These are the real questions from search results and reader mail, not invented ones. Where the honest answer is “it depends” or “nobody knows,” I have said so.

Is it okay for Christians to invest in stocks?

Yes, and Scripture’s treatment is more positive than most people expect. In the parable of the talents, a master entrusts capital to three servants. Two invest and are commended; the third buries his portion out of fear and is condemned in the harshest terms in the passage (Matthew 25:14-30). The master’s charge is that he should at minimum have “put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest.”

The parable is about more than money, but it uses investment as its picture of faithfulness, and it treats risk-avoidance as the failure. That is a difficult passage to reconcile with the view that investing is worldly.

Proverbs adds the method: “Dishonest money dwindles away, but whoever gathers money little by little makes it grow” (Proverbs 13:11). Gradual accumulation, contrasted against get-rich-quick schemes.

What does the Bible say about investing money?

Four consistent themes, none of them a stock tip.

Ownership is God’s, not yours. “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it” (Psalm 24:1). You are managing someone else’s capital, which changes the question from “what will make the most money?” to “what would the owner want done with this?”

Diversify. “Invest in many different places, for you do not know what risks might lie ahead” is Ecclesiastes 11:2 in plain terms — written roughly 2,900 years before modern portfolio theory said the same thing with more equations.

Plan long-term. “Go to the ant… it stores its provisions in summer” (Proverbs 6:6-8). The ant’s virtue is acting in a good season for a bad one, unsupervised.

Watch what money does to you. “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Timothy 6:10). Note the precise wording — the love of money, not money, and “a root,” not “the root.” Paul’s concern in the surrounding verses is people who “want to get rich,” which is a disposition rather than a net worth.

Is investing gambling?

No, and the distinction is worth being precise about because they can look alike from outside.

Gambling creates risk that did not exist in order to transfer money between participants. Nothing is produced. For one person to win, another must lose an equivalent amount.

Investing supplies capital to a business that uses it to produce goods, employ people, and generate profit. The returns come from that productive activity. Both parties to a share purchase can end up better off, because the underlying enterprise created something.

Two honest qualifications. Day trading and short-dated options move much closer to the gambling end, because the holding period is too short for productive activity to be the source of return — you are betting on price movement against another participant. And leverage that could wipe you out is not stewardship regardless of the label. Our guide to gambling stocks and Christian screening covers the related question of owning casino companies.

Do I really need to invest if God promises to provide?

This is the best question in the set and the one least often addressed.

Scripture holds both things without apparent tension. God feeds the birds (Matthew 6:26), and Joseph stores grain for seven years (Genesis 41). The ant that Proverbs commends is not accused of unbelief for storing provisions. Paul tells the Thessalonians to work rather than wait.

Providence in Scripture usually works through ordinary means rather than instead of them. The pattern is not that faith replaces planning but that planning is held with open hands: “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that” (James 4:15). James is criticizing presumption about the future, not the act of making plans — he assumes his readers will keep making them.

Where the question becomes real is anxiety. If your portfolio is where your security actually rests, no balance will be sufficient, and the problem is not solved by more saving.

Is day trading a sin?

Not automatically, but it is hard to defend as stewardship, for reasons that are practical before they are moral.

The evidence on outcomes is unambiguous: frequent trading reliably underperforms holding. So a Christian day trader is usually taking more risk, paying more tax and cost, and earning less — which fails the faithful-manager standard on its own terms without any appeal to sin.

The behavioural concern is more serious. Trading apps are deliberately engineered with the mechanics of gambling — variable rewards, streaks, confetti — and those mechanics work on people. If you cannot stop checking, that is worth attending to as its own issue.

What is biblically responsible investing?

Applying scriptural moral criteria to what you own. In practice it means three activities: excluding companies whose core business conflicts with Christian conviction, selecting companies whose conduct is positively good, and engaging with management as a shareholder.

It is not a legal term and there is no governing standard, which is why two “faith-based” funds can screen very differently. Catholic screens and Protestant screens exclude different things — CATH, the Catholic values ETF, does not screen alcohol, gambling, or corporate policy categories that Protestant BRI funds do. Read the methodology, not the label. Our fuller explanation of BRI goes deeper.

How can I find out if my stocks are biblically responsible?

Free, in about ninety seconds. Inspire Insight at inspireinsight.com covers 72,124 tickers and is genuinely free to retail users, scoring companies from −100 to +100. Christianinvestingtool.com gives five free fund reports on registration.

Look up your largest holding first. Some calibration: eBay and Amazon both score −100 on Inspire’s scale, and Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Pfizer all score −93. If that surprises you, you have learned something the label on your fund was never going to tell you.

Are only Christian companies considered biblically responsible?

No, and this is a common misunderstanding. Screening looks at business activity and corporate conduct, not at the professed faith of management. A screened portfolio is full of ordinary industrial, technology, and healthcare companies run by people of every belief and none.

There is no meaningful universe of “Christian companies” to invest in — a handful of privately held firms are owned by Christians, and privately held firms are not available to buy. Screening is about what a business does, not who runs it.

Isn’t screening futile, since no company is perfect?

The strongest objection, and it deserves a real answer rather than a dismissal.

The objection proves too much. Every ethical decision is made under conditions of imperfect information and partial complicity — the same argument would end fair-trade purchasing, employment choices, and charitable giving. Scripture nowhere requires moral perfection as the condition of moral effort.

What screening does is draw distinctions where distinctions exist. There is a real difference between a company with imperfect labour practices and one whose primary revenue comes from something you believe is gravely wrong. Refusing to distinguish between them because neither is spotless is not rigor.

What screening does not do is make you clean. If you approach it as a purity mechanism you will end up either self-satisfied or paralyzed. Approached as ordinary faithfulness under constraint, it is manageable.

What should I do if my 401(k) has no screened options?

The common situation, and there is a sequence.

First, capture the match anyway. An employer match is typically 50% to 100% on your first several percent of pay, and no screening consideration outweighs turning down a guaranteed 50% return. Contribute at least to the match.

Second, look harder at the menu. Many plans include a self-directed brokerage window that is not advertised. Ask HR specifically.

Third, use your IRA for screening. You control it entirely, and $7,500 for 2026 is meaningful.

Fourth, ask. Plan sponsors do add funds when participants request them, and a written request from several employees carries weight. Our guides to Christian 401(k) options and Christian IRA investing cover both routes.

Does screening cost me returns?

Less than most people assume, and the two costs are separable.

Expense ratios. The cheapest faith-based large-cap fund, Inspire’s PTL, charges 0.09%. The cheapest secular index funds charge 0.015% to 0.03%. So the cheapest available screening costs roughly 7.5 basis points — about $7.50 a year per $10,000. Actively managed faith-based funds run 0.80% to 1.94%, which is a genuinely large difference and a separate decision from screening itself.

Performance. Excluding companies changes your holdings, which can help or hurt in any given period. One data point worth knowing: the MSCI USA Catholic Values Index holds 402 constituents with no Apple and no Amazon, and returned 22.70% against 21.89% for the unscreened MSCI USA over the year to 30 June 2026. Screening beat the benchmark that year. It will not every year, in either direction.

The honest answer is that the tracking difference is real, unpredictable in sign, and small relative to the cost of active management layered on top.

Should I tithe on investment gains?

Scripture does not settle this, and anyone who tells you it does is overreaching. What it does give you is a principle — proportional giving from increase — and two questions to resolve.

What is the base? Unrealized gains are not income in any practical sense; you cannot give what you have not received. Most people who tithe on investments do so on realized gains, in the year they realize them, which is at least administrable.

What is the vehicle? This is where real money sits, and almost nobody optimizes it. Giving appreciated shares rather than cash lets you deduct the full market value while never realizing the capital gain — better for you and the charity both. If you are 70½ or older, a qualified charitable distribution sends up to $111,000 in 2026 straight from an IRA to charity, excluded from income entirely rather than merely deducted, and it counts toward your required distribution.

Paul’s guidance is proportional and pre-committed: set aside a sum “in keeping with your income” on a regular schedule (1 Corinthians 16:2). Decide a percentage, apply it to realized increase, and give the shares rather than the cash. Our guide to tithing and giving works through the gross-versus-net question in detail.

Where should I actually start?

Look up what you own on a free screener. Capture your employer match. Open an IRA you control. Pick a low-cost screened index fund rather than an expensive active one until you have a reason to prefer otherwise. Decide your giving percentage before your income rises again.

That is most of it. Our guides to how to start Christian investing and biblical principles for investing cover the rest.

Related reading

• Christian Investment Calculator
• Christian Finance Conferences
• Christian Investing Glossary
• Best Christian Investment Funds, ETFs, and Platforms
• Christian Investing for Women
• Christian Investing Tools and Resources
• Best Christian Investing Apps
• Christian Investing Podcasts
• Christian Stock Screener Tools
• Christian Investing: The Complete Guide for 2026

If you want to talk to your spouse about how your money is invested, the first thing to put down is the scare statistic. It is not true, and you do not need it.

The statistic you should stop repeating

“Money is the leading cause of divorce” appears everywhere in Christian financial teaching. I went looking for the study.

There isn’t one. The oldest traceable ancestor is a 1996 magazine article titled “Why Money Is the Leading Cause of Divorce,” citing “a study by Citibank showing that 57 percent of divorces are caused by money problems.” No author, no year, no sample, no methodology — and no Citibank study that anyone has been able to locate in thirty years. Even Ramsey Solutions’ own posts hedge the claim to “according to many relationship counselors” rather than to research.

