Generating as much as $25 million a year through 105 ministries, Briarwood Presbyterian Church touches the world like a multinational corporation.

"Fifty cents of every dollar goes outside the church -- whether it's Campus Outreach or Bangladesh," said the Rev. Bruce Stallings, Briarwood's executive pastor. "We are able to support missions all around the world."

Founded in a storefront in 1960, Briarwood operates what is probably the biggest church budget in Alabama, with ministries such as a ballet, a high school, a seminary and missions to prisoners, students and foreign countries.

Briarwood has an operating budget of $10 million, and collects $2.5 million more -- over and above tithes -- to devote to mission work. When all of its affiliate ministries are combined, the budget rises to about $25 million.

Similar vast corporate church operations are on the rise. The largest congregations -- those with memberships in the thousands and budgets in the millions -- operate like Church Inc.

They embrace the business side of religion, often recruiting staff with corporate experience and adopting business world methods -- hiring consultants, starting endowments and taking tithes electronically -- as they try to meet the challenge of handling God's business with accounting savvy but also spiritual integrity.

"There's a need to step up to a higher level of professionalism and accountability within churches," said former accountant, lawyer and seminary graduate Bryan Gunn, now minister of administration at Shades Mountain Baptist Church in Birmingham.

"A lot of churches operate on the philosophy that if you're not broke, you're not operating on faith," said Paul Berry of the Covenant Group, a Christian consulting group. "That's not good stewardship."

For the Rev. Chris Hodges of Church of the Highlands, also in Birmingham, it means running his congregation's $9.5 million budget like a corporation.

Read the rest of Greg Garrison's article in the Washington Post: Church's Bottom Line - Pastors Increasingly Need Business Savvy to Manage Millions and Wide-Ranging Ministries