Generosity Beyond the Tithe: What to Do With the Other 90%

A man I know - mid-thirties, two kids, a mortgage like the rest of us - asked me something over coffee last fall that I have not stopped thinking about. He said, "I give ten percent to the church. I've done that for years. Why do I still feel like I'm missing something?"

I knew what he meant before he finished the sentence. He was not confessing a sin. He was not humble-bragging. He was describing a feeling I have had myself, and one I have heard from a dozen other men in quieter moments. The tithe is in. It clears the account every month. The books are balanced. And yet there is a nagging sense that Christian generosity is supposed to be about more than the one line item that goes to the local church.

He is right. It is.

Most Christian finance content stops at the tithe. Ten percent, gross or net, whether you can afford it, whether it still applies under the New Covenant. Those are real questions, and I have written about them before. But if the tithe is the only conversation we ever have about money, we have missed the much bigger one. The tithe is the floor, not the ceiling. It is the on-ramp to a stewarded life, not the destination. The real question - the one that actually shapes a Christian man's financial life - is what he does with the other ninety percent.

The New Testament Quietly Raises the Bar

Here is something I wish someone had told me earlier. The New Testament almost never talks about the tithe.

The word shows up a handful of times, mostly in reference to the Old Covenant system or as a throwaway example. When Jesus mentions it in Matthew 23:23, he tells the Pharisees they should have tithed and done justice and mercy. When Paul writes about giving - and he writes about it a lot - he does not set a percentage. He says things like "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 this looks like a reduction. No more rule. Just a vibe. Give what you feel like giving.

That is not what is happening. Read Paul carefully and you will see he assumes a standard of generosity that quietly makes the tithe look like a starting line. "Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously." He praises the Macedonians for giving "beyond their ability." He tells the Corinthians that God loves a cheerful giver and then, three verses later, that God is able to bless them abundantly "so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work."

The New Testament does not lower the bar from ten percent. It removes the ceiling. The assumption is not less giving. It is more, coming from a heart transformed by grace rather than compelled by law. Paul is writing to people who understood the tithe as a baseline expectation of covenant life. He is not telling them to do less. He is telling them the reason behind the number has gotten deeper, and so the number itself is almost beside the point. You belong to Christ now. Everything you have is his. Start there and the question is not "how much do I have to give" but "how much am I free to give, and to whom, and for what."

That shift is the whole thing. If you cannot feel the difference between those two questions, the rest of this article will not help you much. But if you can - if you sense that "how much do I have to give" is a small and anxious question while "how much am I free to give" is a large and joyful one - you are ready to think about the other ninety percent.

All of It Is Stewardship

The split most Christian men carry in their heads looks like this: ten percent belongs to God, ninety percent belongs to me. God gets his cut. The rest is mine to spend, save, and enjoy, as long as I am reasonable about it.

This is not Christian. It is pagan with a religious veneer. The pagan gods of the ancient world got their sacrifices and then left you alone to run your own life. The God of the Bible does not work that way. The biblical claim is that everything you have - your income, your house, your retirement account, the groceries in your fridge - belongs to God. You are not an owner negotiating a tax rate with a deity. You are a steward managing an estate that is not yours, for a Master who will eventually ask what you did with it.

This is where the language of stewardship actually lives. I have written about this more broadly in biblical principles of money management, but the short version is this: the tithe is a practice that reminds you of this truth. It is not the truth itself. The truth is that all of it is his. The tithe is a liturgy that helps you remember, every pay period, what the other ninety percent is actually for.

If you believe that - really believe it, not just nod at it - your whole financial life changes shape. Saving is not hoarding; it is stewardship for future needs, your own and others'. Spending is not self-indulgence; it is provision for a household entrusted to your care. Giving is not a ten percent tax; it is one expression, among many, of a life oriented toward a Master who gave everything. The categories stop being "God's money" and "my money" and become "faithful" and "unfaithful."

That change in framing does not make stewardship easier. In some ways it makes it harder. Ten percent is a number you can hit and then stop thinking. Stewardship is something you have to think about Monday morning and Friday afternoon and every decision in between. But it is what the New Testament assumes, and it is what actually produces the kind of man I think most of us, in our better moments, want to be.

What "Beyond the Tithe" Actually Looks Like

So, practically, what does generosity look like once the tithe is covered? Here is what I see in the men I know who are doing this well. These are not rules. They are categories worth thinking through.

Parachurch and Mission Work

The local church is the primary expression of the body of Christ, and the tithe should go there - that is where you are fed, pastored, and held accountable. But the gospel is bigger than any single church, and there are ministries doing kingdom work that your church does not and cannot do alone. Missionaries translating Scripture into languages that do not yet have a Bible. Crisis pregnancy centres. Christian counselling. Apologetics ministries. Seminaries training the next generation of pastors. Indigenous ministry, refugee support, prison chaplaincy.

These are not a replacement for the local church. They are extensions of what the local church cares about. A man giving five percent to his church and then another three percent across two or three parachurch organizations he has researched and prayed about is doing something the ten-percent-into-one-plate man is not.