The softer version — that money fights are the second leading cause of divorce, behind infidelity — is asserted on Ramsey’s own research page. But their study surveyed 1,072 general-population adults about attitudes and behaviours. It did not survey divorced people about why they divorced. It cannot support the claim, and no citation is given for it.

This matters practically. If you open a conversation with your spouse by implying your marriage is statistically endangered, you have started an argument rather than a discussion. And if the statistic is false, you have done it for nothing.

What the research actually shows

The genuine academic root is Amato and Rogers, writing in the Journal of Marriage and the Family in 1997. Their finding: feeling that one’s spouse spent money foolishly increased the likelihood of divorce by 45% for both husbands and wives. Substantial. But their own conclusion was that “only extramarital affairs and alcohol/drug abuse were stronger predictors of divorce.”

So the real research puts money third, behind affairs and substance abuse — not second. The popular framing drops alcohol and drug abuse to make the ranking sound more alarming.

A second finding gets cited constantly and deserves a caveat. Jeffrey Dew reported that couples disagreeing about finances once a week were “over 30 percent more likely to divorce over time” than couples disagreeing a few times a month. The footnote reveals that figure came from an unpublished conference paper, summarized in an advocacy report — not a peer-reviewed article. It may well be right. It is not what most people think they are citing.

The strongest peer-reviewed work is Dew, Britt and Huston in Family Relations in 2012, using 4,574 couples from a national longitudinal survey. Their careful finding: “When financial disagreements were in the model, financial well-being was not associated with divorce. Both wives’ and husbands’ financial disagreements were the strongest disagreement types to predict divorce.”

Read that twice, because it is the most useful sentence in this literature. Financial well-being did not predict divorce. Financial disagreement did. It is not the size of your income or the state of your balance sheet. It is whether the two of you are fighting about it.

One housekeeping note: the widely cited “2013 Kansas State study” is this same 2012 paper. If a source claims both “4,500 couples” and “30% more likely,” it has spliced two different analyses together.

Money is not the most frequent fight. It is the worst one.

The finding that changed how I think about this comes from Papp, Cummings and Goeke-Morey, published in 2009. Rather than asking couples to recall their conflicts, they had 100 husbands and 100 wives keep diaries of 748 actual conflicts in the home.

Their conclusion, verbatim: “Contrary to findings from previous laboratory-based surveys, spouses did not rate money as the most frequent source of marital conflict in the home. However, compared to nonmoney issues, marital conflicts about money were more pervasive, problematic, and recurrent, and remained unresolved, despite including more attempts at problem solving.”

Note the last clause. Couples tried harder to resolve money conflicts and resolved them less often. That is the actual shape of the problem, and it explains why a single big conversation rarely works.

Shaunti and Jeff Feldhahn’s research for Thriving in Love and Money puts numbers on the gap between tension and fighting. Across 23 identified points of tension around money, 92% of couples reported at least one. But only 19% said “yes definitely” and 30% “yes somewhat” to actual arguing with raised voices — meaning roughly half report money tension with no fighting at all. Their deck opens with the line “It’s not about the money.”

The other Feldhahn finding worth knowing: 76% of couples do not want a budget, and one stated reason was “because we’ll just start arguing or get upset; it is better to keep the peace.” Avoidance is not indifference. It is usually conflict management.

Where couples actually stand in 2026

Fidelity’s Couples & Money study, released in May 2026 and surveying 3,193 married or partnered adults:

• 68% did not know their partner’s full financial picture before moving in together
• 49% avoid money conversations specifically to prevent arguments
• Almost one in four admit hiding a financial secret
• 69% are not regularly discussing long-term finances — and 41% wish they were
• Only 42% combine finances into joint accounts
• 53% name being on the same page about financial habits as the top factor in a successful relationship

That fourth line is the opening you are looking for. Two-thirds of couples are not having these conversations, and a large share of them want to. The odds your spouse is quietly hoping you will raise it are better than you think.

Fidelity’s earlier data adds two useful details: 53% of not-yet-retired couples hold conflicting views on how much they need saved to retire, and 57% of women say their partner is savvier about investing — which is worth noticing if you are the one who reads sites like this. A conversation where one person arrives with a thesis and the other arrives without information is not a conversation.

Bankrate’s January 2026 survey found 43% consider financial secrets at least as bad as physical infidelity, and 45% of couples don’t know everything about each other’s finances. The standard is higher than the practice.

How to actually raise values-based investing

The specific conversation this article is about has a trap in it. If you have just discovered what your index fund owns, you will arrive convinced, informed, and ready to change the retirement account. Your spouse will experience that as a decision already made.

Some things that work better:

• Lead with the question, not the conclusion. “Do you know what our 401(k) actually owns? I looked it up and I was surprised” invites someone in. “We need to move our retirement account” does not.
• Show, don’t argue. Look up your largest holding together on a free screener. Our guide to Christian stock screener tools covers which ones are free. Two minutes of looking beats twenty minutes of explaining.
• Name the cost honestly. The cheapest faith-screened index fund runs about 7.5 basis points more than the cheapest secular one — roughly $7.50 a year per $10,000. If you claim it is free, and your spouse finds the number later, you have damaged your credibility on the substance.
• Separate the decisions. Screening, active management, and hiring an advisor are three choices that get bundled in sales conversations. Decide them one at a time.
• Make it recurring and short. Rachel Cruze’s framing — a monthly budget meeting rather than an annual reckoning — is well suited to a conflict type the research says stays unresolved. Small and often beats big and rare.

If you want structure, Prepare/Enrich includes a scored “Financial Management” category with exercises named “Financial Goals,” “Budget Worksheet,” and “The Meaning of Money.” That last one is the right title. The disagreement is rarely about the allocation.

When you genuinely disagree

Sometimes one spouse thinks screening is a matter of obedience and the other thinks it is needless complexity with a cost attached. Both positions are held by serious Christians.

Two things help. First, distinguish conviction from preference. If one of you believes owning a particular company is participation in something evil, that is a conscience issue and Paul’s instruction in Romans 14 applies — the person with the stricter conscience is not to be pressured, and the person with the freer conscience is not to be despised. If it is a preference about strategy, it is negotiable in the ordinary way.

Second, look for the partial move. You do not have to convert the whole portfolio to resolve this. Screening new contributions, or one account rather than both, is a real option and often the thing that unsticks a stalled conversation.

The verse that frames it

“Do two walk together unless they have agreed to do so?” (Amos 3:3). The question is rhetorical and the answer is no — which is the point. Agreement is the prerequisite for walking together, not a pleasant outcome of it. Applied to a retirement account, it means a decision one spouse makes alone is not a shared decision even if it turns out well.

Genesis frames marriage in terms that were always partly economic: “they become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). Ancient marriage contracts were property documents, and one-flesh language carried implications about ownership that modern readers tend to spiritualize away. Your money is genuinely joint whatever the account titling says.

And Paul’s instruction about how to handle disagreement is the operative one: “speaking the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15). Both halves. Truth without love is where the scare statistic came from. Love without truth is the 49% who avoid the conversation to keep the peace — and the research suggests that avoidance is precisely what predicts the outcome they are trying to avoid.

One last piece of context, for perspective. The “50% of marriages end in divorce” figure is also not supported by current data. The crude divorce rate fell from 4.0 per thousand in 2000 to 2.4 in 2023, a decline of about 40%. Your marriage is in better statistical shape than the genre of article you are reading suggests.

Our guides to Christian marriage and money and Christian budgeting cover the mechanics once you are talking.

Related reading

• Christian Investing FAQ
• Christian Investing Glossary
• Christian Investment Calculator
• Best Christian Investment Funds, ETFs, and Platforms
• Christian vs. Conventional Investing
• Christian Investing Tools and Resources: Everything You Need
• Best Christian Investing Apps
• Best Christian Investing Books
• Christian Finance Conferences
• Christian Investing

Dates and prices below were checked against each organizer’s own registration pages in late July 2026. Several long-standing events have changed names, formats, or ceased entirely, so verify before booking travel.

The big one, under a new name

The Kingdom Advisors Annual Conference is now branded Redeeming Money, on its own domain. If you search the old name you will find stale pages.

The 2026 speaker list gives a fair sense of the range: Michael Kitces, Bob Doll, David Bahnsen, Finny Kuruvilla, Randy Alcorn, Bob Goff, Carey Nieuwhof, and Jon Tyson. That mix — practice-management technicians alongside pastors and authors — is what distinguishes it from a standard advisor conference.

Two practical notes. Spouses need a separate full ticket; Kingdom Advisors does not sell partial access. And if you hold the CKA® designation, attending covers your entire 10-hour annual continuing education requirement in one trip, which changes the economics considerably. Kingdom Advisors claims record attendance for 2026 but publishes no number.

What is actually upcoming

Most Christian finance events cluster in February and then again in the autumn. Here is what has not yet happened as of late July 2026.

Faith Driven Entrepreneur Conference — Friday 18 September 2026. The best-value event in this space. It runs online with in-person watch parties, and last year drew over 7,000 entrepreneurs across 600+ locations. Regional pricing as listed: Americas $29, Europe $29, Asia-Pacific $15, Africa $10 — and free if you attend through a partner church. Prices step up after the first 500 global registrations. Speakers include John Maxwell, David Green of Hobby Lobby, and Chris Tomlin.

