The Day I Realized
How Much Money There Is In Ministry
You gotta understand, we grew up broke.
Not like cute, college-kid-on-a-ramen-budget broke, but homeschooler broke. Listening to Adventures in Odyssey on a cassette tape in a minivan that barely starts broke.
Ministry? Money? Those were two concepts that existed in entirely separate galaxies. Worship music, maybe—once I learned how CCLI functioned in my 20s, I realized royalties were a thing. But pastoring? Preaching? That was like going into medieval cartography—or better yet, aspiring to be a Philippino Tilt-a-Whirl operator (they are our nations backbone).
My dad spent a decade as a full-time itinerant preacher in Canada, a country that, when it pays its pastors, does so in Monopoly money—if they remember to at all. Every Canadian church I grew up in had the same financial model as a mumble rapper: underfunded, overworked, and somehow still managing to book the occasional tour.
I went to Bible college mostly because I had no better plan and figured God might start talking to me if I loitered around the buildings Kevin Connor and Frank Damazio taught in. No audible voice ever broke through the clouds, but I had one unshakable operating principle: we build church. That’s what Finochios do. If the doors are open, we’re inside—volunteering, serving, stacking chairs, paid or unpaid, doesn’t matter. Church is less of a choice and more of a family obligation, like being born into a mafia you can’t leave.
But making money from ministry? LOL.
Did anyone? I didn’t grow up in a prosperity-gospel environment, and Canadian culture in general leans so blue-collar that the idea of a pastor rolling up in a new car was so American that it rode a scooter through Disneyworld. Nobody in my church had new cars. Nobody even talked about money except to pray that God would miraculously send some.
I spent most of my young adult years actively avoiding ministry for this exact reason. I had no interest in being broke like my parents or their ministry heroes, who all seemed to die in poverty, their legacies deeply impactful and spiritual but financially nonexistent.
So I tried other things. Other things didn’t work. I reluctantly wandered back into ministry when I was pity-hired by Carl and Joel, which is to say, divine providence sometimes looks like cronyism with extra steps.
Wanna know how much I got paid for “part-time” at Hillsong NYC? Here’s what I made: