The Modern Epic, Pt. 5

This chapter of the Modern Epic has proven difficult to write because instead of telling a story it largely requires telling an absence of story, and it can be difficult to find the words to describe a void. Put another way, the primary subject of this chapter is the outcome of the investigations into the financial mischief at Takoma Park, which have been largely suppressed by the powers that be.

Our readers will recall that there have been two separate investigations, the auditor’s investigation and the police investigation. The audit investigation ran roughly between February and May of 2013. The police investigation began shortly after the audit ended and concluded around October. A report, purportedly of the conclusions of the audit, is now kept locked in the desk of Mrs. Warfield, who has been acting as temporary church secretary since the previous secretary departed. Members may go in to the church office and ask to read the report—under supervision—but it has not been distributed in any way.

This report estimates the financial loss to the congregation as being between $50,000 and $150,000. Separately, it traces the mysterious $90,000 left from the steeple repair as far as having been placed in the church’s operating fund, but is unable to track it any further. The report stops short of naming any specific individual(s) as being responsible for the losses. The police investigation also ended without naming any perpetrators.

There have been no official statements made by either the pastors or conference administrators presenting or commenting on any of the information in the preceding paragraph, which brings us to the end of the rather unsatisfying official information.

We will now proceed with the unofficial information, namely that a member of the pastoral staff has said unofficially that the actual loss was closer to $500,000. This calls into question the reliability and authenticity of the document in Mrs. Warfield’s desk. If the actual loss is that much greater it would seem at the very least that the conference must have redacted significant portions of the auditor’s report detailing mischief the congregation has no awareness of and then presented only the resulting reduced document. At worst, they have outright rewritten the report to hide the extent of the loss. As for why this would be done, the pastor said that they are attempting to “save the congregation pain.”

Let’s now take a moment to analyze what little information is provided in the official report. It is estimated that during the “good times” before the economy went south and all this governance trouble commenced the value of loose offerings would range between $500 and $1,200 a week. With these two factors (bad economy and trouble in the church) in play it seems unlikely that the giving levels would not have dropped, but we will take this range as a working basis and use the average of $850 a week for our calculations. At this rate, it would take between 59 and 177 weeks (or 1.1 to 3.4 years) of every single dollar bill of loose offering having been stolen in order to achieve the official loss of $50,000 to $150,000. We discard the possibility that money was also taken from tithe envelopes, as individuals giving that way would expect receipts and complain if they didn’t receive them, and no church members have made any such complaints.

But the math doesn’t end there. As the assertions were only that some of the loose offering was taken—rather than all of it—we will assume half of it being lost and double that necessary duration of theft to 118-354 weeks. With 52 weeks in a year that comes out to between two and seven years that the theft would have been ongoing in order to achieve that much loss through the pilfering of loose offerings. Going through this same calculation with the unofficial loss amount of $500,000, it would take 1,176 weeks, or 22.6 years, to lose that much money through loose offerings.

The assertion has been made that the thefts occurred over a period of four years. This means that only the $50,000 figure—or close to it—would be a plausible amount of money to have lost. To lose even the official upper range amount, $150,000, would take nearly twice as long as is allowed and the unofficial/real loss amount is simply preposterous in that amount of time through loose offering alone. Thus, our conclusion is that theft of loose offering alone cannot account for the entirety of the financial loss Takoma Park has suffered. There must, then, be additional theft of another kind. It strikes us as unlikely that the pastors and conference would be this secretive if the theft had been committed by strangers, which makes us think that this also was an inside job.

The generalized suspicions in the congregation regarding the loose offering theft have centered around DeSilva and the former church secretary. We cannot prove or disprove these suspicions. But so long as we are discussing unprovable suspicions, we think it worth observing that during the police investigation the chair of the finance committee took great care to avoid being questioned. This included not picking up or returning investigators’ phone calls and avoiding being present at the church when investigators were known to be there. Pastor Warfield attempted to be similarly elusive, but had the ill luck to walk down a hall just as the investigator was coming from the other direction. This seems like strange behavior for innocent men, but nothing can be proved by it.

So far as we are aware, Adventist Risk Management (the Church’s insurance agency) has not compensated the Takoma Park Church in any amount for these losses. That is hardly surprising given the uncertainty about the amount of the loss.