NACFC Conference — 7-9 October 2026, The Ark Encounter, Williamstown, Kentucky. The National Association of Christian Financial Consultants, which champions biblically responsible investing explicitly. Cost runs from free to $349, with the free tier bundled into membership ($250 to $950 a year). Members get discounts on eVALUEator and on the Eventide courses.

Praxis Africa Gathering — 28-30 October 2026, Nairobi, $199. And Praxis Asia Pacific Gathering — 18-20 November 2026, Singapore, $499. Both are invitation-only forums, with limited scholarships available.

Lausanne Workplace Forum for Africa and the Middle East — 6-9 August 2026, Accra, Ghana. $300 to $400 covering all on-site costs including airport transfers and meals. The first event of its kind for these regions, postponed from 2025, with participants selected and deliberately at least half drawn from the workplace rather than ministry.

Looking into 2027: the Outcomes Conference from Christian Leadership Alliance runs 6-8 April 2027 with registration already open at $699 and $899. Generous Giving’s Celebration of Generosity runs 23-25 April 2027 at The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs. Acton University runs 21-24 June 2027 in Grand Rapids — general admission $1,500, early bird $1,000, students $700, drawing around 800 attendees from 80+ countries. The Praxis Redemptive Imagination Summit runs 24-26 May 2027 in Napa. And Faith Driven’s “Solving the World’s Greatest Problems” Summit runs 18-20 March 2027.

Investor gatherings that are harder to get into

The Faith Driven Investor Conference ran on 6 February 2026 with the theme “Seeds vs. Silos,” and its 2027 date is not yet announced. Worth understanding the format: it is virtual, hosted locally at watch parties worldwide rather than at a single venue. Pricing started at $35 early bird and rose to $100. The 2026 speaker list included Bear Grylls, Mart Green, and Henry Kaestner.

The Christian Economic Forum is the most exclusive and most expensive. Its 2026 global event ran 19-22 July in Palm Beach with over 300 delegates, and registration is reserved for members only. Membership runs through a pre-application, a final application, and then an invitation, vetted by a committee that balances industries — and it “may be deferred or declined.” Event tiers for 2026 ran $2,250 to $2,750 excluding travel, on top of annual dues of $1,200 for an individual or $5,000 for up to five. Its distinguishing feature is that there are no outside presenters or keynote speakers; all content comes from members.

Praxis runs accelerators rather than conferences. One point of confusion worth clearing up: Praxis and Praxis Mutual Funds are unrelated organizations. The accelerator is a New York nonprofit whose old domain now redirects to praxis.co; the funds belong to Everence. The accelerator has 303 active ventures across 113 countries. Its US business track costs $8,000 per venture with an optional $50,000 investment; its nonprofit track charges no fee at all and provides a $50,000 grant on completion. The Capital Fellowship for investors and philanthropists runs $19,500.

Peer groups, not conferences

Two organizations appear on conference lists but do not run annual conferences as their core product.

C12 operates monthly local business forums plus monthly one-to-one coaching for Christian CEOs. It is invitation-only, with eligibility generally at 10+ employees and over $2 million in revenue, and dues are set locally and deliberately unpublished. Typical tenure runs five to seven years. Its biennial gathering, CURRENT27, runs 31 March to 2 April 2027 at the Gaylord Texan; the 2025 edition drew over 1,700. Note that its old domain is dead — the live site is joinc12.com.

Convene runs peer-advisory teams of 10 to 15 plus monthly coaching, with over 2,000 member companies across 25+ years. Pricing is unpublished, but its regional gatherings are cheap and open: Denver 30 July 2026 at $50, Houston 20 August at $50, Bellevue 16 September at $95 to $145.

If what you actually want is sustained accountability rather than three days of content, these are the better format — and considerably more expensive over time.

Things that look like events but are not

This section will save you some searching.

• Sound Mind Investing holds no conferences or in-person events at all. Its only “event” is a free on-demand video workshop of about ten minutes. It is a subscription newsletter service — $119.95 a year for Basic — founded in 1990 in Louisville at Larry Burkett’s suggestion, taking its name from 2 Timothy 1:7.
• The Eventide Center for Faith & Investing runs courses, not conferences. Its financial advisor course earns 7 hours of CFP® and IWI® credit plus 3 additional hours. Prices are not published.
• Faith & Co. is a film and curriculum project from Seattle Pacific University, not an event, and appears dormant — its last post was April 2025.
• BAM Global is entirely virtual now, with a free Connect session on 11 November 2026 and its next summit on 6 May 2027. There is no in-person congress in 2026 or 2027.
• The Impact Foundation runs cohorts, not summits — “The Table” is a seven-week virtual cohort capped at 20 participants, each contributing a $10,000 charitable grant into a pooled fund that the group then allocates by vote.

Whether any of this is worth the airfare

For a working advisor, the calculation is straightforward: Redeeming Money at $990 covering a full year of continuing education competes well against $600 to $1,600 for screening software plus separate CE. For an individual investor, the $29 Faith Driven Entrepreneur ticket is the only entry point priced for a normal household budget, and the partner-church route makes it free.

What you get from a conference that you cannot get from a podcast is other people. “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another” (Proverbs 27:17). The image is abrasive on purpose — sharpening involves friction and material loss on both sides. Conferences do that when you talk to someone who disagrees with you, and they do nothing at all when you sit through sessions confirming what you arrived believing.

Hebrews frames gathering as an obligation with a purpose attached: “let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together” (Hebrews 10:24-25). Consider how — the writer expects deliberate thought about what the meeting is for. Applied to a $990 registration, that means going with two or three specific questions rather than a general hope of inspiration, and booking one honest conversation rather than nine sessions.

Our guides to finding a Christian financial advisor, Christian investing podcasts, and Christian investing books cover the cheaper ways to get the same content.

Related reading

• Christian Investment Calculator
• How to Talk to Your Spouse About Christian Investing
• Christian Investing FAQ
• Best Christian Investment Funds, ETFs, and Platforms in 2026
• The History of Christian Investing
• Christian Investing Tools and Resources: Everything You Need
• Best Christian Investing Apps
• Christian Stock Screener Tools
• Christian Investing Glossary
• Christian Investing: The Complete Guide

Terms marked ⚖ have a technical or legal definition you should not paraphrase loosely.

Screening and philosophy

Biblically responsible investing (BRI). Not a legal term. An industry label for applying scriptural moral criteria to security selection. Note that the major houses deliberately use different words: Timothy Plan says “filtering,” the US Conference of Catholic Bishops says “socially responsible investment,” and Faith Driven Investor says “faith driven investing” while arguing the concept is bigger than avoiding sin stocks.

Negative screening (also exclusionary screening). Removing companies by activity or revenue threshold. The thresholds are where the substance sits: the USCCB excludes companies deriving more than 10% of revenue from contraceptives, and MSCI’s Catholic screens use a 5% revenue test for adult entertainment. Inspire assigns negative points and always excludes any company scoring below zero.

Positive screening (also best-in-class). Actively selecting for good corporate conduct rather than merely excluding bad. Inspire scores 25 positive categories; the BRI Institute’s methodology rewards things like Christian employee groups and corporate chaplains.

Divestment. Selling an existing holding for moral reasons rather than valuation. Distinct from screening, which means never buying it.

Engagement (also shareholder advocacy). Staying invested and pressing management for change. This is the USCCB’s own second strategy, stated as “Actively Work for Change.” See our guide to Christian shareholder advocacy.

SRI (socially responsible investing). The older values-first umbrella term, predating ESG by decades.

ESG. ⚖ Environmental, Social, Governance — and the precision point that matters most in this glossary. As the two dominant raters define their own products, ESG measures financial risk to the company, not morality. Morningstar Sustainalytics rates unmanaged risk from 0 to 100 where higher is worse; MSCI rates industry-relative management quality from AAA to CCC. This is why a tobacco company can carry an AAA rating.

Single versus double materiality. Whether you are measuring the world’s effect on the company (single — what ESG ratings do) or the company’s effect on the world (double — what biblical screening cares about). This one distinction contains the entire argument between the two approaches.

Impact investing. Capital deployed with an intended, measurable positive outcome alongside financial return. The secular frameworks are IRIS+ and the GIIN; on the faith side, “Avoid, Embrace, Engage” is the common formulation.

Sin stocks. Conventional shorthand for alcohol, tobacco, gambling, adult entertainment, and weapons. Worth knowing that current biblical screens have moved well past this list into abortion, IVF, embryonic stem cells, cannabis, state-owned enterprises, and corporate policy positions. Our guide to sin stocks covers the history of the term.

Fund mechanics

Expense ratio. ⚖ Annual fund operating costs as a percentage of assets, deducted from net asset value rather than billed to you. Distinguish gross from net: a net ratio reflects contractual fee waivers, and waivers expire — GuideStone’s current waivers run through 30 April 2027. Also note unitary fee structures, where the adviser absorbs all other expenses; Praxis’s new ETFs are unitary at 0.36% and 0.54%.

12b-1 fee. ⚖ An ongoing distribution and marketing fee paid out of fund assets under Rule 12b-1 of the Investment Company Act of 1940, typically 0.25% to 0.75%. Timothy Plan’s Class I shares carry no 12b-1; its Class C shares carry a 1% contingent deferred sales charge. Praxis Class A shares carry a maximum load of 5.25%.