Pick a small number of organizations. Two or three, not ten. Give meaningfully rather than sprinkling token amounts. The mission is better served by one family who gives $100 a month for five years than by fifty families who each give $5 once and forget.

The Neighbour in Crisis

This is the one most men miss, and the one Scripture presses hardest. In Matthew 25, when Jesus separates the sheep from the goats, he does not ask about tithing records. He asks about whether you fed the hungry, clothed the naked, and visited the prisoner. The righteous in his parable are surprised by their own generosity. They did not track it. They just saw need and moved toward it.

I think a lot about that. The righteous did not count. They were the kind of people for whom generosity had become so baked into their lives that they could not remember all the times they had helped.

Real-world: a brother at church loses his job. A friend's car dies and they have no savings. A young family in your neighbourhood is clearly struggling. Your wife's coworker is drowning in medical bills. These moments are constant, small, and mostly invisible to the people who could help. Reactive generosity - being the kind of man who can quietly write a $500 cheque to a family in crisis without checking with anyone first - is not a budget line item. It is a disposition. It grows from a margin you have built into your life on purpose.

This is partly why I am wary of telling men to optimize every dollar. If your budget is so tight that a $500 cheque would blow it up, you have no room to be the kind of man Matthew 25 describes. Some slack is not selfish. It is preparation for the needs you cannot yet see.

Strategic, Planned Giving

Reactive giving is holy. But it is not enough on its own, because reactive giving tends to be small and occasional. At some point, a mature steward also gives strategically.

Strategic giving means sitting down - ideally with your wife, annually, maybe at tax time or around the start of a new year - and asking: what causes have we been given eyes to see? Where do we want our money to go, on purpose, in the next twelve months? How much, to whom, and why? Then you set it up, automate it, and let it run.

This is the difference between generosity that happens to you and generosity that flows from you. Most Christian men, if they are honest, have the first kind. They gave a few times last year because they got asked. A mature steward has both - the automatic, planned giving that runs whether or not anyone asks, plus the reactive, Spirit-prompted giving that meets the need in front of him.

If you want a simple starting move here, use the charitable giving calculator to see what different giving levels actually cost you after the tax credit. Seeing the after-tax number is surprisingly freeing. It makes generosity feel less like a subtraction and more like something the government is actually subsidizing.

Anonymous Generosity

Jesus has something uncomfortable to say about this in Matthew 6. When you give, he says, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. Do it in secret.

Anonymous giving is not about false humility. It is a spiritual discipline. It is the only way to know whether you are giving because it helps someone, or because it makes you look a certain way. Most of us would prefer not to find out the answer to that question. Give some of your money anonymously anyway. The envelope in the mailbox. The unsigned e-transfer with a memo line of "a friend." The fund paid off without anyone ever knowing who covered it.

Anonymous giving is spiritual resistance training. It disciplines the part of you that wants credit, and it trains you to give because God sees, not because anyone else does.

The Canadian Charitable Tax Credit Is a Lever, Not a Loophole

Now, a practical matter. Most Canadian Christian men radically underestimate the power of the charitable donation tax credit. This is not because they are being foolish. It is because no one has actually shown them the math.

In Canada, when you give to a registered charity (which includes your local church, almost all Christian denominations, and most legitimate parachurch ministries), you get a federal credit of 15 percent on the first $200 and 29 percent on amounts above $200, plus a provincial credit on top. In Ontario, once you cross the $200 threshold, you are getting roughly 40 percent back as a combined credit. For higher-income earners crossing into the top brackets, it can climb higher.

Here is what that looks like practically. If you give $1,000 to your church and you are an average Ontario earner, your after-tax cost is somewhere around $540 to $600. The government, through the charitable tax credit system, effectively covers the rest. Your $1,000 gift cost you closer to $550 out of pocket.

This is not a loophole. It is the CRA explicitly encouraging charitable giving through the charitable donations tax credit system. The credit was designed to reward Canadians for supporting the institutions - churches, charities, hospitals, universities - that make civil society function. The government assumes you will take the credit. If you are already giving and you are not claiming it, you are leaving hundreds or thousands of dollars on the table for no reason.

Two practical implications flow from this.

First: keep every receipt. If your church sends year-end receipts automatically, confirm your name and address are current. If you give to parachurch organizations, make sure you gave to the registered charitable arm and not a non-registered offshoot. The CRA requires a valid receipt to claim the credit.

Second: the credit makes more generosity possible. If your budget says you can give $500 a month, the after-tax reality is that you could give closer to $850 a month for the same net cost. That is not hypothetical. That is math. Most men have more giving capacity than they realize, and the Canadian tax system is quietly the reason.

I will note the obvious pastoral caution. Do not give in order to get a tax credit. That is the inverse of the point. Give because you have been given to, in Christ, extravagantly. But once you are giving, let the tax credit do what it was designed to do. It is not gaming the system. It is the system working as intended.

The Quiet Gravity of Planned Generosity

Here is the thing I wish someone had told me in my twenties.

