I was sitting in the third row of a church in Ohio a few years back, and the pastor got to the offering.
And you could feel him brace.
He did the thing. You know the thing. The apology before the ask. “I know, I know, the church always wants your money.” Nervous laugh. “Don’t worry, we’re not going to spend all morning on this.” And then he moved through the offering like a guy walking past a dog he isn’t sure about.
I’ve watched that same forty-five seconds play out in a lot of churches now. And here’s what I’ve come to believe about it: the awkwardness almost never comes from the congregation. It comes from the pastor. The people in the seats are just picking up what’s already in the room.
Let me say up front that I’m not a pastor. I’ve never carried a church budget, so take this for what it’s worth.
But what I do have is a lot of hours in the back of rooms where churches were teaching their people about money, watching which approaches opened people up and which ones made everybody study their shoes.
Why it feels weird
Here’s the thing: when you talk about giving, your salary is in the room.
That’s the whole problem. Every other subject you preach on, you have nothing to gain. You preach on forgiveness, and there’s no conflict of interest. You preach on giving, and some part of you knows that the offering pays your mortgage. So you overcorrect. You apologize, you rush it, you make the joke.
And your people feel that hesitation and read it as guilt. Which makes them suspicious of something you weren’t even doing.
The second reason is simpler. Most of us learned about money from someone who was either broke and ashamed, or wealthy and weird about it.
Very few people have a healthy model in their head for what a normal, non-anxious conversation about money even sounds like. Pastors included.
What silence teaches
Now, the temptation is to just avoid it. Preach on money twice a year, keep it short, move on.
But silence isn’t neutral. If the only time your church hears about money is during a building campaign, you’ve taught them exactly one thing: church and money go together when the church needs something.
Meanwhile, they’re drowning. The average person in your seats is carrying a car payment they regret, a credit card balance they haven’t told their spouse the real number on, and a lot of financial anxiety that follows them into worship. They are thinking about money constantly. They just aren’t thinking about it with you.
But we can NOT forget that Jesus was not shy on this topic. Depending on how you count, roughly a quarter of his recorded teaching touches money and possessions.
He talked about it more than heaven. He told stories about wages, debts, buried treasure, dishonest managers, and a guy who built bigger barns.
Whatever awkwardness we feel about the topic, he clearly did not share it.
Six things that actually help
I’ll give you the practical stuff. None of this is complicated. Most of it is just removing the thing that’s making it weird.
1. Separate the teaching from the ask
If the only sermons about money happen when the church needs money, every sermon about money becomes an ask. Your people have learned the pattern.
So teach about money when you don’t need anything. Preach a four-week series in February when there’s no campaign, no deadline, no thermometer in the lobby. Teach it because your people are struggling with it. Then, when you do run a campaign in the fall, it lands on top of two years of teaching that had nothing to do with the budget, and it doesn’t feel like a bait and switch.
2. Confess before you instruct
This is the single biggest unlock, and it costs you nothing but pride.
Before you teach anything about money, tell them where you’ve gotten it wrong. The credit card you carried longer than you want to admit. The season you and your spouse fought about it. The year you did not tithe and did not tell anyone.
I’ve watched rooms physically change when a leader does this. Shoulders come down. Arms uncross. Because the whole time you were teaching, they were bracing for the part where you make them feel behind. And when you go first, that fear dies.
You cannot teach people out of shame while standing in a posture that produces it.
3. Talk about their money more than the church’s money
Here’s a test. Add up the minutes your church spends per year talking about money. What percentage of those minutes are about their situation versus your budget?
If it’s mostly your budget, that’s the whole issue right there.
Your people have questions.
Should we pay off the car or fund the emergency account? What do we do about my brother-in-law who keeps asking for loans? Is it okay to enjoy money? How do we talk about this without fighting?
Nobody is answering those questions for them. If you become the place those questions get answered, you have earned an enormous amount of trust before you ever ask for anything.
4. Stop apologizing for the offering
You are not doing something shameful. You’re inviting people into something Jesus repeatedly said was good for them.
Just say it plainly. “This is the part of the service where we give. If you’re a guest, please don’t feel any obligation; we’re genuinely glad you’re here. For the rest of us, this is one of the ways we get to participate.” Then move on with the confidence of a man reading announcements.
The apology is what makes it awkward. Not the ask.
5. Give them somewhere to go on Monday
The worst thing a money sermon can do is convict people and then abandon them. You show them the gap between where they are and where Scripture points, and then the band plays and everybody goes to lunch, and nothing changes.
So always land the plane somewhere concrete. A small group study. A budget worksheet. A class. One specific action that takes ten minutes this week.
Conviction without a next step just becomes shame, and shame is a terrible long-term motivator. It works for about a week, and then people avoid the topic (and sometimes the church) entirely.
6. Say a number out loud
Not to brag. To normalize.
When a leader says “here’s what we give and here’s how we landed there,” it does something no amount of principle-teaching does. It makes generosity concrete, and it makes it discussable. And it gives people permission to have a number at all instead of a vague intention.
Two guardrails on this one, and they matter. Frame it as your story, not the standard. And say clearly that if someone’s number is 1% right now, that’s a real starting point and not a failure. Otherwise, you’ve just handed people a new way to feel behind, which is the exact thing you were trying to fix.
What this looks like in practice
Fair warning, this is the part where I tell you we built something for this, so weigh it accordingly.
Linda and I created True Financial Freedom after hearing the same thing from pastors over and over. They wanted to disciple their people financially. They didn’t want to hand them something harsh or shame-based. And they did not have forty spare hours to build a six-week curriculum from scratch on top of everything else.
It’s a six-session class on saving, earning, giving, and enjoying money, made to run in a small group or a Sunday class. Linda and I teach the sessions, so nobody on your staff has to become the money expert, and a volunteer can facilitate it.
But the part that’s relevant to this article is how it opens.
Before we teach anything, we tell people about the $7 that was in our checking account, and the night I pushed a dead convertible off the road by myself with three hours until rent was due. Not as a setup for the comeback story. Just so that nobody sitting in that room is the furthest behind.
That one move does most of the work, which is why the feedback we hear most often is about the tone rather than the content:
“TFF is the only program I have seen that truly deals with the issues Christians need addressed. Your humble spirits allowed this touchy and difficult subject to change lives.” — David Harrison, Harbor Point Church
A touchy and difficult subject. That’s just true, and it stays true. The goal was never to make money an easy topic. It was to stop being the reason it’s tense.
And then this one, from a participant, which is the one I think about most:
“First class where I left equipped, not burdened. Expecting change, not just hoping.” — Ryan D.
Equipped, not burdened. If that’s how your people walk out of a money conversation, the weirdness is already gone.
The point underneath all of it
Money is the place where what we believe gets tested against what we actually do. That’s why it’s uncomfortable, and it’s also why it’s some of the most fertile discipleship ground you have.
Your people are already having a hard conversation about money. It’s happening in their kitchen at eleven at night. The only question is whether the church is part of that conversation or standing outside of it.
You don’t have to be an expert. You just have to be honest, go first, and give them somewhere to go next.
And if you need our help, grab a free 14-day trial to see what True Financial Freedom is all about.