Load. A sales charge paid on purchase (front-end) or sale (back-end). Ave Maria’s funds are entirely no-load. Mutual fund loads across the industry generally run 3% to 8.5%, which is the single largest avoidable cost in retail investing.

Tracking error. How far a fund diverges from its benchmark. The screening-specific version: CATH deliberately matches S&P 500 sector weights to minimize it, and the MSCI USA Catholic Values Index holds 402 constituents with no Apple and no Amazon — yet returned 22.70% against 21.89% for MSCI USA over the year to 30 June 2026. Screening does not automatically cost return.

Volatility weighting. Weighting index holdings by price volatility rather than market capitalization. Timothy Plan’s four established ETFs track volatility-weighted BRI indexes, which is why their returns diverge from the S&P even in years when their screens exclude little.

Advisor and legal terms

Fiduciary. ⚖ For a registered investment adviser, the SEC’s own interpretation states the duty “comprises a duty of care and a duty of loyalty,” and that the adviser “must, at all times, serve the best interest of its client and not subordinate its client’s interest to its own.” That is the strongest standard available in this industry.

Suitability. ⚖ FINRA Rule 2111 requires a “reasonable basis to believe” a recommendation suits the customer’s profile — a materially lower bar than fiduciary duty. The detail most write-ups miss: the rule’s own supplementary material says it does not apply to recommendations subject to Regulation Best Interest. For retail customers, Reg BI displaced suitability in 2020.

Regulation Best Interest. ⚖ Effective 10 September 2019 with a compliance date of 30 June 2020, codified at 17 CFR 240.15l-1. Four obligations: Disclosure, Care, Conflict of Interest, and Compliance. It raised brokers to a “best interest” standard but did not make brokers fiduciaries, and did not import the ongoing monitoring duty that applies to advisers.

Form ADV. ⚖ An investment adviser’s public filing, in parts. Part 1A is the regulatory data — ownership, assets, clients, affiliations, discipline. Part 2A is the plain-English brochure covering services, fees and conflicts. Part 2B is the supplement describing the individuals actually advising you. Part 3 is Form CRS, a two-page relationship summary. Within Part 1A, Item 9 is custody and Item 11 is disciplinary history — a distinction commonly reported backwards.

CKA® (Certified Kingdom Advisor). ⚖ A registered designation of Kingdom Advisors, not a government credential. Requires an existing professional credential or ten years of experience, a 16-module program, a proctored exam, and three references including one pastoral. Full requirements in our guide to finding a Christian financial advisor.

CFP®. ⚖ A certification mark of the CFP Board. Four requirements — Education, Exam, Experience, Ethics — and CFP professionals commit to the Board to act as a fiduciary under standards effective 1 October 2019. There were 109,482 CFP professionals as of July 2026.

CFCA®. The credential of the National Association of Christian Financial Consultants. Note the letters — it is not “Christian Financial Consultant,” which is how it is usually miswritten.

Fee-only. ⚖ Per NAPFA, whose members are required to work only within this structure, “accepting no commissions for their work.” Compensation comes directly from clients — hourly, retainer, percentage of assets, or flat fee. Distinct from fee-based, which permits commissions alongside fees and is the source of most confusion in advisor marketing.

Shareholder proposal. ⚖ This one has hard numbers, set by SEC rule. To submit, you must have continuously held $2,000 for three years, $15,000 for two years, or $25,000 for one year, and you may not aggregate holdings with other shareholders. The proposal and supporting statement may not exceed 500 words. One proposal per person per meeting. It must arrive at least 120 calendar days before the anniversary of last year’s proxy statement. Since a February 2025 amendment you must also state in writing that you can meet with the company 10 to 30 days after submitting. Resubmission is barred if a substantially similar proposal drew under 5% once, under 15% twice, or under 25% three or more times.

Proxy voting. ⚖ Voting your shares on ballot items, governed by Regulation 14A; advisers voting client proxies are subject to Advisers Act Rule 206(4)-6. This is the mechanism behind engagement — see Christian shareholder engagement.

Accounts and giving

403(b)(9). ⚖ A retirement income account that is a church plan, exempt from ERISA, available to churches and organizations associated with them. Its distinctive feature — and the reason it matters enormously to clergy — is that it can support a housing allowance designation on distributions to retired ministers. No 401(k), 403(b)(7), or IRA can do this. See our guide to financial planning for ministry workers and pastors.

Donor-advised fund (DAF). ⚖ Defined in the tax code as a fund separately identified by reference to a donor’s contributions, owned and controlled by a sponsoring organization, over which the donor has or expects advisory privileges. You take the deduction on contribution; grants are recommended rather than directed. Fee models diverge wildly — Charityvest charges nothing on cash, Daffy charges a flat $3 to $40 a month, the National Christian Foundation charges 0.90% tiering down to 0.05%, and Fidelity charges 0.60%.

Qualified charitable distribution (QCD). ⚖ A direct IRA-to-charity transfer available from age 70½, excluded from gross income rather than deducted, and able to satisfy a required minimum distribution. The 2026 limit is $111,000 per person. Unavailable from an ongoing SEP or SIMPLE IRA, and DAFs do not qualify.

Required minimum distribution (RMD). ⚖ Begins at age 73 under current law, computed by dividing the prior 31 December balance by a life-expectancy factor. Roth IRAs are exempt. The penalty for missing one is a 25% excise tax, reduced to 10% if corrected promptly.

Tithe, offering, and firstfruits. No legal definitions, and the terms that actually need distinguishing are the base and the vehicle. Base: gross or net income, and whether unrealized capital gains count at all. Vehicle: cash, appreciated stock (which avoids the capital gains tax entirely), a DAF grant, or a QCD. Giving appreciated stock rather than cash is the most commonly missed opportunity in Christian giving — you deduct the full market value and never realize the gain. Our guide to tithing and giving works through the base question.

Why precision here is a spiritual matter

“The discerning heart seeks knowledge, but the mouth of a fool feeds on folly” (Proverbs 18:15). Seeking is active. The proverb contrasts someone who goes after information with someone who consumes whatever is placed in front of him — which is a fair description of the difference between reading a Form ADV and taking an advisor’s word for how he is paid.

“Test them all; hold on to what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Vocabulary is where testing begins. An industry that can call a commission-earning salesperson “fee-based” and a risk metric “responsible” is an industry where the words are doing work, and knowing which terms are legally defined tells you which promises are enforceable.

Two practical applications. Ask any prospective advisor whether he is a fiduciary at all times and get the answer in writing. And before buying any fund, look up its gross expense ratio, not its net — because the waiver has an expiry date printed in the prospectus.

Related reading

• How to Talk to Your Spouse About Christian Investing
• Christian Investment Calculator
• Christian Finance Conferences
• Best Christian Investment Funds, ETFs, and Platforms in 2026
• Christian Investing for Millennials and Gen Z
• Christian Investing Tools and Resources: Everything You Need
• Best Christian Investing Apps
• Christian Stock Screener Tools
• Best Christian Investing Books
• The Complete Guide for 2026

A calculator is only as honest as its inputs. This article gives you the verified 2026 numbers to put into one, and flags the assumption most likely to mislead you.

What faith-based calculators actually exist

Ramsey Solutions has the most complete suite, twelve calculators, all live: Investment, Retirement, Compound Interest, Net Worth, Budget, Debt Snowball, Student Loan Payoff, Mortgage, Mortgage Payoff, Cost of Living, College Savings, and Term Life Insurance.

GuideStone offers five: a Traditional IRA calculator, Life Insurance, APR Mortgage, a “Cool Million” calculator that projects when your savings plan makes you a millionaire, and a Checkbook Balancer.

Crown Financial Ministries offers twelve, including Debt Snowball, Net Worth, Mortgage Amortization and Refinancing, Auto Loan and Lease, Compound and Simple Interest, Retirement Savings, Loan Affordability, Savings Goal, and Life Insurance.

Some negative findings so you do not go looking: FaithFi ships an app rather than calculators, Timothy Plan’s resources section has none, and the National Christian Foundation’s calculator page is gone.

Note what is missing from all of them. Nobody publishes a calculator that models the cost of faith-based screening — the one calculation genuinely specific to this audience. The rest is compound interest, which works identically regardless of what you believe.

The 2026 numbers a calculator needs

Every figure below is from IRS Notice 2025-67, Revenue Procedure 2025-19, or the Social Security Administration.

Phase-outs for 2026: Roth IRA contributions phase out from $153,000 to $168,000 for single filers and $242,000 to $252,000 for joint filers. Traditional IRA deductibility phases out from $81,000 for a single filer covered by a workplace plan. The Saver’s Credit cuts off at $80,500 joint.

Two structural rules a calculator will not tell you. Required minimum distributions begin at 73, and Roth IRAs are exempt from them entirely. And if your wages from an employer exceeded $150,000 in 2025, your 2026 catch-up contributions must be Roth — which changes the tax line in any projection you build.

The return assumption that matters most

This is where calculators mislead, and the error compounds over thirty years.

The best-documented long-run figure comes from Aswath Damodaran’s dataset at NYU Stern, updated in January 2026 with data through calendar 2025. $100 invested in the S&P 500 with dividends reinvested at the start of 1928 grew to $1,157,598 by the end of 2025 — a compound annual return of 10.02% over 98 years.

