The Rise of the Entrepreneurial Church: How Churches Can Fund Ministry Beyond Tithes
Pastor Mike unlocked the front door to his church café at 6 a.m., grateful for the aroma of coffee that filled the air. As he flipped the sign to OPEN, he couldn’t help but smile. This small café—once just an idea scribbled on a napkin—now paid for the church’s youth ministry, local outreach and mission trips. It had transformed not only their finances but their sense of purpose. For Pastor Mike and his congregation, this wasn’t just a café; it was a lifeline to the community—a place where conversations about faith flowed as freely as the espresso.
It also was an answer to prayer. Mike had spent many late nights asking God, How do we keep the lights on? How do we keep serving our people when giving is down? Like so many pastors today, he felt the tension between ministry and money, between calling and reality. The café was his step of faith, his yes to God’s challenge to think differently.
Entrepreneurial Churches: A New Approach
The biblical model of relying solely on tithes and offerings no longer works for many churches. The troubling reality is that over 15,000 churches in America are expected to close their doors this year. Behind every statistic is a congregation, a pastor and a community left searching for hope. The challenges are real: declining attendance, shifting giving patterns, and cultural changes that have made sustaining ministry harder than ever.
But underneath every challenge is also an opportunity. A growing number of innovative churches are getting proactive and flipping the script. Instead of just surviving, they’re thriving—launching cafés, co-working spaces, thrift stores, day cares and other creative, missional businesses that bless their communities while fueling their ministries. Church leaders are thinking like entrepreneurs and transforming their church spaces into engines of mission and sustainability.
Missional businesses offer a chance to transform empty spaces into vibrant community hubs while creating sustainable income streams to keep the doors of the church open.
Beyond Tithes and Offerings
The urgency of this issue for the church is personal to me. Not once, but three different times in my ministry career I’ve been called into a meeting where the pastor or board explained that due to finances—not because of any wrongdoing—I no longer had a position. I’ve had to pack up my office, say goodbye to colleagues I loved, and move somewhere unknown. I’ve had to sit across the table from my wife each time and tell her, “I lost my job today.”
Those moments of heartache helped me realize that frequently the financial model for churches is a challenge. We are relying solely on tithes and offerings—on Sunday mornings—while the rest of the week our buildings sit empty. So, I started asking, What if we could do more? What if our churches could serve their communities every day of the week? What if we could create income streams that blessed our cities and funded ministry?
Inspired by these simple questions and curious if I could make this new model work, I convinced my church to make a deal with AT&T: We’d let them put a cell phone tower on the back part of our parking lot, and in return we’d receive a monthly payment that helped support our ministry. That was in 2000.
In 2007, my church in Dallas created a café with free Wi-Fi and comfortable seating for local business leaders and congregants to gather, work, study and hold meetings.
