Anthony O’Neal: Churches Are Talking About Money All Wrong

Churches talk about money every Sunday. Anthony O’Neal’s complaint is that they only ever do it in one direction. What you hear from the pulpit: tithing sermons. What you almost never hear: how to negotiate a salary, pay off credit card debt, build wealth or buy your first home. “I think churches talk about finances from a perspective of giving,” O’Neal told RELEVANT. “It’s offering and tithing time, sow a seed and give, right? But when we talk about finances? No. The church as a whole does not do a good job at talking about finance that doesn’t benefit the church, but only benefits the home.” And O’Neal thinks that’s not just a pastoral failure. It’s self-defeating. “We wouldn’t have to ask for more tithes and offerings if we spent more time helping them become owners and homeowners, and how do you properly invest? And how do you properly get out of debt? And how do you properly use your check on the first and the 15th to properly do things? “I’ve never met a true Christian who loves Christ say, ‘I do not want to give.’ The majority of the time I hear them, it is, ‘I can’t give.’ Because if I give to them, then I won’t be able to pay my light bill. If I give to the church, I won’t be able to do this. If I give my tithe, I won’t be able to send my son to this football game or this soccer camp.” He has a theory about why these conversations stay rare. “I think the reason being is because half of the pastors who are preaching are not good with their own finances,” he said. “So they do not want to have a conversation about something that they’re not good in.” Not a condemnation — his actual suggestion is pragmatic. If you’re not qualified to teach it, bring someone in who is. O’Neal’s career has been built on financial literacy of the non-glamorous kind. His newest book, Stop Living Paycheck to Paycheck, releasing Aug. 25,, keeps returning to the same idea: most people don’t have an income problem. They have a margin problem. “Your greatest wealth building tool is not the income,” he said. “It is the margin that you have left over after you pay your bills.” He means it literally. If you make $5,000 a month and $5,000 goes back out, you have zero margin. If $5,500 goes out, you’re borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. But if $3,000 goes out? Now you have $2,000 to invest, save or deploy however you choose. That gap — not the gross income — is where financial freedom actually lives. Getting there, he says, requires something most people skip: getting stable first. He tells the story of a friend who works in emergency medicine. She complained one day that every patient who came in was screaming to be fixed — not understanding that before you can fix anything, you have to get someone stable. Heart pumping, blood flowing, nothing immediately life-threatening. Once we get you stable, she told him, then we can go inside and assess what the problem actually is. O’Neal uses that framework for finances. Before anyone talks about investing or debt payoff strategies, he wants them to do three things: have a stable job, stop borrowing, and park at least one month of income in a high-yield savings account. That last one isn’t just about the money — it’s about the decision-making. “Studies have shown that we tend to make better decisions off of the slow side of our brain,” he said. A 30-day cushion means you don’t have to respond to a crisis with a panicked choice. He’s skeptical of the advice that skips this part — the viral TikTok promises about making six figures in 90 days, the get-rich-quick influencers recycling content they found online. Real financial freedom, he says, doesn’t happen in a month. His escape plan takes 18 to 24 months. “If you look at all of the wealthy ones, I would say at least 90% of them built their wealth over time.” His skepticism isn’t purely practical, though. It’s rooted in theology: He used to pray for more money — a nicer car, a bigger house — and wonder why God wasn’t answering. Then he came across the passage where Solomon asks God not for wealth or fame or power, but for wisdom and knowledge to steward the kingdom well. “He said, you’re asking me for the wrong thing,” O’Neal said, describing the realization. “The reason why I didn’t give you a pay raise is because if I gave you the pay raise with this mindset, you’re gonna blow it.” He stopped praying for more money. He started praying for the wisdom to handle what he had. “And man, when I started praying that prayer, I started getting more.” That’s what he means when he talks about giving, too. “The greatest investment we can make is not into SpaceX. The greatest investment we can make is not into your 401(k), your Roth IRA, your index fund. The greatest investment is not even in real estate,” he said. “The greatest investment to me is giving back God His 10%. Because as a man of faith, God owns it all.” It’s not a prosperity gospel pitch. The point is stewardship — proving you can handle what you’ve been given before expecting more. He learned to think about money that way the hard way. He noticed it at a restaurant once, showing up in an older car, understated. Nobody said anything to him. A couple months later he went back on a date, driving something nicer. Suddenly people wanted to talk. “I’m the same guy,” he said. “But you didn’t respect me because I was driving a car that you call a normal car.” A lot of people, he thinks, are buying things to fill that gap — approval, security, the feeling of being seen. And a lot of them are doing it while living paycheck to paycheck. “The biggest flex that I believe I can have as a man is that when I am married and I have kids, my wife doesn’t have to work and my kids can live a life that I couldn’t live when I was growing up. It’s not a car. It’s not a watch. It is my family has freedom.” That’s also what he’d tell anyone in their 20s or 30s who feels like the financial deck is stacked against them — and he doesn’t dismiss the feeling. “Isn’t it funny that we went through 12 years of school?” he said. “They teach us how to consume. But they never taught us how to own, how to build wealth, how to start a business.” The American Dream, in his view, wasn’t designed to help anyone thrive. It was designed to keep people surviving and calling it a dream. The system can be unlearned, he says — but it takes time and a why that’s stronger than the discomfort of the process. He has his. He’s 42 and has never been to Disney World. His parents had him working at 14, riding his bike home from Taco Bell with food balanced in his arms so the family could have dinner. He’s going to take his kids to Disney World. He’s going to take them on a cruise. And when they come home, there won’t be any stress about how to pay the bills. “If you feel like this ain’t for you,” he said, “I want you to know it is. But it starts with you, it starts with your mindset. Two years — that’s a long time. Spending the rest of your life living paycheck to paycheck? That’s a long time.”