The comparators over the same period:

Now the flag. Ramsey’s own investment calculator page describes “ETFs that average 10-12%” annual returns. The top of that range sits meaningfully above the verified 98-year figure. It is a modelling assumption, not a historical fact, and the difference is not academic — projecting 12% instead of 10% on $500 a month for thirty years overstates the ending balance by roughly 40%.

Use 10% nominal if you want the historical average. Use something lower if you want a projection you are unlikely to be disappointed by, and remember that inflation takes roughly three points off the nominal figure over long periods.

The other thing a smooth compound-interest curve hides is the path. Recent single years from the same dataset: 2025 up 17.78%, 2024 up 24.88%, 2023 up 26.06%, 2022 down 18.04%, 2021 up 28.47%. The worst years on record are 1931 at −43.84%, 2008 at −36.55%, and 1937 at −35.34%. No calculator shows you the year your balance falls by a third, and that is the year that determines whether your plan survives.

What faith-based funds cost, precisely

Here is the calculation nobody in this space states plainly, and it is the one Christian investors actually want.

The cheapest faith-based S&P-500-style fund is Inspire’s PTL at 0.09%. The cheapest comparable secular index funds are Fidelity’s FXAIX at 0.015% and Vanguard’s VOO at 0.03%.

So screening costs you roughly 7.5 basis points a year — about $7.50 annually per $10,000 invested. On a $100,000 portfolio, $75 a year. That is the honest price of the cheapest available faith-based option, and it is far smaller than most people assume.

The gap widens considerably against other faith-based funds:

• CATH (Catholic values): 0.29%
• Praxis’s forthcoming ETFs: 0.36%
• Inspire BIBL: 0.35%
• GuideStone Equity Index: 0.39%
• Ave Maria Bond: 0.42%
• Timothy Plan ETFs: 0.52% to 0.62%
• Actively managed faith-based funds: 0.80% to 1.94% gross

Against an actively managed BRI fund at 1.2%, you are paying roughly 118 basis points more than FXAIX — about $118 a year per $10,000, and over thirty years that compounds into a meaningful sum. Whether it is worth it depends on whether you want screening alone or screening plus active management, and those are separate decisions that get bundled together in the sales conversation.

Run the number for your own balance before accepting either the claim that screening is free or the claim that it is prohibitively expensive. Our guides to the best Christian ETFs and the best BRI funds compare the lineups in detail.

The calculation almost nobody runs

If you are 70½ or older, the qualified charitable distribution is the most tax-efficient giving mechanism available, and no faith-based calculator models it.

You can send up to $111,000 in 2026 directly from an IRA to a qualified charity. The amount is excluded from income rather than deducted, which is better — it never enters your adjusted gross income, so it cannot push up your Medicare surcharge or the taxable portion of your Social Security. It also counts toward your required minimum distribution.

The window between 70½ and 73 is the part people miss. Distributions are not yet required, so every dollar sent to charity in those years permanently shrinks the account balance that all future required distributions are calculated from. Done for three years at meaningful amounts, it reduces your taxable income for the rest of your life.

Rules: it must go directly from the custodian to the charity, it is unavailable from an ongoing SEP or SIMPLE IRA, and donor-advised funds do not qualify. Report the full distribution on the IRA line, enter zero as taxable, and write “QCD” beside it.

One 2026 change relevant to everyone else: for the first time since 2021, households that do not itemize can deduct up to $1,000 of cash giving, or $2,000 filing jointly, and churches qualify. Itemizers now face a floor — only giving above 0.5% of income counts, so a household at $150,000 loses the deduction on its first $750.

Why the arithmetic is worth doing

Jesus treats calculation as a mark of seriousness rather than a lack of faith: “Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it?” (Luke 14:28). The context is discipleship, not construction — he is arguing that anyone who begins something without counting what it requires is not to be admired. Estimating the cost is the faithful behaviour in the parable.

Proverbs adds the contrast between planning and haste: “The plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty” (Proverbs 21:5). Haste, not risk. The failure mode is acting without having worked it out.

What a calculator cannot supply is the finish line. Ron Blue has spent forty years asking a single question — how much is enough? — and no spreadsheet answers it. A projection will tell you what $500 a month becomes in thirty years. It will not tell you whether that number is the right target, or what you intend the surplus above it to do. Those are the decisions that actually determine whether the money did any good.

Our guides to how much Christians should save for retirement and tithing and giving take up both halves of that question.

Related reading

• Christian Finance Conferences
• Christian Investing FAQ
• Christian Investing Glossary
• Best Christian Investment Funds, ETFs, and Platforms in 2026
• Christian Investing for Millennials and Gen Z
• Everything You Need
• Best Christian Investing Apps
• Christian Stock Screener Tools
• Best Christian Investing Books
• The Complete Guide for 2026

You can find out what your index fund actually owns in about ninety seconds, for free. Most Christians have never looked. Here is what each tool does and what it costs.

Inspire Insight: free, and the most transparent

Inspire Insight scores companies from −100 to +100. The mechanics are published rather than proprietary, which is unusual in this space.

Every company starts at zero. Exclusionary screens fire first and assign negative points — Inspire’s own language is that companies triggering them “are always excluded from investment.” Companies that pass then score positively across five sustainability categories. Inspire only invests in companies scoring zero or higher.

The fourteen negative categories, in Inspire’s own words: Abortifacients, Abortion Activism, Abortion Services, Alcohol, Cannabis (Cultivation and Processing), Cannabis (Retail THC), Embryonic Stem Cells, Exploitation, Gambling, In Vitro Fertilization, LGBT Activism, Sexually Explicit, State Owned Enterprise, and Tobacco. Twenty-five positive categories cover things like business ethics, human rights, labor practices, and emissions.

Three definitions are worth reading closely, because they are more specific than the category names suggest:

• Exploitation is scored according to the National Center on Sexual Exploitation.
• State Owned Enterprise names its excluded countries explicitly — China, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Vietnam.
• LGBT Activism is defined as “companies earning an above-average rating according to an annual self-reported survey conducted by a national LGBT advocacy organization.” Inspire does not name the organization on that page; reporting has identified it as the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index.

Positive-category data comes from FactSet; the negative screens are Inspire’s own research. One inconsistency to be aware of: Inspire’s own pages give three different category counts — 40 in the FAQ, 39 across the enumerated pages, and “50+” on the About page. Cite the list, not the number.

Some live scores, useful for calibration: eBay and Amazon both score −100. Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Pfizer, and Sanofi all score −93. The highest-scoring US companies are FuelCell Energy at 81, Alexandria Real Estate at 80, and Arrow Electronics at 78.

If those numbers surprise you, that is the point of the tool. Retail access is genuinely free and always has been. Advisor pricing exists but is not published anywhere — the pricing page returns a 404.

eVALUEator: the one with published prices

eVALUEator Services runs two products: eVALUEator covering more than 11,000 mutual funds, funds of funds, variable annuities and ETFs using Morningstar data, and INVESTigator covering nearly 30,000 individual companies.

It applies 8 broad screens across 63 sub-screens: Abortion (6 sub-screens), Entertainment (10), Pornography (11), Lifestyle (15), Rights (5), Alcohol (7), Tobacco (3), and Gambling (6). The language is blunt and shows its age — the Rights category includes a “Persecution” screen for companies conducting business in countries with known persecution of Christians.

Pricing is published, which makes it the only serious tool in this category you can budget for without a sales call:

There is a free consumer sibling at christianinvestingtool.com, offering five free reports on registration. If you want a fund-level screen and Inspire Insight does not cover your holding, try there.

A detail that explains a lot: eVALUEator’s office is in the same building as Timothy Plan’s headquarters in Maitland, Florida. The relationship is confirmed from both sides — Timothy Plan says it screens “through the filtering tools provided to us by eVALUEator,” and eVALUEator says Timothy Plan has used its research since 1994.

Timothy Plan’s filters

Timothy Plan deliberately says “filtering” rather than “screening,” and applies eight filters in two named groups.

Faith-based filters: Abortion (including fetal tissue research and abortifacients), Pornography, Entertainment (“anti-family entertainment which includes; violence, language, sex and drugs”), Lifestyle, and Rights (covering human oppression, trafficking, slave labor, terrorism, and Christian persecution).

Social filters: Gambling, Tobacco — which includes recreational marijuana — and Alcohol.

Their own distinction between the two groups is candid and unusual: the social filters cover areas “where a certain element of ‘Christian liberty’ could be expressed, but because of the overwhelming abuses” they screen anyway. That is a firm acknowledging its screens go beyond what Scripture requires, which is more honest than the category norm.

Their enforcement policy is absolute: “if any company we currently own is determined to be within a violation, we will liquidate immediately.”

The origin story matters for understanding why this exists. Art Ally was asked in 1992 to design a retirement plan for independent-church pastors and found nothing on the market that screened for abortion or pornography. He spent two years building a filter model and launched in 1994, at 52, with a million dollars raised. There were five filters initially; entertainment and lifestyle came later. Our Timothy Plan review covers the current fund lineup.

The legacy tool people still cite

The Biblically Responsible Investing Institute comes up constantly in older articles, and two corrections are needed.

First, the site is effectively frozen around 2013-14. Its homepage backtest chart is labeled through June 2014 and its only press item is a magazine article from June 2013. It returns a live page, but describe it as legacy rather than current.

Second, and more important: the BRI Institute has no certification program of any kind. If a firm claims to be “BRI Certified,” that credential does not exist. The real designation is the CKA® from Kingdom Advisors, an entirely separate organization — see our guide to finding a Christian financial advisor for what it actually requires.

