Generosity Beyond the Tithe: The Other 90%

"I give 10% to the church. Why do I still feel like I'm missing something?"

A man asked that question in those words. It is a good question, and it came from someone already doing what most Christian money advice asks of him. The tithe goes out every month and the books balance, and something still nags at him.

He was right to feel it.

Most Christian finance writing stops at the tithe: gross or net, and whether it still applies under the New Covenant. Those are real questions, and I have written about them. But the tithe is the floor of Christian giving. The question that actually shapes a man's financial life is what he does with the other 90%.

Why Paul Never Gives You a Number

The New Testament barely talks about the tithe. The word turns up a handful of times, usually as a reference back to the Old Covenant system. When Jesus mentions it in Matthew 23:23, he tells the Pharisees they should have kept the tithe and practiced justice and mercy along with it.

Paul writes about giving often, and he never sets a percentage. He says "each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver" (2 Corinthians 9:7).

At first glance that looks like a discount, as if the rule has been swapped for a feeling and you can give whatever seems right.

Read the chapters around it and the discount disappears. "Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously." Paul holds up the Macedonian churches, who gave "even beyond their ability" out of extreme poverty. And in the verse right after the cheerful giver, he promises that God is able to bless you "so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work."

Paul takes the ceiling off. He assumes that grace will produce more giving than the law ever squeezed out of anyone, because a man who has been forgiven everything has stopped keeping score. Once you belong to Christ, everything you have is his, and a new question opens up: how much am I free to give, and to whom?

I know the old question well. When my wife and I settled on tithing from our gross income, it was because I felt like I was trying to "negotiate terms with God." "How much do I have to give?" is a small, anxious question. It gets small answers.

Everything in the Account Already Belongs to Someone Else

Plenty of Christian men carry a split in their heads. Ten percent is God's. Ninety percent is mine, to spend and enjoy as long as I am sensible about it.

That split is older than the church. The gods of the ancient world took their sacrifice and left a man alone to run the rest of his life, and a lot of us live as if that were the deal. Scripture makes a far bigger claim. Your income and your house belong to God, right down to the RRSP and the groceries in the fridge. You are a steward managing an estate that was never yours, for a Master who will one day ask what you did with it.

The tithe is how you remember that. It works like a liturgy, a practice repeated every pay period until you believe what it says about the whole paycheque.

Take that seriously and it gets harder. Ten percent is a number you can hit and then stop thinking about. Stewardship follows you into the grocery store on Tuesday and the car lot on Saturday.

It also makes you free. Saving becomes provision for needs you cannot see yet, including other people's. Spending on your family becomes care for the household God put in your hands, and you can enjoy it without guilt.

Where the Other 90% Goes Once the Tithe Is Covered

So what does this look like in practice? Treat what follows as ground to think through with your wife. Some of it will fit your season and some of it will wait.

Mission and Parachurch Work

The tithe belongs to your local church. That is where you are fed and held accountable, and I trust the church to steward what it is given. Past the tithe, there is kingdom work no single congregation can carry: Bible translation, crisis pregnancy centres, Christian counselling, seminaries, refugee sponsorship, prison chaplaincy.

Pick two or three and give each one enough to matter. A ministry is better served by one family who gives $100 a month for five years than by fifty families who each give $5 once.

The Neighbour in Crisis

This is the category Scripture presses hardest and the one that gets skipped. In Matthew 25, Jesus separates the sheep from the goats by whether they fed the hungry and visited the prisoner. Nobody is asked for a tithing record. And the righteous are surprised. They ask when they ever saw him hungry.

I think about that surprise a lot. Generosity had become so ordinary for them that they had stopped counting.

A brother at church loses his job. A friend's car dies and there is nothing in savings. Being the man who can write a $500 cheque that week, without calling a family meeting first, depends on margin you built on purpose. It is part of why I am wary of telling men to optimize every dollar. A budget with no slack has no room for Matthew 25.

I have needed this kind of neighbour myself. For a couple of weeks I lost feeling in my hands and they went weak, so I couldn't cook, and someone from church sent us $500 of Uber Eats. I was blown away.

Sometimes the need is a seat at a table. In our house the table is probably the biggest flexible line in the budget, and I don't lose sleep over it. Sharing a home counts as generosity too.

Planned Giving That Runs Without You

Most men who describe themselves as generous are remembering the times someone asked. They picked up the tab or helped a brother move. Those moments count, and they are holy.

Planned giving is the kind that builds over a lifetime. You sit down once a year with your wife, decide where the money should go and how much, then set it up and let it run. Our tithe goes out automatically, like nearly everything else in our house, and there is real freedom in never having to decide it again in a hard month.

The numbers get large without anyone noticing. A man earning $70,000 who gives 12% on automatic for thirty years will give more than $250,000 on the strength of a decision he made once. The man who calls himself generous, but whose giving is all reactive, is usually giving less than he thinks. Automation also keeps the giving steady in the lean months, which are often the months when the need around you is greatest.

