I'm Not a Pastor. I've Just Spent Twenty Years Serving Alongside Them.
How a skeptical fifteen-year-old ended up doing tax returns for ministers
It Started with an Argument I Was Trying to Win
I came to church at a friend's invitation as a high school freshman, and I came to argue. I was analytical, methodical, and reasonably confident I'd find the fatal flaw in Christianity.
I didn't. After about a year of pushing on it, I found something else instead — that the thing I'd been treating as an argument had a hold on me I couldn't reason my way out of.
Not long after, I noticed a keyboard sitting unused on the church stage and volunteered to play it. I was barely past deciding I believed any of this. That turned into more than two decades of ministry, all of it in the same shape: not the person out front, but the person making it possible for the one out front to do their work.
That turned out to be the whole pattern of my calling.
Twenty Years on the Inside
Fourteen years as music director at my previous church, and still leading worship where I am now. Years of service on a church board. Currently serving as church treasurer.
Those last two are why this practice exists.
I've sat on the board side of a compensation conversation — the volunteers around the table genuinely trying to do right by their pastor, working from a structure not one of us fully understood. I've watched a housing allowance get set without anyone in the room being able to explain what it actually was. And I've seen the other side of it: the pastor who knows something in his pay is wrong and has concluded that raising it would cost him more than the money is worth.
Nobody in that room was careless. There just wasn't anyone whose job it was to know.
The Assignment, and What It Cost
In 2021 I got my securities and tax licenses and started apprenticing under John, the senior advisor whose book I was set to inherit. Three advisors were retiring into the arrangement, plus a tax practice. By any ordinary measure it was a good outcome — years of work with a clear path at the end of it.
In September of 2023, a few months before the handoff, I was praying over what my own practice should look like. I was looking down the barrel of about a thousand clients and trying to think clearly about the shape of the next twenty years. What landed instead wasn't a plan, it was a calling:
Cover financially those who cover us spiritually.
That January, the three advisors retired and I took over management of the combined book — north of $100 million, and about a thousand clients depending on it being serviced well.
For fifteen months I did that job properly. It also paid well, which is where the trouble was — I was making a good living, but I had no hours left for the thing God had told me to do. The book wasn't mine; I serviced it under a contract I didn't control, and the payout wasn't enough to hire help and steward both obligations well. Nothing about that was going to improve by waiting.
In April of 2025 I went back to renegotiate the terms so I could build a team and keep stewarding those clients well without giving up the calling. I knew what would probably happen if I pushed. I counted the cost before I made any noise.
As predicted, they chose to reassign the book rather than renegotiate.
Overnight, $100 million in managed assets became less than $5 million. I don't tell it as a story about walking away, because I didn't — someone else made the final call. But I made the choice that made theirs likely, and I made it with my eyes open.
What I got back was time. That's the entire trade, and I'd make it again.
The Work
Two decades inside churches and a career in finance is an odd combination. It turns out to be the right one for a problem almost nobody works on — an armorbearer for pastors, armed with a spreadsheet instead of a sword.
Tax preparation and review for ministers, nationwide. This is the practice. Clergy returns exclusively — no corporate work, no general clients. Housing allowance, dual tax status and self-employment tax, the Form 4361 decision, the errors that survive a decade because no generalist preparer has reason to look for them.
Compensation and payroll review for churches. Most of what goes wrong on a minister's return started at the church. Boards get a document from someone with no stake in the outcome, which changes what the conversation is about.
Education for denominations and networks. Assessment, cohort curriculum, and teaching for the organizations responsible for pastors at scale.
Teaching, wherever the room is. Conferences, clergy days, board meetings, and congregations.
Where the Expertise Comes From
CTEC-registered tax preparer, practicing nationally
Certified Kingdom Advisor®
Accredited Asset Management Specialist℠
Twenty-plus years in ministry as a worship director, board member, and church treasurer
Clergy taxation is a genuine specialty. Housing allowance mechanics, the dual-status treatment, the interaction between an allowance and credits a pastor with children may be counting on — none of it appears in general practice, and a preparer seeing one or two minister returns a year has no reason to learn it.
Off the Clock
I'm a husband and a father to two boys who keep life humbling and exciting.
When I'm not working through someone's housing allowance, I'm usually leading worship, performing in community theatre, or several hours into a D&D campaign with friends who have long since stopped pretending we're going to finish it. I read a lot of fantasy.
None of that is incidental. The people I work with spend their weeks carrying everyone else's crises, and the case for having something that's just yours is one I'd rather make by example.
The Short Version
Every pastor I work with was doing something else with the hours they now spend on other people's emergencies. Somebody should be looking after the one doing the looking after.
That's the whole idea.
I’d love to invite you to join the free community — pastors working through this together, no cost and no pitch.