Question: I'm working on a small website for a local church. The site needs to allow administrators to edit content and post new events/updates. The only "secure" information managed by the site will be the admins' login info and a church directory with phone numbers and addresses.

How at risk would I be if I were to go without SSL and just have the users login using straight HTTP? Normally I wouldn't even consider this, but it's a small church and they need to save money wherever possible.

Answer: 
Use HTTPS with a free certificate. [StartCom](http://cert.startcom.org/) is free, and included in by Firefox browsers; since only your administrators will be logging in, they can easily import the CA if they want to use IE.

Don't skimp on security. Anecdotally, I have seen websites that sound similar to yours defaced just for kicks. It's something worth taking pains to avoid.
Realistically, it's much more likely that one of the computers used to access the website will be compromised by a keylogger than the HTTP connection will be sniffed.