You've Done the Right Things for Your Pastors.
You’re Still Watching Them Leave Over Money.
Clergy financial wellness assessment, curriculum, and education for denominations, judicatories, and the foundations that serve them
You built the budget line. Brought in reputable providers. Maybe wrote the grant. That's more than most.
And most denominational leaders have quietly concluded there's nothing further to be done — not from indifference, but because everything available was built for a general audience, and the choice seems to be between building something yourself with no hours and no expertise, or accepting the gaps and doing what you can.
There's a third option, and that’s why you’re here.
It’s Not Unsolvable — It's Just Never Been Built For.
The programs weren't built for clergy.
Generic financial education delivers solid general literacy and never touches the part that's actually different: housing allowance designation and substantiation, dual tax status and self-employment tax, the Form 4361 decision that can't be undone, how a church retirement plan works. Your pastors complete the program believing they've been trained, still carrying the thing that keeps them up at night.
Asking for help costs a pastor something.
In most polities, the people who would help are also the people who make appointments, approve calls, and evaluate fitness. A pastor weighing whether to raise a financial problem is weighing it against his standing. Most decide it isn't worth it — which is why the free program with a real incentive still has twelve people in it.
The earliest signal is silence, and it's visible long before the resignation.
A healthy pastor advocates for himself: asks about the raise, requests the conference funds. A pastor in real trouble goes quiet. That silence reads as humility. It usually means he's concluded that asking will cost him something.
That last one is the opening, and it's the reason this isn't as intractable as it looks.
Distress in ministry doesn't arrive without warning — it arrives with a warning nobody was watching for. But you can't act on what you can't see, and national averages won't show you your own pastors.
The Financial Readiness Assessment
$4,500
Start here, not with a program. Before you build or buy anything, you need to know what your pastors are actually facing — in your polity, in their own words, rather than what a national average or your committee believes they're facing.
The assessment is a structured three-part diagnostic that surfaces what's actually happening in your pastoral network — and produces a clear, prioritized path forward.
Infrastructure Review
A structured questionnaire completed by denominational leadership, assessing what your denomination has in place across six domains: housing allowance guidance, payroll and W-2 compliance, retirement plan structure, current wellness programming, crisis and benevolence patterns, and institutional visibility. No pastor participation required.
Clergy Survey
A short, anonymous survey distributed to your pastoral network, measuring financial knowledge, confidence levels, and avoidance patterns. Participation rate itself is diagnostic — a network where few pastors engage with an anonymous financial survey tells you something important about the culture you're working with, and directly informs which program approach will be most effective.
Pastor Tax Reviews
Five individual pastor tax reviews, selected systematically from survey respondents to represent a cross-section of financial readiness and career stage. These surface the specific, often-irreversible errors that generic programs never reach: housing allowance miscalculations, church payroll errors, suboptimal retirement contributions, missed SECA strategies. They also give your denomination concrete, real-world illustrations of what's at stake.
What You Receive
A written Financial Readiness Report covering all three components — segmented by tenure, church size, and appointment type, risk-rated and prioritized — plus a debrief conversation before the report is delivered.
$4,500, fixed regardless of network size. Four to six weeks.
If you're in a planning year, this is grant-application infrastructure. Funders ask what the need looks like in your specific context. Most applicants answer with national statistics. An organization that can answer with its own data is answering a different question than its competitors are — and the report is built to be presentable to a board or a grant committee as it stands.
The Shepherd’s Blueprint
A structured 8-session cohort course covering what ministers actually need: how clergy compensation works, housing allowance done correctly, the tax structure nobody explained, retirement participation, debt, and giving on a ministry income.
Built to run as a cohort rather than a lecture series, because the peer setting is what makes the material discussable.
Housing allowance, clergy tax structure, compensation, retirement basics. Delivered live to your clergy, recorded if you want it, built for your polity rather than generic.
Education for Your Clergy
Webinars and teaching sessions — $1,500 per session
Conference and gathering sessions
Keynotes, plenaries, breakouts, and clergy day teaching. Fees and formats are published on the speaking page.
Church board and compensation training
For judicatories that want to reach the lay leaders who actually set pastoral pay. Details on the churches page.
If You're Writing a Grant Proposal
Foundations funding clergy financial wellness increasingly want to see a named implementation partner rather than a plan to find one later. A proposal that specifies who will deliver, with what curriculum, on what timeline, is a materially stronger proposal than one that doesn't.
If you're preparing an application — to Lilly Endowment, to a denominational foundation, or to a regional funder — we can be named in it. That includes a scope and budget for the delivery portion, a description of methodology and credentials suitable to include, and a letter of commitment.
There's no cost to being named, and no obligation if the grant doesn't come through.
If the assessment feeds the proposal, that's the strongest version: your own data establishing the need, and a named partner ready to deliver against it.
How This Usually Goes
A conversation first. Twenty minutes on what you're seeing, what you've tried, and what's actually within your authority to decide. If there's no fit, I'll say so.
Scoped, not retained. Engagements are defined pieces of work with a beginning and an end. No monthly retainer, no open-ended commitment.
Delivery runs May through December. January through April is tax season and the practice is fully committed. Plan accordingly — a decision made in November delivers comfortably in the spring.
On budget. Assessments and cohorts are real expenses and most judicatories don't have a line item waiting. If the work is right and the number is the obstacle, say so directly and we'll talk about what's possible — timing, scope, phasing, or funding sources you may not have considered. That conversation has produced more engagements than a smaller opening number would have.
Who You'd Be Working With
I'm Seth Scott. Clergy finance is the entire practice — I prepare tax returns for ministers nationally, review church payroll structures, and teach this material to pastors, boards, and judicatory leaders.
Twenty years inside churches before that, as a worship director, board member, and treasurer. I've been the volunteer trying to do right by a pastor using a structure nobody in the room fully understood.
Recent and current work:
WatersEdge Church Finance Conference
UMC Dakotas-Minnesota
ACNA Clergy Financial Wellness Initiative
Frequently Asked Questions
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Good — most of what's here works alongside one rather than replacing it. The common gap is that the existing program covers general financial education well and clergy-specific structure not at all. That's usually where the participation problem lives.
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If their judicatory is holding the responses, perhaps not. Independent administration is the design, and it's the difference between usable data and reassuring data.
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Yes. The practice is cross-denominational by design, and polity differences are the substance rather than a complication — how a housing allowance gets designated, who sets compensation, and how a retirement plan is structured all vary, and material that ignores that doesn't land.
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The assessment is $4,500, fixed regardless of network size, and webinars are $1,500 per session. Cohorts price on size and format. Anything beyond that is scoped to what you're actually trying to do rather than sold from a menu.
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Yes — payroll and compensation review, board training, and tax preparation for ministers. See For Churches.
Tell me what you're seeing in your clergy and what you've already tried. Twenty minutes is usually enough to know whether there's something here worth building.
You've already shown the care. What's been missing is infrastructure built for the problem.