What Is Giving Power? How Knowing What You Can Afford Changes Everything

A few months ago I was on a call with my pastor — Pastor Josh.

We were not talking about an upcoming sermon series or the next church plant. We were talking about the people in his congregation he could not yet figure out how to serve well. The single mom whose income changes month to month. The working actor doing rideshare between auditions. The freelance designer with three streams of variable income. Different lives, same gap. "Jared," Josh said, "I want to serve people like that. I just don't have a tool that lets me. They want to give. They love this church. They simply don't know what they can afford to commit to month after month."

That conversation has stayed with me. Pastor Josh was naming, in two sentences, the missing piece of the church's entire approach to recurring giving. The gap is not a heart problem. It is a clarity problem. And you cannot pastor someone toward faithful giving when they cannot see what they actually have at the end of the month.

That is the gap Giving Power was built to close.

How much can I afford to give to church? The question we never answered

When members ask how much can I afford to give to church, most pastoral resources hand them one of two answers:

1. "Tithe ten percent of your gross income." (Honest, biblical, but answers a percentage question — not an affordability question.)
2. "Pray about it and give what feels led." (Spiritually true, but practically homeless. They walk away with no number.)

Neither of these answers what the member is actually asking. The members Pastor Josh was naming did not need a sermon on percentages. They needed someone to look at their real life — their variable income, their rent, their unpredictable month — and help them find the number they could give this month without breaking faith with their family.

That number has a name now. It is their Giving Power.

What we learned from listening to thousands of believers

When we started building Stablish, we wanted to understand what was actually happening in the hearts of believers around giving. So we did something the church-tech industry rarely does — we listened. We used AI to search through thousands of Reddit posts and comments where Christians talked openly about giving, tithing, and church.

What we found was not theological resistance. What we found was guilt.

Members had heard their pastor preach the 10% number. Many of them wanted to obey. Many of them simply could not see how. So they did not give at all — paralyzed by the belief that anything less than 10% was somehow not honoring God. "If I don't give 10%, am I even serving Him?" That question, in some form, came up over and over again across thousands of voices.

Sit with what that means. The 10% number — preached faithfully from pulpits for generations as an invitation into stewardship — has become, for many in the pew, a burden that prevents giving altogether. The pastor's heart was right. The math broke the member.

This is exactly the gap Giving Power was built to close. Not by abandoning the call to grow toward proportional giving — Scripture is clear that growth is good — but by giving the member a real, achievable, honoring place to start. The actor whose Giving Power this month is $40 can give $40 with peace, knowing it is acceptable according to what he has, not according to what he does not (2 Cor 8:12). The 10% is not the entry fee. It is a destination on a longer road of stewardship — and Giving Power is what gets a member walking down that road instead of standing frozen at its edge.

A word to pastors: just start them somewhere

I want to speak directly to my pastor friends for a moment, because the Reddit data above changed how I think about this work.

Your theology is not what is going to move a paralyzed member into faithful giving. We see this in the data. Preaching the Malachi 3:10 verse harder, longer, or more often does not move the needle for the member who is already drowning in guilt. It often sets them back. They walk out of the service feeling smaller, not freer.

Here is the different approach we built Stablish around — and the one I want to invite you into, friend: just help them start somewhere.

A member at $20 a month is infinitely closer to a 10% tither than a member at $0 frozen by guilt. The starting point is not the ending point — but you cannot disciple someone toward 10% who is not yet on the road. Giving Power lets them step on the road today, with a real number, given in peace, blessed by the Spirit. From there, the long, slow, beautiful work of growing toward proportional generosity becomes possible. Most members who start at $20 do not stay at $20 — because faithfulness is contagious in a heart the Holy Spirit is shepherding.

Here is what the Stewardship App does that no sermon can do. It walks with the member every day. It surfaces their financial picture. It removes the fog. It puts a real, achievable number in front of them. Then it gets out of the way and lets the Holy Spirit — the true Master Steward — do the work of moving them from where they are to where He is calling them.

You do not have to do this work alone, friend. The technology does it for you. You preach the gospel. You shepherd the heart. The app meets them in the 166 hours between Sundays and quietly tills the soil your sermon lands in. That is the brief we built against. That is the gift we hope it is to you.

What Giving Power actually means

Giving Power is the personal monthly amount a believer can faithfully give based on what is actually in their account after their essentials are covered. It is calculated in real time from real bank data — not from a guess, not from last year's tax return, not from what they hope is true.

Three things make Giving Power different from anything the church has previously handed members:

• It is real. Pulled from actual checking and savings balances, not aspirational budgeting.
• It is dynamic. This month's number can be different from last month's, because life is.
• It is theirs. It is a private number a member sees in their own pocket, not a public commitment.

