Supporting Faith Communities
in the Business of Ministry
in the Business of Ministry
Building Up Faith Communities
through Systems and Infrastructure
through Systems and Infrastructure
Founder Veronica Tierney combines her professional background in the finance and investment management industry with her experience as a solo pastor, chaplain, teacher, and academic theologian to serve faith communities in managing the business of ministry. Whether you are struggling with your member database, your accounting platform, your implementation of best practices, FourTwelve can provide solutions to your particular needs. Free your clergy and lay leaders from the undue burdens of outdated, patchwork, or absent systems so that they can focus their gifts, talents, and energies on ministry in your community and beyond.
Areas of Practice
Accounting & Finance
How can we be good stewards of the gifts members and donors give in the absence of robust accounting and finance systems? Build trust and generosity by ensuring that gifts are acknowledged with gratitude, accounted for with transparency, and used for their intended purposes.
Budget Forecasting
Joseph was able to interpret Pharaoh's dreams of the years of plenty followed by the years of famine, and that foresight allowed Egypt to prepare well (Gen 41). Most congregations create budgets with a one-year time horizon. If you could get a reasonable picture of your financial position with a multi-year view, you could plan more effectively for future initiatives or approaching challenges. A budget forecast may not be a vision from God, but it is a way to read the signs of the times and plan accordingly!
Image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:P1200346_Louvre_peinture_tombe_Ounsou_N1431_rwk.jpg
Strategic Planning
Where is God calling your community to move and minister into the future? A disciplined stragetic planning process can be a fruitful way for your community to discern its future by clarifying its identity and core values, articulating its mission and goals, and laying out a roadmap for achieving them.
Process Design
"But we've always done it this way!" How many times do we hear (or even say) something like this? A process is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Processes are meant to serve your mission, to streamline decision making, and to facilitate implementation. Processes should make things easier, faster, more efficient, and more accurate. If the way you've been doing things isn't working as well as it should, let us help you craft "a still more excellent way" (1 Cor 12:31).