Christian Investing Tools and Resources

Best Christian Investing Books

Updated 7 min read
books Good Faith Investing

The short version: two books published ten weeks apart in 2025 argue opposite approaches to faith-based investing, and reading both is the fastest education available. Robin John’s The Good Investor makes the case for deploying capital redemptively; Robert Netzly’s Biblically Responsible Investing makes the case that owning index funds makes you complicit. Start there.

Most reading lists in this space recycle the same four classics and pad the rest. Below is what has actually been published recently, with verified years and publishers, and a short list of titles that circulate widely but do not exist.

The 2025-26 wave

Robin John, The Good Investor: How Your Work Can Confront Injustice, Love Your Neighbor, and Bring Healing to the World. Forefront Books / Simon & Schuster, 22 July 2025. 224 pages, $28, foreword by Ron Blue.

John co-founded Eventide and is its CEO, and his argument is that investing is never morally neutral. Because capital allocation determines which businesses exist and what they do to people, an investment is an act of either love or harm toward a neighbor. The conclusion is constructive rather than restrictive: fund enterprises that create genuine value for the common good. It is heavily memoir-driven — a Kerala village, an immigrant childhood in Boston, and eventually a multibillion-dollar firm — which makes it far more readable than the category norm.

Robert Netzly, Biblically Responsible Investing: On Wall Street as It Is In Heaven. Canon Press, 30 September 2025. 140 pages.

Netzly runs Inspire, and his argument is blunt moral complicity. Owning a broad index fund — he names the Vanguard S&P 500 specifically — makes a Christian a passive financier of activities he would never fund directly. His leverage claim is that the roughly $22.4 trillion held by American Christians is enough to reprice the market if it moved, which makes divestment an obligation rather than a preference.

Read them as a pair. They landed about ten weeks apart, from two of the most prominent figures in faith-based asset management, and they pull in different directions — one toward redemptive deployment, the other toward refusal of participation. Between them you get the whole live argument, and you will find you agree with parts of each. Our guide to what biblically responsible investing actually is lays out the same tension without the book purchase.

Ron Blue, Master Your Money: A Step-by-Step Journey to Financial Strength. Moody Publishers, 5 May 2026. Paperback, 304 pages, $18.99.

A genuinely new edition, with a different subtitle and ISBN from the 2016 third edition. Blue has been teaching the same four principles since the 1980s: God owns it all, you are a steward, the amount is irrelevant but faithfulness is not, and giving breaks materialism’s grip. The organizing question is “How much is enough?” — set a finish line, then plan backward from it. Chapters include “Will I Ever Have Enough?” and “The Dangers of Debt.”

Jade Warshaw, What No One Tells You About Money. Ramsey Press, 6 January 2026. 288 pages, $24.99. Her thesis in one line: “Most people think they have a math problem with money, but really, they have a mindset problem.” Her own $460,000 debt payoff is the case study.

John Cortines, Wisdom Over Wealth: 12 Lessons from Ecclesiastes on Money. FaithFi, 2025. $18. Treats Ecclesiastes as Scripture’s most honest book about money — wealth cannot deliver meaning, and accumulation is vapor. A useful corrective if the rest of this list starts to feel like optimization.

Worth having from 2023-24

Faith Driven Investing: Every Investment Has an Impact — What’s Yours? Tyndale, 3 January 2023. 240 pages. Eighteen contributors including Henry Kaestner, Timothy Keller, Andy Crouch, Cathie Wood, Finny Kuruvilla, and Ron Blue. Built as small-group curriculum, which is how it works best — the chapters are short and argue with each other.

George Kamel, Breaking Free From Broke. Ramsey Press, 16 January 2024. 304 pages, foreword by Dave Ramsey. Not a budgeting manual but a debunking book, aimed at credit card rewards, credit scores, auto loans, and buy-now-pay-later.

Dave Ramsey, The Total Money Makeover, updated and expanded. Thomas Nelson — not Ramsey Press — 14 May 2024. The twentieth-anniversary edition of the 2003 original, and the substantive addition is a new section on buy-now-pay-later and payday lending.

Art Rainer & Thom S. Rainer, Money in the Light of Eternity. Tyndale, 5 September 2023. 160 pages.

