How to Protect Your Church With Proper Insurance in Florida

Is your Florida church properly protected against crime and inclement weather? As a faith-based institution with a brick-and-motor building and a congregation that regularly visits your property for worship services, Bible study and special events, like fairs and bingo, you probably have property insurance, liability insurance, and workers compensation. However, these coverages may not completely protect you. The good news is that getting a church insurance policy can help provide more complete coverage.

Understanding How Church Insurance Protects Your Florida Religious Organization

Church insurance goes beyond the property and liability insurance policies that financially protect you if there is damage to your building from fire, theft, vandalism, or a covered weather event. In addition to protecting your house of worship against people filing lawsuits or claims against your church if they get hurt on your property, a comprehensive church program has the option to include at least the following coverages:

Auto Liability

Does your church have a bus or a van that is regularly used to transport members to and from your church or religious events? Auto liability insurance helps to pay for your church’s liability and the replacement of your church-owned vehicles as well as any injuries sustained by the driver or passengers if the vehicle gets into an accident.

Abuse Liability Coverage

Abuse liability coverage helps protect your church against claims of improper behavior, including sexual abuse and harassment. This type of church insurance coverage is essential because once an accusation has been made, your church has to defend itself, whether the accusation is true or false.

Crime Insurance Coverage

Crime insurance coverage helps financially protect your religious organization against various crimes, including burglary, forgery, and embezzlement. This insurance policy can cover crimes committed by your church employees, members of your congregation, and members of the community.

Cyber Liability Coverage

Cyber liability coverage financially protects your organization if your church experiences a data breach. Today, almost every business and organization stores some amount of data either online or on a computer. If your church has payment information, addresses, names, social security numbers, or other information; getting cyber liability insurance makes sense. Hackers and criminals are always looking for ways to steal personal identification information. There are many costs involved in a case where a criminal steals information from your employees or your congregation members. Some of these costs include: Notifying every customer; paying for credit monitoring for each customer; and paying for any lawsuits that get brought against your organization. This type of insurance can also pay for ransom and the cost to rebuild your data. Cyber liability coverage can help mitigate the costs associated with any data breach.

Equipment Breakdown Coverage

Equipment breakdown coverage helps financially protect your vital electronic components and equipment. This type of insurance policy can be extremely beneficial if your church experiences a catastrophic breakdown of its computers, lights, phones, air compressors, sound and video equipment, as well as copiers and other office machinery.

Professional Liability Insurance

Professional liability insurance is often referred to as errors and omissions insurance. This insurance is designed to help financially protect your religious organization against claims for personal injury that may have been caused by the advice or service you provided. All professional liability is not equal; therefore, having an agent that specializes in church insurance is vital to the protection of your house of worship.

Umbrella Insurance

Umbrella insurance is a separate policy that can be purchased to provide additional liability insurance. It would help cover your church if a filed claim exceeds the thresholds on the standard insurance policy. For example, if your church experiences a claim that goes over $1,000,000 in any one instance, then the umbrella policy would step in and cover the remaining portion of that claim up to the umbrella policy limit.

Other Types of Church Insurance We Offer in Florida

In addition to property coverage, liability insurance, professional liability, abuse liability, commercial car insurance, crime insurance, cyber liability coverage, and umbrella policies, we also offer several other types of insurance policies for your Florida church. These include employee benefits liability, group health insurance, key man insurance, hired and non-owned auto liability, employment practices liability, directors’ and officers’ liability, management liability, basic student accident coverage, catastrophic student accident insurance, violent response coverages, and religious enhancements.

If you need flexible church insurance for your religious organization, you can count on our agents at Fearnow Insurance to find the right coverage to meet your needs now and into the future. To learn more about our church insurance and to get a quote, please give us a call at (813) 689-8878.