This is also the answer to a quiet question we have heard echoed across our research — why is it that the same household can subscribe to Netflix at $15.49/month without flinching, but cannot bring itself to commit to a $50 monthly gift to the church? The reason is not generosity. It is predictability. A subscription works because the member trusts that when the month is tight, the service will not bankrupt them. The amount feels right-sized to a season they cannot yet see. Giving Power gives the same quiet confidence to a recurring gift. The number flexes if it has to. The commitment becomes safe. The act of giving finally looks like the act of subscribing — but to the kingdom of God, not to a streaming service.

When a believer sees their Giving Power, the question shifts. They are no longer wrestling "can I afford this?" mid-service with the offering plate moving past them. They have already done the work. The number is sitting in their hand.

The Scripture under the number

"For if the readiness is there, it is acceptable according to what a person has, not according to what he does not have." — 2 Corinthians 8:12 (ESV)

Paul wrote that to a church wrestling with how to give. He did not flatten everyone to a single percentage and call it faithfulness. He said: the gift is acceptable according to what a person has. The whole point of the verse is that giving in the New Testament was always proportional to actual capacity — not to wishful thinking, and not to comparison with the family in the next pew.

But that text presupposes something we have not given our people in a generation: the ability to actually see what they have. Maria couldn't obey 2 Corinthians 8:12 not because she didn't want to — but because she literally did not know the number.

Giving Power is the modern, digital answer to a very old problem. It is what makes proportional, joyful giving possible again for the average member.

Two pastors, one tool, very different shepherding

Working with churches in Los Angeles taught me something every pastor reading this needs to hear: Giving Power is not a one-shape-fits-all answer. It is flexible by design — because shepherds use it differently, and that is exactly the point.

I spoke with a pastor in one part of LA who said, "Jared, I do not care if it's $5 or $500. I just want my people in the habit of giving. Show me their Giving Power and let them give whatever they can. The discipline of consistency matters more than the size right now." That is a perfectly faithful posture for a congregation finding its footing — for actors, gig workers, single parents, and anyone whose first faithful step is the act itself.

I spoke with another pastor — same city, very different congregation — who said, "I want my people to grow into the tithe. Show them their Giving Power as a starting point, and let me preach them toward 10% as they steward better and earn more consistently." That is also a perfectly faithful posture, for a different season of a flock.

Both pastors are using the same number. They are shepherding their people in two different directions, and Giving Power flexes to serve both. The number is not the prescription — the number is the picture. The pastor leads the prescription. That is how a stewardship tool should work: it serves the shepherd; it never replaces him.

Why Giving Power changes recurring giving specifically

Pastors have been chasing recurring giving for years. The offering committee at my home church has been talking about AutoGive sign-ups for as long as I have been a member. The strategy is usually the same — preach on it, push the QR code, hope people sign up.

It does not move because most members will not commit to a recurring gift they are not sure they can sustain. They have watched a credit card auto-payment fail. They have watched a streaming subscription bounce a checking account. They are not going to do that to the Lord.

But once they can see their Giving Power — the floor of what they can sustainably give every month, even on a tight one — recurring giving stops being scary. It becomes the floor underneath their generosity, with the freedom to give above when the Lord provides margin. It is the same dynamic we explore in what Dynamic AutoGive actually is and the foundation of the framework we walk through in the Money Map.

How to introduce Giving Power to your church

Three pastoral moves to bring the language into your church:

1. Replace "how much should I tithe?" with "what is your Giving Power?" The first is a percentage question that triggers comparison and shame. The second is a clarity question that triggers stewardship.
2. Preach proportional giving from 2 Corinthians 8:12. Honor the heart, anchor it to capacity, and trust the Spirit to grow generosity over time as members see their picture.
3. Hand them a tool to see the number. This is where Stablish lives. The Stewardship App calculates Giving Power inside the Money Map framework and surfaces it the moment a member opens the app — so the next time they think about giving, the number is right there.

A final word

Maria came back the next month. She had downloaded the app. She had her number. She had set up a recurring gift she could sustain — small, but faithful, every month. And she was smiling when she told me about it. Not because the gift was large, but because the guilt was finally gone.

That is the fruit of Giving Power, friend. Not bigger gifts extracted from anxious people. Smaller gifts given with peace, sustained over years, that compound into a generation of recurring givers your church has never had.

For the bigger picture of why this matters at the macro level, our stewardship-first path to generosity walks through the theological frame.

If you would like to see how Giving Power surfaces inside Stablish — and how it would feel for your members — take a look here. No pitch. Just a window into something we believe will serve your flock well.

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