After reviewing a lot of church and nonprofit policies over the years, a handful of gaps show up again and again — not because churches are careless, but because these are genuinely easy things to miss when insurance isn’t anyone’s full-time job. Here are the five that come up most consistently.

The first is outdated property valuations, where a building’s insured value hasn’t been updated in years despite rising construction costs, leaving the church underinsured on paper without anyone realizing it until a major claim exposes the gap. The second is missing or inadequate volunteer accident coverage, since general liability alone doesn’t cover an injured volunteer’s own medical bills, and many churches assume it does until an incident proves otherwise.

The third recurring gap is abuse and molestation coverage that’s either missing entirely or carries a much lower limit than the church’s general liability policy, often without anyone on the board realizing there’s a meaningful difference between the two numbers. The fourth is non-owned and hired auto coverage, which matters whenever staff or volunteers use personal vehicles for church business — youth group pickups, errands, off-site meetings — and is one of the most commonly overlooked exposures in an otherwise solid policy.

The fifth is cyber coverage, which a surprising number of churches still don’t carry at all, despite processing online donations and storing sensitive congregant data. None of these gaps are exotic or unusual — they’re common precisely because they require someone to specifically ask about them rather than assuming a standard policy automatically covers everything a modern church actually does. A periodic policy review with an agent who works specifically in this space is the most reliable way to catch them before they matter.

Action Items

• Pull your current policy and check these five items specifically: property valuation, volunteer accident, abuse/molestation limit, non-owned auto, cyber.
• Prioritize closing the highest-severity gap first if budget doesn’t allow addressing all five at once.

This post is for general informational purposes only and isn’t legal or insurance advice — every policy is different, so please talk with a licensed insurance professional for a review of your specific coverage.