § 19-7-5 makes virtually every paid and volunteer church worker a mandatory reporter of suspected child abuse. The reporting duty raises both the legal exposure and the documentation burden for any Georgia church with youth, children’s, or student ministry programming.

Red flag if you can’t answer: “I think we have it” or “I assume it’s in there somewhere.”

2. Wire-fraud / social engineering coverage

Standard church cyber policies cover ransomware response and donor-data breach notification — but social-engineering wire fraud is excluded by default on most of them, including the standard cyber endorsements offered by leading ministry carriers. The classic attack: a forged email purporting to be from the pastor or finance director, telling the bookkeeper to wire funds for an “urgent vendor payment.” When the wire goes out, the carrier’s standard cyber section doesn’t reimburse it — that loss requires a separate Cyber Crime endorsement or stand-alone Business Email Compromise (BEC) policy. If your church doesn’t have one, you’re not unusual — but you’re exposed.

Georgia angle: Georgia’s data-breach notification statute (O.C.G.A. § 10-1-912) covers donor-data breaches (a separate exposure that standard cyber DOES address), but it does not protect against wire-fraud loss — that’s a money-out-the-door event the cyber section was never designed to cover.

Red flag if you can’t answer: “We have cyber insurance, so we’re covered for all of that.” (Standard cyber excludes wire fraud — confirm the specific Cyber Crime or BEC endorsement in writing, or expect a denial.)

MinistrySure can quote this separately. A stand-alone Cyber Crime policy or BEC endorsement is straightforward to bind on top of your existing coverage. Most churches we work with have a coverage gap here they didn’t know about until they take the audit.

Section B — Limits

Are the dollar limits on your policy keeping up with reality?

3. Property valuation

Property coverage is written one of two ways: Replacement Cost or Actual Cash Value (ACV). Replacement Cost pays what it takes to rebuild today. ACV pays the depreciated value of a 40-year-old building, which is almost never what it costs to put up a new one. The second question, once you’ve confirmed Replacement Cost: when was the building value last updated, and by whom? A sanctuary insured at its 2017 value is dramatically underinsured in 2026 — and an underinsured property triggers the coinsurance penalty, where the carrier pays only a fraction of even a partial loss.

Georgia angle: Atlanta-metro and coastal Georgia rebuild costs have outpaced standard depreciation tables every year since 2020. A north-Atlanta sanctuary valued five years ago is almost certainly 30 to 50 percent under today’s replacement cost.

Red flag if you can’t answer: “We’ve had the same property limit for a while and nobody’s complained.”

4. Abuse coverage sub-limits

Abuse coverage is one of the most common places where a policy looks adequate on paper and fails at claim time. The structure to watch for: abuse claims capped at a sub-limit ($100,000, $250,000, $500,000) inside the main general-liability limit, with defense costs charged against the same sub-limit. A single contested abuse defense can burn through $250,000 before the case reaches discovery. The right answer is a meaningful stand-alone abuse limit with defense costs outside the limit — and at a church with active youth ministry, that limit should match the per-occurrence GL limit, not a fraction of it.

Red flag if you can’t answer: “Abuse is covered under our general liability.”

Section C — What your agent should already be doing

It’s Day 90 before your renewal. What has your agent already done?

5. Renewal package pre-built

A Day-90 agent has already pulled your declarations page, your loss runs, your updated property valuation, and your current exposure schedule (payroll, attendance, vehicles, programs), and assembled them into a renewal package — before the carrier emails the renewal worksheet. The package goes out to your incumbent carrier and to two or three alternate ministry carriers at the same time, so the renewal is a real market test rather than a take-it-or-leave-it offer. If your agent is waiting for the carrier worksheet to start, the renewal is being run on the carrier’s schedule, not yours.

Red flag if you can’t answer: “We’ll see what the carrier sends us.”

6. Claims advocate identified

When you have a claim, your first call should not be to the carrier’s 1-800 number — it should be to a named human at your agency who advocates for you inside the carrier process. That person tracks your claim, escalates when adjusters go quiet, and pushes back when reservations of rights letters arrive. Without a named claims advocate, you’re a file number to a regional claims office and your renewal pricing is shaped by how that adjuster classifies your claim, with nobody at your agency double-checking the classification.

