Holy Broke

Your ministry is not underfunded because God is silent. It is underfunded because you have been silent and you have been calling that silence obedience.

Every ministry has two conversations about money. The one in the staff meeting: God is faithful, we're trusting Him for the rest. And the one in the parking lot afterward: How long can we actually do this?

The gap between those two conversations is where ministries die.

HOLY BROKE is the book nobody in Christian leadership has been willing to write. Graham Nicholas has planted two churches, served as chief executive of large faith-based ministries, and carried personal responsibility for raising more than five million dollars a year. He opens this book by admitting he once stood in a member's kitchen calculating what the man's countertops cost and then said nothing about it for seven years.

Twelve lies. Seven about your organization. Five about your heart, including the ones you have never said out loud to your board, your elders, or your spouse.

• Why "if it's God's will, the money will show up" is the most expensive sentence in ministry
• What to do with the fact that you know exactly what everyone gives
• Why the wealthiest person in your church is the least pastored person in it
• Why low overhead is not humility - and what your staff's paychecks preach about God
• What this ministry has cost your family that you have never acknowledged

Then the second half: the Solomon standard. When the Queen of Sheba came to test Solomon, what took her breath was not the gold. It was the seating of his servants and the apparel of his ministers the one thing no leader can fake for a visitor. Walk a queen through your building this Sunday. What would she see?

This book stands against prosperity theology and against the poverty theology nobody preaches against: the belief that having less is evidence of being more. It closes with a ninety-day plan, a fifteen-question audit for your board, and one habit that will do more for your funding than any campaign, consultant, or rebrand you could buy.

For pastors, executive directors, development staff, and board members who are tired of praying for a harvest on land nobody has plowed.

You are not underfunded. You are unasked.