The methodology is still worth reading for two features nobody else has. It includes a predatory lending screen covering payday loans, pawn shops, auto title lending, and rent-to-own — a category no other Christian screen touches. And it assigns explicit per-parameter “failure periods,” so a company’s involvement carries a defined duration rather than a permanent mark. It also gathers data through primary research — SEC filings, public tax records, direct contact with management — rather than buying a vendor feed.

Two more clarifications. Faith Driven Investor is not a screening tool — it publishes no screener, no screened-fund list, and no manager directory. It is a content and community ministry, and a good one. And the Christian Investment Forum wound down in May 2020, with its content absorbed into Faith Driven Investor, so links to its old “Chart of Funds” are dead.

What ESG ratings actually measure

This is where most Christian investors get confused, and the confusion is understandable because the marketing invites it.

Morningstar Sustainalytics rates ESG risk from 0 to 100, where higher is worse: Negligible below 10, Low to 20, Medium to 30, High to 40, Severe above 40. It covers over 16,000 companies. Critically, the score measures unmanaged risk — and Sustainalytics deliberately carves out what it calls unmanageable risk, using tobacco as its own example, since a tobacco company cannot eliminate the health effects of its product.

MSCI rates AAA down to CCC across more than 17,000 issuers, and its ratings are industry-relative. A weapons or tobacco manufacturer can earn AAA by managing its risks better than its own peers do.

Both free public lookup tools are now gone. Sustainalytics’ per-company pages redirect to a sales page, and MSCI retired its free ESG search entirely. Fund-level Sustainalytics data is still visible on Morningstar’s retail fund pages.

On the Catholic side, the current USCCB Socially Responsible Investment Guidelines date from November 2021, replacing the 2003 version after eighteen years. Its three strategies are, verbatim: “First, Avoid Doing Harm / Second, Actively Work for Change / And third, Promote the Common Good.” Its five policy categories are Protecting Human Life, Promoting Human Dignity, Enhancing the Common Good, Pursuing Economic Justice, and Saving Our Global Common Home. One hard threshold worth quoting: the guidelines exclude companies deriving more than 10% of revenue from contraceptives.

The comparison that settles the argument

Here is the cleanest proof that biblical screening and ESG rating are not two points on one scale.

A high score on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index raises a company’s social profile in ESG terms. That same high score drives its Inspire Impact Score toward −100. The identical fact pattern moves one score up and the other down.

They are not measuring the same thing more or less strictly. One prices financial risk to the shareholder; the other declines participation in an activity regardless of whether it is profitable. Sustainalytics says so in its own definitions — its bands are written in enterprise-value terms, about material financial impacts. Biblical screening excludes on conscience whether or not the exclusion costs anything.

Once you see that, the “does ESG cover this for me?” question answers itself. It does not, and it was never designed to.

What screening is for

Paul’s instruction to the Ephesians is the sharpest verse in this area: “Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them” (Ephesians 5:11). Two commands, and the second is the harder one. Declining involvement is passive; bringing what is hidden into view takes work. That second command is a fair description of what a screening tool does to a portfolio nobody has examined.

Alongside it, “Test them all; hold on to what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Testing implies a standard and a method. For most of Christian history, an investor had no practical way to know what he owned inside a pooled fund. That constraint is gone, which changes what faithfulness requires — not because Scripture changed, but because the excuse of ignorance is no longer available.

Start with the free tool, look up the largest holding in your retirement account, and decide what to do with what you learn. Our guides to negative screening and positive screening cover the two approaches, and Christian investment screening is the fuller treatment.

Related reading

• How to Talk to Your Spouse About Christian Investing
• Christian Finance Conferences
• Christian Investing FAQ
• Best Christian Investment Funds, ETFs, and Platforms in 2026
• From Wesley to Modern ETFs
• Everything You Need
• Christian Investment Calculator
• Christian Investing Glossary
• Christian Investing Podcasts
• Christian Investing: The Complete Guide for 2026

I checked every feed in this article directly rather than trusting directories, because the directories are badly out of date. Episode counts and dates below are as of 29 July 2026.

The daily show, and its unusually long lineage

Faith & Finance, hosted by Rob West, is the anchor of this category, and its history is worth knowing because it explains why it sounds more established than everything around it.

In 1988 Larry Burkett launched a thirty-minute program called Money Matters with co-host Steve Moore, eventually carried on more than a thousand stations. Burkett died in 2003. Howard Dayton took over as host in 2004, and the show was retitled MoneyWise in 2011 under Dayton’s Compass ministry. Kingdom Advisors acquired the broadcast in 2017. On 2 January 2023 it became Faith & Finance.

That is a single continuous program with 38 years of history, which is not something else in Christian media can claim. It now reaches over a million radio and podcast listeners daily across more than 2,000 radio outlets.

There are three feeds carrying the same daily content in different cuts:

Pick one. The 25-minute FaithFi cut is the efficient version; the longer ones include more listener calls, which is where the show is at its best. Episode #990 published on 29 July 2026. The call-in line is 800-525-7000.

Rob West is CEO of both FaithFi and Kingdom Advisors; Sharon Epps is president. Underwriters include Eventide, Timothy Plan, Praxis, GuideStone, OneAscent, and Sound Mind Investing — which is worth knowing when fund recommendations come up, and to the show’s credit it discloses them.

One search trap: “MoneyWise” as a live show no longer exists. The shows now carrying that name on Apple belong to unrelated companies, and “The Moneywise Guys” is a Bakersfield radio program. Searching the old name will not find this show.

The Ramsey shows

The Ramsey Show began in June 1992 on WTN in Nashville as The Money Game, with Ramsey alongside an insurance agent and a realtor. It became The Dave Ramsey Show in 1999 and The Ramsey Show in 2020. It runs three hours, weekdays 2:00 to 5:00 PM Eastern, on over 600 stations.

Ramsey’s published reach figures are large and slightly inconsistent — the show page says over 18 million combined weekly listeners while the personalities page says 20 million, and their own pages disagree about how many bestsellers Dave has written. Treat any single number cautiously.

The current roster is Dave Ramsey, Rachel Cruze, George Kamel, Jade Warshaw, and Dr. John Delony. Ken Coleman is no longer a Ramsey Personality — his departure was announced on 27 April 2026 after twelve years, so lists naming him are out of date.

Two related feeds are more practical than the main show. The Ramsey Show Highlights publishes twice daily at about nine minutes an episode, which is the right format if three hours of call-in radio is more than you want. Smart Money Happy Hour with Cruze and Kamel runs weekly on Thursdays and is lighter.

A caveat worth holding: the Ramsey framework is excellent on debt and behaviour and weaker on investing specifics. Its published return assumptions run above the long-run historical figure, which our guide to Christian investment calculators examines in detail.

Actually about investing

Faith Driven Investor is the only well-produced show in this category focused on investing rather than household budgeting. Episode 227 published on 20 July 2026, running about 41 minutes.

Two corrections to what most lists say. The credited hosts are now John Coleman and Luke Roush, not Henry Kaestner — Kaestner co-hosted the first episode in July 2019 and remains a founder, but he is not the current host. And the cadence is now biweekly rather than weekly. The recurring “Marks on the Market” segment is the most useful part if you follow markets.

Its sibling, Faith Driven Entrepreneur, runs weekly on Tuesdays and reached episode 385 on 28 July 2026 — more prolific, and aimed at operators rather than allocators.

Smaller shows worth a subscription

The Stewardology Podcast is the most consistent of these — a financial planner and a pastor working through topics together, which produces better theology than a planner alone and better practice than a pastor alone. The Catholic Money Show is the strongest Catholic entry by a distance.

Shows that are dead, dormant, or not what you think

This section exists because every other list gets these wrong.

• Eventide has no active podcast. Two feeds exist and both are dormant — “Invest by Design” last published in August 2023 with four episodes, and the Eventide Center for Faith & Investing’s “The Faith and Investing Podcast” last published in December 2024. The Center’s live products are its journal and its courses, not a show.
• Inspire Investing has no podcast at all. Robert Netzly appears as a guest on other people’s shows; there is no Inspire show.
• Kingdom Advisors has no active podcast. Its old feed has one episode, last touched in 2009.
• Sound Retirement Radio is not a Christian show. It is a competent retirement program from a fee-only adviser in Washington, with no faith content anywhere in it. It appears on Christian podcast lists constantly and does not belong there.
• The “Rich Habits Podcast” is secular. Fine show, wrong list.
• Faith & Retirement from Faith Investor Services has 107 episodes but has been quiet since March 2026.

Where to start, depending on what you want

The lists in this category are undifferentiated, so here is an opinionated version.

• If you are getting out of debt: The Ramsey Show Highlights. Nine-minute episodes, relentless on behaviour, and the call-in format means you hear people at every stage of the same problem. Our guide to a biblical approach to debt covers where the framework is strongest.
• If you want a daily habit: Faith & Finance, the 25-minute FaithFi cut. It is the only show in this space that publishes every weekday with consistent production quality.
• If you actually want to think about capital: Faith Driven Investor. Biweekly, longer-form, and the only show interviewing fund managers and allocators rather than answering household budget questions.
• If you want theology alongside the practice: The Stewardology Podcast, where a CFP® and a pastor work through topics together.
• If you are Catholic: The Catholic Money Show, which has been running since 2018 and treats Catholic social teaching as a serious input rather than a footnote.

