This book wasn’t a prescriptive line by line assessment of a church budget. I found this book to provide helpful guardrails and foundational reminders for how a church should approach its budget. It was short and easy to read and still robust in its content. I certainly learned a lot and it has changed the way I will look at the budget categories that I oversee and how I view a church budget more broadly. Using the Great Commission as a key standard for budgeting seems quite sound. The practical realities of how and when to pull funding for line items was helpful. Overall, this was really good and educating book.

I slowly made my way through this one - not because it’s written poorly, just because it wasn’t quite scratching the itch. It gave me a lot of great things to consider - not a ton of practical steps or scenarios to apply things. Being on the ground and starting from scratch I was hoping for an extremely practical guide to budgetary decision-making, grounded in sound doctrine and faithfulness to Gods Word. I got that occasionally, but this book is more helpful for the philosophy-making of a church budget. It is helpful for learning to think about a church budget in a Christ-centered way…but it’s not gonna tell you explicitly “spend no more than x% of your budget on x” quite as often as I’d been hoping.

It’s still very good and I would recommend it to others.

A unique book on an overlooked topic that is foundational for a healthy church. Every pastor should read this.

Excellent book on church finances! Every pastor, deacon, elder, or church leader would benefit (and also help benefit the church) by reading and heeding the principles contained therein.

Thank you Mr. Dunlop for this book!