Archived: Crossway: charity review

This is a review of the organisation that has a website in the name Crossway^[1].

Crossway has an online invitation to give. It’s a church so it’s most likely a charity.

The Australian charities regulator, the ACNC, in their Factsheet: Making sure your donation gets to where it needs to, gives “some steps to consider to help make sure your donation is going where it is intended.”

1. Check the organisation’s name
2. Ask for identification from anyone seeking a donation.
3. Be careful of online requests for donations.
4. No tax deduction doesn’t mean the charity is not a legitimate one.
5. Find out more about how the charity says it uses donations.

Here are the answers for Crossway:

1. There is no charity under that name:

Roll to the bottom of the home page and you’ll see that the church is the third one in this list, Crossway Baptist Church Inc.

2.   NA

3.   Crossway’s “web address begins with ‘https’ and…there is a closed padlock symbol next to the website’s URL in the address bar”. A secure way to give to Crossway.

4.   ABN Lookup says that Crossway operates two funds, gifts to which ‘may be deductible’: Crossway CRE Fund and Crossway Baptist Church Fellowship Fund. Neither of these funds are mentioned on the website.

Others are though:

’Crossway Kingdom Fund’ is the registered charity The Trustee for Crossway Kingdom Fund, and ‘Cross way LifeCare’ is the registered charity Crossway Lifecare Limited.

5.   The audited account of how the donations are used is the Financial Report 2017 on the ACNC Register. Within that there are two statements that give information on how the donations were used. Most donors think in terms of cash, so if that’s you, you might turn first to the Statement of Cash Flows^[2]. What you might now know though, is that you first should turn to the Notes to the accounts (Notes to the Financial Statements in this case) to check out the ‘Basis of preparation’.

Do you provide or give things to, receive things from, or have oversight of, or review, one or more of the three Crossway charities? Perhaps you are one of the 6,864 people who, on average, attended church each week (perhaps also contributing to the average weekly tithe of $114K), or one of the suppliers, employees or beneficiaries who shared in $9.39 m of cash payments?^[3] If so, can you ring Crossway’s office and request that they prepare financial statements that answer the question or questions you have about the charity? I very much doubt it. You are therefore ‘potentially interested in the information provided in general purpose reports’^[4].

You are therefore in the wrong place – I only have access to the published accounts of Crossway, and the Committee members^[5] of Crossway, under the ‘Basis of preparation’, say that you don’t exist^[6]. End of review^[7].

1. For the previous review, see here. ↑
2. It would have been more helpful if the title had been preceded by ‘Consolidated’. For Crossway’s accounts are not just for itself but include the figures for the two charities that it controls, Crossway Lifecare Limited and Trustee for Crossway Kingdom Fund. ↑
3. Annual Report 2017, from the website. ↑
4. From Objective of General Purpose Financial Reporting (SAC2), www.aasb.gov.au: ↑
5. One of these board members is John Peberdy. John is a director of Christian Ministry Advancement Ltd, an organisation that believes that ‘Christian organisations should be the standard-setters in terms of impeccable corporate behaviour’. The mission of their committee, the CMA Standards Council, is to ‘help build faith and trust in Christian organisations’, including by allowing organisations who are compliant with a set of standards, formed by the Council, to display the Council’s seal of approval. ↑
6. ↑
7. I sent a draft of this review to Crossway. Like the previous two years, they…did not respond. ↑