Gifts Nobody Sees

Jesus says it plainly in Matthew 6: when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.

Anonymous giving is the one test of whether you give to help someone or to be seen helping. Most of us would prefer to skip the results. Do it anyway. An envelope in a mailbox. An e-transfer with "a friend" in the memo line. It trains the part of you that wants credit to be content with the Father who sees.

When I was 21, someone in the church gave me $1,000 anonymously. It came at exactly the right time for me financially, and no one would have known that. With the giver unnamed, the thanks went where it belonged. I have since given gifts the same way myself.

What the Tax Credit Gives Back on a $1,000 Gift

Canada rewards giving more generously than most men realize. Gifts to a registered charity, which covers almost every church and most established ministries, earn a federal credit of 14% on the first $200 you give in 2026 and, for most earners, 29% on everything above it. Ontario adds 5.05% on the first $200 and 11.16% above it. Past the first $200, that is about 40 cents back on every dollar.

Run it on a $1,000 gift to your church. The federal credit is $28 on the first $200 and $232 on the remaining $800. Ontario adds $10.10 and $89.28. The credit comes to $359.38, and the gift costs you $640.62. The lower rate on the first $200 is why you get 36% back here and closer to 40% on larger totals.

That scales. If your budget can carry $500 a month in giving, the credit means you could give about $830 a month for the same net cost. The credit is non-refundable, so it only reduces tax you actually owe, and spouses can pool their receipts on one return. The rules on receipts and pooling are laid out in is tithing tax deductible in Canada.

Giving in order to collect a credit gets everything backwards. You give because you have been given to, in Christ, extravagantly. Once you are giving, let the credit do what Parliament designed it to do.

Generosity Grows Where a Man Knows He Has Enough

A man does not become generous by trying harder at it.

If the tithe feels heavy, or you find yourself resenting the offering, the trouble almost always sits at the level of identity before it reaches the budget. Jesus put the order plainly: "where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." The heart follows the money. Send the money toward the kingdom and your heart starts to go there with it, and it comes easiest to a man who knows he has already been given everything that matters.

That is why the gospel is the real starting point. God gave his Son for you, a finished work with nothing left for you to add. Once you see that, the question of how much of your paycheque you are required to give starts to look a little funny. You were his before the paycheque existed.

The pressure runs the other way in Canada right now. Households owed 176.4% of their disposable income in the second quarter of 2026, according to Statistics Canada. That is a problem of enough, and no raise has ever solved one.

It is also why giving beyond the tithe is the last move on the Steward's Map. The seven moves before it exist to make it possible. A man with his debt cleared and a real cushion behind him can say yes when something is asked of him.

Three Moves for This Week

Sit down this week, with your wife if you are married, and do three things.

1. Find your real giving number for the last twelve months. Everything counts, including the e-transfers to friends in need. Your church's annual receipt and line 34900 of last spring's tax return (yours or your spouse's) will get you most of the way. Work out what share of your gross income it was. The goal is to know.
2. Choose one planned-giving category beyond your local church for the coming year. Missions, Bible translation, a crisis pregnancy centre, your denomination's seminary. Commit a specific amount, $25 or $100 a month or whatever fits, and set it up on automatic. The charitable giving calculator will show you what it costs after the credit. Let it run a full year before you judge it.
3. Set aside a monthly amount that belongs to no budget category and waits for the neighbour in crisis. Even $50 a month is $600 a year of mercy ready to go.

Twenty minutes. A year from now you will have given more, on purpose, than you would have by waiting to be asked.

For the Man Who Tithes and Still Feels Something Missing

If that is you, the nagging is worth listening to.

The tithe was always pointing past itself. God deserves the firstfruits, and in fact he deserves it all. The 90% is where most of your stewardship happens, in the grocery aisle and at the dinner table.

The man who sees this stops anxiously calculating what God has a claim on. He is free to be faithful with what was never his, for a Master who was faithful to him first. Our wealth is in the cross, and a man who knows that can afford to give.

Give the tithe. Then, slowly and on purpose, learn what to do with the other 90%.

Common questions

What is generosity beyond the tithe?

It is everything a Christian does with the other 90% once the tithe is covered. The tithe goes to your local church. Beyond it sits giving to mission and parachurch work, help for a neighbour in crisis, planned gifts you automate, and gifts nobody ever hears about.

How much should a Christian give beyond 10%?

Scripture sets no number above the tithe. A good start is one organization beyond your church, a specific monthly amount set up on automatic, and a small monthly margin left unspent for whoever needs help. In Ontario the tax credit returns about 40 cents of every dollar given past the first $200, so most men can give more than they assume.

What does a $1,000 donation cost after the tax credit in Ontario?

About $640. For 2026 the federal credit is 14% on the first $200 and 29% above it, and Ontario adds 5.05% and 11.16%. That makes a credit of $359.38 on a $1,000 gift, so it costs you $640.62, as long as you owe enough tax to use the credit.