Reactive generosity is not the whole story. Most men who describe themselves as generous are thinking about the times they gave because someone asked. They picked up the tab. They wrote a cheque when a friend was in trouble. They helped a brother move. Those moments are real, and they count.

But there is another kind of generosity, and it is the kind that builds over a lifetime. It is planned. It is automated. It is invisible to the giver most of the time, because it is just running in the background, the way your mortgage runs. And because it is running, it adds up to something far larger than the reactive version ever could.

A man who commits to giving 15 percent of his income for thirty years, and sets it up on automatic, will give hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of his working life without ever once having to muster the willpower to do it. The decision is made. The mechanics are set. The money moves. That is how rivers form. Not from individual dramatic acts, but from steady flow over long time.

Planned generosity also protects you from the emotional volatility of giving. If you only give when you feel like it, you will give less in hard months, and those are often the months when the need around you is greatest. Automated giving keeps flowing when you are discouraged, or distracted, or honestly tempted to redirect the money somewhere else.

This is one of the deep disciplines of the Christian life, and it is easily as important as anything else I could tell you about money. The man who says "I am generous" but whose giving is all reactive is giving less than he thinks. The man who says "I am just trying to be faithful" but whose giving is automated and consistent is doing more than he realizes.

Randy Alcorn puts this bluntly in his writing at Eternal Perspective Ministries: the question is not whether you can afford to be generous. It is whether you can afford not to be. He means something specific by that. He means that generosity is the only antidote to the spiritual corrosion that wealth, even modest wealth, quietly produces in a human heart. The more you have, the more you need to give, not for the sake of those who need it, but for the sake of your own soul.

Where This Comes From

None of this works without the engine underneath it. A man does not become generous by trying harder to be generous.

If you find yourself calculating, resenting, or white-knuckling the tithe - never mind anything beyond it - the issue is almost never at the level of money. It is at the level of identity. Generosity flows naturally from a man who knows he has been given everything that matters already. Generosity is almost impossible for a man who thinks he is still earning his standing.

This is why the gospel is the actual starting point for this conversation. The New Testament's silence on a fixed tithe percentage is not laxity. It is the reasonable consequence of grace. If you understand that God gave his Son for you - not as a down payment you still have to finish, but as a completed transaction - the question of how much of your paycheque you have to give becomes almost amusing. All of it is already his. You were his before the paycheque existed. The real question is what kind of steward you want to be with the accounts he has temporarily placed in your name.

If you are stuck on the tithe - if the ten percent feels heavy, or like it is the ceiling rather than the floor - the answer is not to try harder. The answer is to stand longer at the foot of the cross. Generosity grows from gospel security, or it does not grow at all.

I have written elsewhere about the theology of enough, which is closely related. The man who knows he has enough can give. The man who does not cannot, no matter what his income is. Canada's household debt-to-income ratio sits around 174 percent, according to Statistics Canada. That is not a problem of income. That is a problem of enough. And the solution is not a higher paycheque. It is a deeper security.

A Concrete Step for This Month

If you have read this far, here is what I would actually suggest you do.

Sit down this week, ideally with your wife, and do three things.

First, look honestly at your total giving for the last twelve months. All of it. Church, parachurch, charity, the quiet gifts, the e-transfers to friends in need. What percentage of your gross income did it represent? Not to shame you. Just to see the number. Most men overestimate their generosity by a factor of two when they have not looked.

Second, decide on one additional planned-giving category for the coming year. Not a vague "give more." Pick one organization beyond the local church. Missions, crisis pregnancy, Bible translation, Christian counselling, your denomination's seminary, whatever has caught your attention. Commit to a specific monthly amount - $25, $50, $100, whatever fits. Set it up on automatic. Let it run for a year before you evaluate.

Third, build in some reactive margin. Identify a specific dollar amount per month that sits unspent, not in any budget category, available for the neighbour-in-crisis moments. Even $50 a month is $600 a year of discretionary mercy. If you want help running the numbers on what you can actually afford, the charitable giving calculator will show you the after-tax cost, and the Know Your Numbers Pack will walk you through the broader budget picture so you can see where the margin might come from.

Three moves. Twenty minutes of work. And at the end of the year, you will be a materially more generous man than you were at the start. More importantly, you will have made the quiet shift from tithe-compliance to actual stewardship.

Why This Is Worth Doing

At the coffee shop, after my friend asked his question, we sat for a while and did not say much. Eventually I told him the thing I wish someone had told me earlier.

Christian generosity is not about the ten percent. It never was. The tithe was always a way of pointing to something much larger - that all of it, every dollar of it, was always going to belong to God. The ninety percent is not your reward for clearing the ten. It is the rest of the stewardship.

The man who sees this is free in a way most men are not. He is not anxiously calculating what God has a claim on. He is not resenting the offering plate. He is not counting. He is simply being faithful with what is not his, for a Master who has been faithful to him first. That is a quieter life, and a larger one, than the ten-percent-and-done version ever was. It is also, I have come to believe, the life most of us actually want, once we can see it.

Give the tithe. And then, slowly and on purpose, learn what to do with the other ninety percent.