Red flag if you can’t answer: “We call the claims line on the policy.”

Section D — Carrier alignment

Is your carrier actually built for ministry, and is your agent positioned to use it well?

7. Direct ministry appointment vs. broker placement

Ministry-specialist carriers — Brotherhood Mutual, Insurance Board, Philadelphia, Glatfelter, The Hartford, AmTrust — appoint agencies directly when the agency has the ministry book and underwriting relationships to justify it. A direct appointment means your renewal goes through underwriters who already know your agent’s name and the quality of the agency’s submissions. A broker placement means your business is being sent through a wholesale middleman who marks up the premium, slows the renewal, and doesn’t have the relationship to fight for you when the carrier wants a hard rate increase. Ask your agent specifically which of the six ministry carriers they hold direct appointments with.

Red flag if you can’t answer: “Our agent shops it around for us.”

8. Denomination match

Insurance Board is the ministry carrier for the United Church of Christ, the Disciples of Christ, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Alliance of Baptists, and the Reformed Church in America. If your church belongs to one of those traditions, Insurance Board is a serious option that may not be on your current agent’s quote sheet. If your church is independent, Southern Baptist, Pentecostal, charismatic, or non-denominational, Insurance Board is not the right carrier, and the conversation should move to the broader ministry-carrier list (Brotherhood Mutual, Philadelphia, Glatfelter, The Hartford, AmTrust).

Georgia angle: A large share of Georgia congregations are independent or Southern Baptist–affiliated, which narrows the ministry-specialist carrier list for the typical Georgia church. Confirm with your agent that the carriers being quoted actually serve your tradition.

Red flag if you can’t answer: “I’m not sure who our carrier is, exactly.”

Section E — Process

Day 90 versus Day 30 — what timeline is your renewal actually on?

9. Renewal timeline transparency

A ministry agent running the Day-90 framework gives you a written renewal calendar with named milestones: a Day-90 kickoff and exposure update, a Day-60 carrier submission, a Day-30 proposal delivery, a Day-7 final binding decision and certificate-of-insurance issuance. The calendar belongs to the church, not just the agent — the executive pastor, the finance committee chair, and the senior pastor should each have a copy, and the dates should be on the board’s calendar. Without a written calendar, the renewal runs on the carrier’s clock and your church finds out the new premium the week before it has to pay it.

Red flag if you can’t answer: “We just hear from our agent when it’s time.”

10. Proposal format and timing

The renewal proposal you receive from your agent should be a written, side-by-side comparison: current policy versus renewal options, line by line, with coverage limits, deductibles, exclusions, premium, and a plain-English summary of every change. It should land in your hands at least 14 days before the policy expires, in a format that a non-insurance person can read in 20 minutes. A one-page email saying “your renewal premium is $X, please sign here” is not a proposal — it’s a bill. Above $5K in premium, the proposal is the artifact that lets the board exercise actual fiduciary oversight on the largest annual operating-expense line that isn’t payroll.

Red flag if you can’t answer: “We usually get the renewal a few days before it expires.”

Ministry-specialist agent vs. generalist agent at Day 90

Two agents handle the same renewal completely differently. Here’s the difference, dimension by dimension.

Dimension	Ministry-specialist	Generalist
Renewal start day	Day 90 (proactive)	Day 30–45 (reactive)
Coverage review cadence	Annual exposure data refresh	Only when something changes
Claims advocate	Named, reachable	Carrier 800 number
Sexual Acts / cyber wire-fraud / abuse limits	Stand-alone limits, defense outside	Often missing or sub-limited

Who wrote this

MinistrySure is an independent insurance agency in Loganville, Georgia, serving 700+ Georgia ministries since 1989. Co-owners Michael and Matthew Campbell are Brotherhood Mutual preferred agents and have won the carrier’s Agent of the Year award twice. We work with Georgia churches, Christian schools, camps, and faith-based ministries with premiums starting at $5,000. If you find gaps in this audit, schedule a no-obligation coverage review.

Ready for a real coverage review? Take the interactive audit (2 minutes, get your score) or schedule a coverage review directly.