Testing the Tithe: A Response to My Pastor’s Stewardship Email

My church recently sent out a stewardship email from Heather, one of our pastors. It was a good email — warm, personal, careful to say tithing isn’t a magic formula. It closed with an invitation to “test God” on tithing for six months, built around Malachi 3:10. It got me thinking enough that I want to respond to it here, in public, because I think there’s a better way to read that verse than the one the email lands on — one that actually grew out of my own experience with giving, before I ever went looking for a verse to explain it.

First, some background on where I’m coming from.

Heather’s email opens with her own story of growing up Baptist, where the church mailed everyone offering envelopes — one for every Sunday of the year, and not just to the adults, kids got them too. She learned to tithe the full 10% from elementary school on. I grew up Lutheran, and my version was smaller and less formal: my parents gave me two dollars every two weeks, and fifty cents of it went into the plate. Twenty-five percent, if you want to do the math on a kid’s allowance, though nobody was calling it a tithe.

But unlike Heather, that habit didn’t stick with me into adulthood. I don’t really remember giving much of anything once I was out on my own, because I never felt like I had abundance to give away. I was a broke college student, then a broke married guy with a mortgage, then a broke divorced guy. That feeling of being broke followed me through every one of those chapters, whether or not it was actually true — until the year I gave away $3,000.

The verse everyone quotes

Heather’s email centers on Malachi 3:10:

“Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,” says the Lord Almighty, “and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it.”

To her credit, she’s careful with it — she explicitly says this isn’t a formula, that nobody’s promised four dollars back for every two given. But the invitation she builds on top of that verse is still essentially: try tithing for six months, and if God doesn’t provide, “you’re off the hook.” That’s gentler than a straightforward prosperity read, but it’s still a test aimed outward — at God, to see if He’ll perform.

I don’t think that’s what the verse is doing. I think it’s doing something more interesting, and something a little closer to home than “watch and see if the money shows up.”

What “test me” actually tests

Here’s my read: God isn’t promising to manufacture wealth out of nowhere. He’s inviting you to find out what you actually have.

Most of us operate from a low-grade, background sense of scarcity. We feel broke, or at least tight, even when we’re not — and that feeling shapes everything: what we buy, what we withhold, what we’re afraid to lose. The tithe, on this reading, isn’t a payment plan. It’s an instrument. It measures something. Specifically, it measures whether your sense of scarcity matches your actual financial reality.

I found this out by accident, not by trying to prove a theological point. A few years ago I gave someone $3,000 to help cover legal fees for a divorce. Afterward, almost as a reflex, I did the math — and it wasn’t anywhere close to 10% of my income that year. And I hadn’t missed it. Nothing in my life got harder. That was the moment it actually landed for me: my cup was overflowing, and I hadn’t noticed, because I’d been living as if it wasn’t.

That’s the test. Not “will God zap money into my account,” but “am I actually as stretched as I feel?” For a lot of people, especially people with real margin who’ve just never stopped to check, the honest answer is no. The tithe isn’t creating abundance. It’s revealing abundance that was already there, hiding behind a feeling.

A fair objection here: Malachi wasn’t being metaphorical. The blessings on offer in that text — rain, harvest, crops that don’t fail — are concrete covenant terms addressed to a specific nation at a specific moment, and the flip side of that covenant was just as concrete. Obey and the land flourishes; disobey and the land is judged, sometimes catastrophically. That’s a real transaction, not a psychological one, and I don’t want to pretend the original text is doing what I’m doing with it.

But I don’t think that transactional frame is the one most of us are actually living in anymore, and I don’t think it should be. We don’t expect our cities to be leveled if we stop obeying. Whatever concrete blessings Malachi originally had in mind for covenant Israel, the reason I still find the verse useful isn’t that I think the same mechanism is running today. It’s that the principle underneath it still functions: giving exposes whether you actually have the margin you imagine you lack. We’re not supposed to give in order to avoid hell, or to earn heaven, or to trigger some updated version of rain and harvest showing up on schedule. We’re supposed to give because the person in front of us needs what we have, and that’s reason enough on its own. Malachi’s mechanism was national and covenantal. Mine is just a guy noticing he had $3,000 he didn’t know he had, and someone in front of him who needed it.

But the test has two honest outcomes

Here’s where I’d push back on Heather’s email specifically, even though I think it’s a genuinely thoughtful, non-prosperity-gospel version of this sermon. Her “off the hook” language is trying to lower the stakes, but it still frames the test as having one hoped-for result — you tithe, God provides, you conclude you had margin you didn’t know about — with “off the hook” as the fallback if that doesn’t happen. That’s better than a straightforward prosperity read, but it’s still a test graded on a single outcome. A real test can come back negative and still count as a success — and I think it’s worth naming honestly what a negative result means: if you give 10% and it does make your life difficult — if it costs you something you needed, not something you merely wanted — then you’re not the person the tithe is collected from. You’re the person it’s collected for.

That’s not a modern workaround, either. The tithe system in the Hebrew Bible already built this in — a portion of it was explicitly set aside every third year for the poor, the widow, the orphan, the sojourner. The mechanism for catching people in genuine need was never an exception bolted onto the system after the fact. It was part of the design from the start. So “test me and see” isn’t a rigged question with only one right answer. It’s an honest question, and the honest answers are: you have more than you think, or you have less than you think, and either one is useful information, not a verdict on your faith.

Where I quietly disagree with most churches

There’s a structural piece of this I usually just keep to myself, because it’s not really an argument worth having at the potluck: I don’t give the way most churches assume I do.

I don’t write a check the week I earn the money. I put my charitable giving into my own account first, and I let it sit there — I try to save for a full year before I give any of it away. Partly that’s just practical: it means I’m giving from a settled, considered place rather than reflexively, week to week, off whatever mood or plate is in front of me. And partly it’s because I track my own version of the sabbatical cycle — the third and seventh years — on my own terms, which means I don’t carry guilt about a lighter seventh year the way I think I would if I were just measuring myself against a weekly envelope.

None of that fits neatly into offering-envelope season. It doesn’t produce a tidy weekly number for a stewardship spreadsheet. But I think it’s actually closer to what the tithe was for in the first place — not a subscription payment to an institution, but a discipline of paying honest attention to what you have and giving out of what’s actually true, on a rhythm that lets you tell the difference between generosity and reflex.

The actual test

So when Heather invites people to “test God” for six months with their giving, I’m genuinely on board with the spirit of it — more so, honestly, than with a lot of stewardship appeals I’ve sat through. I just think the test isn’t really about God. God doesn’t need the data. We do.

Give the ten percent. If it costs you nothing you needed, you’ve learned something true about how much room you actually have — room you’d been sitting on out of a scarcity you only imagined. If it costs you something you needed, you’ve learned something equally true: that right now, you’re not the one with the surplus. Either way, you come out the other side knowing yourself better than you did going in.

That’s not a magic trick. It’s just honesty, applied to your bank account.