Unlike other private sector workers whose pensions are insured by the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, church employees have no federal agency poised to rescue their employer-provided pensions in the event of a devastating market crash.

Religious denominations have long provided retired clergy and staff with secure pension payments — more secure, in some cases, than corporate retirement plans.

But some recent bumps have drawn attention to the vulnerabilities of so-called “church plans,” which are exempt from federal regulations aimed at safeguarding retirement funds for private-sector retirees.

As cash-strapped states and private companies revamp, freeze or end their pension programs altogether, participants in church plans are now realizing how church plans can be riskier than they appear, observers say.

“As a group, employees in so-called church plans are far more at risk than other private sector employees,” said Karen Ferguson, director of the Pension Rights Center, a Washington-based watchdog group…

Yet “because there hasn’t been a collapse of a (church) pension board plan, everybody I think is comfortable leaving them alone.”

In several recent cases, however, churches have failed to keep their plans fully funded to be able to meet obligations to retirees…

…About 12,000 Lutherans are seeing their pension payments shrink by 6 to 9 percent annually from 2010 through 2012. The defined benefit program of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America was only 61 percent funded in February 2009, and has been closed to new participants since Jan. 1.

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