The Shepherd's Blueprint
A financial course built for the way pastors are actually paid and actually taxed — not a generic program with a clergy chapter bolted on.
Housing allowance. Dual tax status. A retirement plan nobody explained correctly. These aren't edge cases — they're the norm for ministry income. The Shepherd's Blueprint is eight sessions, a small group of pastors, and the specific answers your situation actually needs.
See how it works →Nobody taught you to check this
Pull your last W‑2. Look at Boxes 3 through 6. If there's a number in any of them, your church has been withholding Social Security and Medicare tax that a minister isn't supposed to pay through payroll at all — which means money that's yours has been sitting with the IRS instead of in your account. It's almost always an honest bookkeeping mistake. It's also almost never caught, because nobody on staff was trained to look for it and neither were you.
Or look at Box 1. If your housing allowance was never actually subtracted before your wages got taxed, you've been paying income tax on money the law specifically says you don't owe tax on. Every paycheck. Possibly for years.
These aren't hypothetical. They're two of the most common errors sitting in ordinary clergy paperwork right now — the kind of thing a generic financial course, even a good one, simply doesn't know to check. That's the gap the Blueprint is built to close.
Eight sessions. A small room. Real numbers — yours.
The course runs on one metaphor: building a house. You don't hang drywall before you pour concrete, so the sessions run in order — foundation, frame, roof, keys.
| No. | Session | Stage | What it covers |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Survey the Site | Foundation | The three real reasons pastors avoid looking at their own finances — named out loud. |
| 02 | Study the Code | Foundation | The three ways ministerial tax status is different, and a first look at the Social Security opt‑out decision if you're in the window. |
| 03 | Pour the Foundation | Foundation | The housing allowance — whether yours is designated correctly, and whether you're using all of it. |
| 04 | Cure the Concrete | Foundation | What your church retirement plan actually is, and how it's taxed. |
| 05 | Build the Frame | Frame | Cash flow that survives an irregular offering count, a support-raising season, or a bivocational schedule. |
| 06 | Complete the Rough‑In | Frame | Debt, and a rhythm for estimated taxes that doesn't leave you guessing every filing season. |
| 07 | Lay the Roofing | Roof | The insurance you actually need to protect your family, and the estate gaps most pastors have never looked at. |
| 08 | Take the Keys | Keys | The whole house, reviewed together — plus a look at generosity and legacy. |
Each session pairs a short teaching video — so the technical content is accurate every time — with a live conversation led by a peer facilitator: a fellow pastor from your own network who's been trained to run the room. The video carries the material. The person sitting across from you is what makes it safe to actually talk about it.
Six to eight pastors, run on your schedule — this shouldn't have to compete with ministry obligations.
Not just notes. A plan, in progress.
Every session works the same way: you assess one part of your financial picture, turn it into a short list of specific next steps, and then go do them. By the end, you're not holding a binder of things you meant to get to — you're holding your own Blueprint Scorecard, marking exactly where each of nine parts of your financial life actually stands: assessed, planned, or already done.
Some pastors find a housing allowance that's been set up wrong. Some find a payroll error that's been quietly overtaxing them. Everyone leaves with a plan across all nine parts of the house, real steps already underway on several of them, and a peer in the room who knows their situation and will still be there when the next question comes up.
This is what it's actually like
No pulpit voice, no jargon, and nobody performing that they already have this figured out — because in a room of six to eight pastors, plenty of them don't, and everyone in the room knows it.
You'll have a little prep to do before each session. The rest happens in the conversation: real numbers, real questions, and a facilitator who has walked this road and knows exactly where the general rule stops applying and your situation starts.
— a room where you're not the only one who didn't already know
The cohort is where it starts
A single cohort is complete on its own. But in networks that build the fuller thing around it, the course sits inside something bigger — and none of it is something you have to buy, arrange, or ask for. If your network builds it, you're just already inside it.
Clergy Financial Help DeskFor the question that comes up mid-course that the workbook genuinely can't answer — the kind that depends on facts specific to your situation rather than a general rule.
Peer facilitator developmentSo the pastors who go through this cohort can become the ones running the next one — which means the person leading your group is someone from your own network, not an outside consultant flown in once and gone.
Clergy-specific toolsA small suite built to run these numbers correctly the first time, instead of forcing a minister's W‑2 into a spreadsheet that was never designed for one.
Church Payroll Health CheckReally the other half of this problem. The course finds the errors sitting in your paperwork; the Health Check catches the same kind of errors at the church's end — the withholding mistakes and setup problems your administrator was never trained to look for either.
— and the coin every pastor in the room is working toward
The kind of thing that starts a conversation
Eight sessions end with something you can hold: a challenge coin, currently in design. Two things about it are already settled, and they're the two that matter.
It is never mailed. It's handed to you, by the peer facilitator who sat across from you every week. A coin from a stranger is a paperweight. A coin from someone who watched you do the work is a different object entirely.
And it isn't for attendance. It marks something specific and earned: you showed up, you built a plan across all nine parts of your financial house, and at least three of them are no longer just plans.
It's meant to end up on a shelf in a pastor's office — and when the next visitor asks what it is, that conversation is most of how this actually spreads.
You can't schedule a cohort. You can do these.
Start with your own return
You don't need a cohort to find out whether your housing allowance is designated correctly, or whether your W‑2 has a Social Security withholding error sitting in Boxes 3 through 6. That's something you can check right now.
Get your own clergy tax review →Bring it to the person who can actually say yes
You can't authorize a cohort for your network — but your district superintendent, conference minister, or executive presbyter can. Don't make them dig through a website to work out what you're asking for.
Send this to your leadership → Download the one-page overview →You teach stewardship every week.
This is eight sessions where someone finally teaches you the version of it that actually applies to you.