Darryl W. Lyons, Biblical Responsible Investing: Insights for Kingdom-Minded Investors. Morgan James, 30 January 2024. 86 pages. Argues BRI is coordinated market participation — proxy voting, fund selection, engagement — rather than sin-screening alone.

The classics, with accurate publication details

Randy Alcorn, Money, Possessions, and Eternity. First published 1989 by Tyndale, revised and expanded 2003. The current edition runs 503 pages with Scripture and topical indexes, a 13-lesson study guide, and five appendices, listing at $18.99. It is still the most thorough treatment available, taking on prosperity theology, debt, gambling, insurance, retirement, and inheritance in turn. Managing God’s Money is the condensed companion at $10.99.

Alcorn, The Treasure Principle. First published 2001 by Multnomah, currently in a revised edition. Six principles built on Matthew 6:19-21, framing giving as transferring assets to where they last. Short enough to read in an evening and the best entry point to Alcorn.

Andy Stanley, How to Be Rich. Zondervan, 2013. The premise does more work than most whole books: nearly every American reading the New Testament’s warnings to “the rich” is in fact the person being addressed, so the instruction is not how to get rich but how to be good at it. Built on 1 Timothy 6.

John Cortines & Gregory Baumer, God and Money: How We Discovered True Riches at Harvard Business School. First published 2016, with a 2024 edition from Tyndale House. Two MBA students working out what to do with high incomes, in public.

Howard Dayton, Your Money Counts. 1996, Crown. Distills roughly 2,350 Bible verses on money — the most useful survey of the raw material.

Ron Blue & Jeremy White, Splitting Heirs. Northfield, 2004, second edition 2008. Argues that equal inheritance is not the same as wise inheritance, and that distribution should follow demonstrated stewardship capacity. Uncomfortable and worth reading before writing a will. Pair it with our guide to generational wealth and the Bible.

Adjacent books about work and vocation

These are not investing books, and lists that file them as such are misleading. They are about what money is for.

Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor (Dutton, 2012, with Katherine Leary Alsdorf) on vocation, and Counterfeit Gods (Dutton, 2009) on money as idolatry. Jeff Haanen, An Uncommon Guide to Retirement (Moody, 2019) — the best Christian treatment of retirement as a vocational question rather than a financial one, and relevant to our guide on retiring with purpose. Steve Corbett & Brian Fikkert, When Helping Hurts (Moody, 2009) on why well-intentioned generosity sometimes damages its recipients.

Books that do not exist

Say this plainly, because AI-generated reading lists have polluted this category badly.

  • There is no book titled Faith-Based Investing: A Christian’s Guide to Investing with Impact from Wiley. No publisher listing, no retailer, no library record. Cody Hobelmann is a real and well-regarded advisor, but he has not written a book.
  • Bob Doll has no book. He is a market strategist known for annual predictions.
  • Finny Kuruvilla has no solo book, though he contributes to Faith Driven Investing.
  • Jeff Haanen has exactly two books, both named above. Titles attributed to him beyond those two are invented.

One observation about who is publishing

Something has shifted. New Christian money publishing now clusters at Ramsey Press, Tyndale, Forefront, Canon Press, IVP, and FaithFi’s own imprint. Against Moody’s full catalogue, the only finance title with a 2023-2026 date is the May 2026 Master Your Money. Crossway, Zondervan, B&H, NavPress, and Baker surfaced no new Christian personal-finance title in range.

Practically, that means the standard evangelical publishers are no longer where this conversation happens, and a reading list assembled from their backlists will be a decade behind.

How to read any of them

“Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed” (Proverbs 15:22). The proverb argues for plurality specifically — not one trusted voice but several, because any single adviser has blind spots he cannot see. That is the argument for reading John and Netzly together rather than picking the one whose conclusion you already hold.

And test what you read. The Bereans were commended for receiving Paul’s message eagerly and then “examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true” (Acts 17:11). Eagerness and verification in the same sentence, applied to an apostle. Books about money written by people who sell financial products deserve at least that much scrutiny — which is not a reason to distrust them, but a reason to notice who benefits from each conclusion.

Our guides to biblical principles for investing and Bible verses about investing cover the primary material these authors are all working from.

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