What none of these will do is tell you what to buy. The daily shows take listener questions and answer at the level of principle, because the hosts cannot see your tax situation, your employer plan menu, or your marriage. That is a feature of the format, not a shortcoming — but it means the podcast is where you build understanding, not where you make decisions.

How to listen without outsourcing your judgment

Financial media is advice delivered by people who cannot see your situation, which is a structural limitation rather than a criticism. Proverbs is enthusiastic about counsel and specific about its plurality: “For lack of guidance a nation falls, but victory is won through many advisers” (Proverbs 11:14). Many advisers. A single voice you trust completely is the failure mode the proverb is warning against, and podcasts are unusually good at producing exactly that kind of loyalty.

Paul’s instruction to the Thessalonians is the right posture: “Test them all; hold on to what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Testing means noticing when a host has a commercial interest in the conclusion, when a return assumption is above what history supports, and when a confident answer depends on facts about your life the host does not have.

Three specific things to hold loosely from any show: return projections, blanket rules about debt that ignore interest rates, and product recommendations from a program the product’s issuer underwrites. None of those make a show untrustworthy. They make it a source among several.

Our guides to Christian investing books and finding a Christian financial advisor cover the other two places people get counsel, and Christian finance conferences covers meeting people in person.

Related reading

• Christian Investing FAQ
• Christian Investing Glossary
• How to Talk to Your Spouse About Christian Investing
• Best Christian Investment Funds, ETFs, and Platforms in 2026
• Christian Investing for Millennials and Gen Z
• Christian Investing Tools and Resources
• Best Christian Investing Apps
• Christian Stock Screener Tools
• Christian Investing: The Complete Guide

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.

Related reading

• Christian Finance Conferences
• Christian Investing FAQ
• Christian Investing Glossary
• Best Christian Investment Funds, ETFs, and Platforms in 2026
• Types of Christian Investment Approaches
• Christian Investing Tools and Resources
• Best Christian Investing Apps
• Christian Stock Screener Tools
• Christian Investing Podcasts
• Christian Investing

Two things to get right here: what the Christian-specific credentials actually mean, and how to check the things a credential does not cover.

What the CKA® actually requires

The Certified Kingdom Advisor is the designation people mean when they say “Christian financial advisor.” It is a registered designation of Kingdom Advisors, not a government credential.

The prerequisite is broader than commonly reported. An applicant must either hold one of CFP®, ChFC®, CPA, CPA/PFS, EA, CFA, CIMA®, AAMS, CLU®, FIC, RICP®, CLTC®, or JD — or have ten years of experience in the discipline. So a CKA is not necessarily a CFP, and the ten-year path means some CKAs hold no other credential at all. Ask which route yours took.

Step one: a 16-module educational program of 95 video lessons taught by Ron Blue and faculty, at roughly three to four hours per module, with a six-month completion window and a 70% required average. Each candidate is assigned an instructional mentor who grades a case study. It is delivered with the Ron Blue Institute and administered through Indiana Wesleyan University, and earns up to 28 hours of CFP® continuing education.

Step two: a proctored online exam of 100 multiple-choice questions plus a case study, 70% to pass, taken within 90 days of registering. Kingdom Advisors’ own pages contradict each other on the exam length — one says up to five hours, another says three — so do not treat either as definitive.

Step three: an application requiring three references: one pastoral and two client, all non-family, all of whom have known the applicant at least two years. The Certification Review Board responds in four to six weeks.

Maintenance requires 10 hours of Kingdom Advisors continuing education annually with no carryover — conveniently, attending their annual Redeeming Money conference covers all ten at once.

One correction worth making, because it circulates widely: there is no signed statement of faith requirement. What Kingdom Advisors requires is agreement to uphold its Code of Ethics, a commitment to biblical stewardship, and the pastoral reference. That is meaningful, but it is not a doctrinal subscription.

And nobody publishes how many CKAs exist. Kingdom Advisors says only “thousands of advisors.” Treat any specific number you see as invented. Their directory now lives at faithfi.com/find.

Some context on why this market exists: Kingdom Advisors’ own research puts $22.4 trillion of investable wealth in the hands of US Christian church members, and found that 50% of religiously affiliated high-net-worth investors consider it very important that their advisor shares their religious values.

The CFP® and the credential that matters most

If I could check only one credential, it would be this one, because it covers technical competence in a way the CKA does not attempt to.

There were 109,482 CFP® professionals as of July 2026. The requirements:

• Education: coursework through a registered program plus a bachelor’s degree in any discipline. Coursework typically takes 12 to 18 months.
• Exam: 170 multiple-choice questions across two three-hour sessions, offered three times a year. The March 2026 pass rate was 67% — 4,391 registered, 2,927 passed.
• Experience: 6,000 hours by the standard pathway, or 4,000 under direct supervision by the apprenticeship pathway.
• Ethics: a signed declaration, a background check, and a commitment to CFP Board to act as a fiduciary under standards effective since October 2019.

Continuing education runs 30 hours every two years, including 2 hours of ethics, with no carryover.

The other Christian credential you may encounter is the CFCA® from the National Association of Christian Financial Consultants. Note the letters — it is frequently miswritten.

Verify before you hire

This takes ten minutes and almost nobody does it.

Look up the firm on SEC IAPD at adviserinfo.sec.gov, and any individual broker on FINRA BrokerCheck. Both are free and both show disciplinary history.

Then read the Form ADV. It comes in parts, and knowing which is which saves time:

• Part 1A — regulatory data: ownership, assets, client counts, affiliations, discipline. Item 11 is the disciplinary section; Item 9 is custody. Most articles get these two backwards.
• Part 2A — the brochure, in plain English: services, fees, and conflicts of interest. This is the document to actually read.
• Part 2B — the supplement covering the specific individuals who will advise you.
• Part 3 (Form CRS) — a two-page relationship summary. Start here if you read nothing else.

One structural fact that tells you something about a firm’s size: an adviser may register with the SEC at $100 million in assets, must register at $110 million, and need not withdraw until dropping below $90 million. A state-registered adviser is therefore generally smaller than $100 million, which is not a problem — it is simply information.

Three questions to ask directly, and get the answers in writing: Are you a fiduciary at all times, or only when giving certain advice? How exactly are you paid, including anything you receive from third parties? And what happens to my accounts if you retire or sell the practice?

What fees actually look like

The best published survey I could verify gives these averages for assets-under-management fees:

So the familiar “1% rule” holds around $500,000 to $1 million and breaks down above roughly $1.5 million, where you should be negotiating. Note that this survey is a few years old — treat it as a benchmark rather than a current quote.

Other models: hourly at $120 to $300, where a limited-scope engagement of six to ten hours runs $1,800 to $3,000; annual retainers of $6,000 to $11,000; and flat fees from $7,500 for smaller portfolios. If your situation is simple and your portfolio large, hourly or flat-fee advice is dramatically cheaper than a percentage.

Fee-only has a specific meaning: NAPFA members accept no commissions and are paid directly by clients. Fee-based permits commissions alongside fees. The two words look alike and describe different businesses, and the similarity is not accidental.

Layer these on top of fund costs. Paying 1% for advice on top of 1.2% for actively managed faith-based funds means 2.2% a year, which our guide to Christian investment calculators shows compounding into a very large number over thirty years.

The fiduciary rule that died

Anyone researching this in 2026 will find articles about a Department of Labor fiduciary rule. It is gone, and the sequence matters.

The 2024 Retirement Security Rule would have replaced the 1975 five-part test for who counts as an investment advice fiduciary. Two district courts stayed it in July 2024. In November 2025 the Fifth Circuit dismissed the consolidated appeal on the Department’s own motion — the government stopped defending its rule. Final judgments followed in March 2026, and on 20 March 2026 the Department published a notice of court vacatur, effective that April.

So: the 2024 rule never took effect, and the 1975 five-part test governs. The related exemption for conflicted advice remains fully operative, but the Department has stated its entire preamble is effectively vacated — meaning the old guidance on rollover advice can no longer be relied on. If an advisor recommends rolling your 401(k) into an IRA he will manage for a fee, that recommendation carries less regulatory protection than articles from 2024 suggest. Ask him to explain in writing why the rollover beats leaving the money in the plan.

Named firms, with real numbers

For scale, from current filings and company disclosures:

• Blue Trust — about $62 billion under advisement, 11,000+ clients, 18 offices, founded 1979 by Ron Blue. A correction that matters: it is not a Thrivent company. That relationship began in 2017 and ended around mid-2022; its affiliates today are the Movement group.
• GuideStone — founded 1918, 250,000 members, 24,000+ churches and ministries; GuideStone Funds held $22.6 billion at 31 March 2026.
• Thrivent — a fraternal benefit society with over $212 billion and 2.4 million clients.
• Everence (Mennonite) — $8.9 billion, founded 1945.
• Christian Brothers Investment Services — $11.9 billion, founded 1981, serving 800+ Catholic institutions.
• OneAscent — $7.1 billion, 93 advisors, founded 2017.
• Inspire Advisors — $1.3 billion across 8,330 accounts and 72 branches.

What a shared faith does and does not guarantee

Proverbs is emphatic about seeking counsel and equally emphatic about its plurality: “For lack of guidance a nation falls, but victory is won through many advisers” (Proverbs 11:14). Many. A single trusted advisor with no second opinion is the arrangement the proverb warns against, however godly he is.

And “Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed” (Proverbs 15:22) sits alongside a warning the same book gives repeatedly about dishonest scales and unequal weights. Scripture is simultaneously pro-counsel and clear-eyed that people who handle other people’s money face particular temptations. Both things are true at once, which is why “he’s a believer” is a reason to consider someone rather than a reason to skip the background check.

The most useful posture is the one Jesus commends when he tells his followers to count the cost before building (Luke 14:28). Count this cost specifically: the annual fee in dollars rather than percent, the fund costs underneath it, and what you are getting that you could not get for a flat fee. Then decide.

Our guides to Christian robo-advisors and Christian investment platforms compared cover the cheaper alternatives to hiring a person.

Related reading

• How to Talk to Your Spouse About Christian Investing
• Christian Investment Calculator
• Christian Finance Conferences
• Best Christian Investment Funds, ETFs, and Platforms in 2026
• Christian Investing for Women
• Everything You Need
• Best Christian Investing Apps
• Best Christian Investing Books
• Christian Investing Podcasts
• Christian Investing

Search for “Christian investing apps” and you get lists padded with things that are not apps, companies that do not exist, and products nobody can buy. Here is what I could actually verify as of late July 2026.

What is genuinely a mobile app, and what isn’t

The category confusion is the whole problem, so start here.

Real iOS apps: Harvest Faith-Based Investing, FaithFi, GuideStone, Faith Driven Investor (content only), Kingdom Advisors, Givelify, Tithe.ly, Church Center, Vanco Mobile, Pushpay, Daffy, EveryDollar, YNAB, and Compass’s “Financial Discipleship.”

Web platforms with no app: Inspire Insight, Charityvest, the National Christian Foundation, Overflow, Sound Mind Investing, and Timothy Plan’s shareholder portal.

Fund families with no app and no direct-to-consumer platform at all: Inspire’s ETFs, Faith Investor Services, Timothy Plan, Praxis, Eventide, Ave Maria, and Global X. You buy their funds through a brokerage account, not through an app of theirs.

Harvest: the one genuine faith-based robo-advisor

Harvest released its iOS app on 4 May 2026, which makes it the newest thing in this space and the item most lists have missed.

Pricing, as published on their site:

• Learn tier: $0 — education only
• Invest tier: $10/month or $99/year while your balance is under $25,000
• At $25,000 and above it switches automatically to 0.30% of assets per year, billed monthly on your average daily balance

Their own worked examples: $5,000 costs $120 a year, $25,000 costs $75, $50,000 costs $150, $250,000 costs $750. Note the quirk — a $5,000 balance costs more in dollars than a $25,000 balance, because the flat fee bites hardest on small accounts. If you are starting with a few thousand dollars, that is 2.4% a year, which is a lot.

Harvest is an SEC-registered investment adviser with custody through Alpaca Securities, and it invests in third-party faith-based ETFs on an “Avoid, Embrace, Engage” framework rather than running its own funds.

FaithFi for budgeting

FaithFi is free to download and claims over 70,000 users. The free tier gives you a weekly newsletter, a few premium articles, and community access.

FaithFi Pro lists at $11.99 a month or $99.99 a year, discounted to $8.99 and $74.99 when I checked. Pro adds envelope budgeting, automatic transaction analysis, and the full digital magazine.

For comparison, the two dominant secular budgeting apps: YNAB costs $109 a year or $14.99 a month with a 34-day free trial and no credit card required. EveryDollar, from Ramsey Solutions, is free with a paid premium tier — I could not verify the current premium price from Ramsey’s own pages, so check it before subscribing rather than trusting any list, including this one.

The fund families, and what they actually charge

Since none of these ship an app, what matters is the funds themselves and their expense ratios. Figures below are from each firm’s own filings and factsheets as of mid-2026.

Inspire runs nine ETFs and manages over $3.4 billion. The cheapest is PTL, the Inspire 500, at 0.09% — the least expensive faith-based large-cap fund available anywhere. Then BIBL at 0.35%, IBD at 0.41%, ISMD at 0.53%, BLES at 0.60%, WWJD at 0.61%. Inspire cut expense ratios on five ETFs in April 2026, an average decrease of 5.3%. It also runs Inspire Insight, a genuinely free screening tool covering 72,124 tickers.

Timothy Plan launched three new ETFs on 5 May 2026 — TPFC and TPFG at 0.59%, and TPFI, an active fixed income fund, at 0.55%. Its four established ETFs (TPHD, TPSC, TPLC, TPIF) run 0.52% to 0.62%. Its 403(b) offering lives on a separate site.

GuideStone Funds held $22.6 billion as of 31 March 2026, making it the largest faith-based mutual fund family in the country. Investor Class expense ratios range from 0.39% for the Equity Index fund to 1.75% for Strategic Alternatives. Its fee waivers run through 30 April 2027, which matters — a net expense ratio is a contractual promise with an expiry date, not a permanent feature.

Praxis is the under-covered story. It has filed for its first three ETFs — PRXV and PRXG at 0.36%, PRXI at 0.54%, all unitary fees. Its mutual funds run 0.34% to 0.94% depending on share class, with a maximum Class A load of 5.25%.

Eventide manages about $7.4 billion across eight mutual funds and six ETFs, the ETFs ranging 0.39% to 0.59%.

Ave Maria is Catholic, entirely no-load, with eight funds from 0.42% for the Bond fund to 1.30% for Value Focused. CATH, the Global X S&P 500 Catholic Values ETF, charges 0.29% on $1.28 billion. Both apply Catholic screens rather than Protestant BRI screens — CATH does not exclude alcohol, gambling, or corporate LGBT policy categories.

One negative finding worth stating plainly: Betterment and Wealthfront offer socially responsible portfolios but no faith-based option, and I found no Schwab-branded or Fidelity-branded faith-based fund or model portfolio. Ave Maria funds are available on those platforms, which is platform availability rather than a Schwab or Fidelity product. Our reviews of Timothy Plan, Inspire Investing, and GuideStone Funds go deeper on each lineup.

Giving apps, with the actual fees

This is where apps genuinely dominate, and the fee differences are large enough to matter to a church budget.

Planning Center’s zero-percent ACH rate is the standout. On a $500 monthly gift, ACH through Planning Center costs $0.30 while a card through Subsplash costs $15.25. Encouraging bank transfers over cards is the single highest-leverage thing a church can do about processing fees.

Pushpay does not publish card pricing publicly. Overflow, which accepts stock and crypto gifts, does not publish pricing either — treat both as contact-sales.

Donor-advised funds, where the fee models diverge sharply

Daffy is the only true DAF with a mobile app, and it charges a flat monthly membership rather than a percentage: free for balances up to $100, then $3, $5, $20, or $40 a month by tier. No asset-based fees and no minimums. For a $100,000 balance, $36 a year against Fidelity’s 0.60% — $600 — is a real difference.

Charityvest is the only zero-fee cash DAF: no admin fee, no investment fee, nothing to open or maintain, if you hold cash. Invested accounts pay 0.60% plus small fund fees. Web only.

The National Christian Foundation charges a tiered ministry support fee starting at 0.90% on the first $500,000 and stepping down to 0.05%, with a $30 monthly minimum. It accepts business interests and real estate, which the low-cost providers generally do not, and has granted $25 billion since 1982.

What to look for before you install anything

Four questions cut through most of the marketing in this category.

• Is it an adviser, a fund, or a screener? These are regulated differently and priced differently. An adviser charges you for advice; a fund charges an expense ratio inside the fund; a screener sells data. Bundled pitches often obscure which you are paying for.
• What does it cost at your balance? Flat monthly fees favour large accounts, percentage fees favour small ones. Harvest’s own examples show the crossover clearly.
• Who holds the money? Custody should sit with a third-party broker-dealer, not the app itself. Harvest uses Alpaca; check for an equivalent disclosure before funding an account.
• What exactly does it screen? “Faith-based” is a marketing phrase, not a standard. Catholic screens and Protestant BRI screens exclude different things, and the difference will surprise you in both directions.

Names that do not exist

Worth saying, because these circulate in AI-generated listicles: there is no “Faithward” app, no “Onward Investing,” no “Kingdom Impact,” and no “Faithful Steward.” Sound Mind Investing has no iOS app. If a list recommends one of these, the list was not checked.

What the tool is for

An app is a means of execution, and Scripture’s concern is upstream of execution. The parable of the talents commends the servants who put capital to work and condemns the one who buried it out of fear (Matthew 25:14-30) — the master’s complaint is not that the third servant chose a poor platform, but that he did nothing at all.

Proverbs pushes in a complementary direction: “Be sure you know the condition of your flocks, give careful attention to your herds” (Proverbs 27:23). Knowing the condition of your holdings is exactly what these tools are good for and exactly what most people skip. A free screener will tell you in ninety seconds what your index fund actually owns, and most Christians have never looked.

Start there rather than with a new app. Our guides to Christian stock screener tools and the best Christian ETFs cover what to do with what you find.

Related reading

• Christian Investing Glossary
• How to Talk to Your Spouse About Christian Investing
• Christian Investment Calculator
• Best Christian Investment Funds, ETFs, and Platforms
• From Wesley to Modern ETFs
• Christian Investing Tools and Resources: Everything You Need
• Christian Investing Podcasts
• Best Christian Investing Books
• Christian Investing FAQ
• Christian Investing: The Complete Guide for 2026