In The Business Tithe, entrepreneur Rick Jones introduces a faith-based framework that empowers small business owners to achieve lasting profitability while giving back generously. This practical and inspiring guide reveals how a simple yet powerful principle—donating 10% of post-tax profits to meaningful causes—can help business leaders transform their companies and communities.
Readers will How generosity strengthens a company’s culture and customer loyalty The seven-step framework for profitable, values-driven growth Why faith and capitalism together create sustainable impact Whether you’re a Christian entrepreneur or a purpose-driven business owner, The Business Tithe offers the roadmap to combine financial success with moral significance and lead a business that changes the world.
What a Business Owes Before It Gives Rick K. Jones’s “The Business Tithe” is less compelling as a grand defense of capitalism than as a practical Christian owner’s manual for turning profit, prayer, and responsibility into disciplined generosity. By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | April 28th, 2026
The title “The Business Tithe” points the eye toward the year-end check: the margin has cleared, the owner has made it through another year of payroll, bills, and weather, and a percentage is cut from the bottom line with the sheen of virtue neatly entered in the books. Rick K. Jones’s sterner claim is that the check matters only if the business has been ordered before it writes it. Before the tithe comes the payroll. The vendor invoice. The customer promise. The cash-flow projection. The employee’s health insurance. The owner’s family. The morning prayer. The plan that is actually executed. The moral audit no accountant can perform.
That is where “The Business Tithe: A Faith-Based Framework for Profitable Businesses That Change the World” is most persuasive: Jones treats generosity not as a fragrance sprayed over profit after the fact, but as a habit scheduled, budgeted, and paid. He is less interested in the owner who admires giving than in the owner whose ledger can testify. The tithe is the visible act, but not the whole chain of obligations. A company cannot outsource its conscience to a donation.
Jones tries to fit a ledger, a sermon, and a public cure into one slim book. The frame strains when he asks owner virtue to do the work of public systems. In roughly 70 pages, he wants to dignify work, defend profit, restore trust in capitalism, chastise selfish owners, summon firms toward local and global repair, teach goal-setting and execution, and urge owners to donate 10 percent of post-tax business profits to causes they and their stakeholders care about. The urgency helps; the small frame cannot bear every claim.
The seven-step frame is plain, and that plainness mostly serves the argument. Jones organizes the manual around a sequence: value your work, feed your sheep, make a profit, embrace the process, plan and execute, pray for success, and tithe 10 percent. Work comes before profit. Obligation comes before optimization. Profit comes before philanthropy. Prayer comes before the final check. The 10 percent gift arrives last because Jones wants it to be the fruit of an ordered business, not a borrowed halo. The order is the argument.
The opening chapters establish work as sacred, creative, and divinely inspired. Jones writes from Genesis outward: God works, human beings are made to work, and business owners should stop apologizing for building enterprises that create value. He then turns to the central metaphor, drawn from Jesus’s command to Peter: “Feed my sheep.” In Jones’s hands, the owner becomes a shepherd with multiple flocks: family, employees, customers, vendors, church or other faith community, local community, country, and the world. The metaphor is plain enough to hold the ethic in place. It makes obligation visible by asking who gets fed, who waits, and who has been left outside the gate.
“Feed Your Sheep” is the chapter where the book does its clearest work. Jones’s owner is not allowed to leap from private profit to public generosity while stepping over the people nearest the company. The first flock is family; Jones is usefully impatient with the romance of the founder who pays everyone except himself while quietly asking spouse, children, and household stability to subsidize the dream. Employees come next, and here the advice stops being merely admirable. It acquires a bill. Jones describes funding employee health insurance and keeping staff employed through the pandemic with government support, loans, and personal funding. Customers must receive fair value. Vendors should be paid promptly, not treated as unwilling lenders. Churches, communities, country, and the world widen the circle further. The tithe is only one act at a table where the business’s dependents are already seated.
This is Jones’s best act of moral architecture: he makes generosity relational before he makes it charitable. Many books about purpose produce more mist than obligation, their values hovering above the business like inspirational office art no one remembers ordering. Jones, for all his fondness for familiar sayings, gives purpose proof beneath the rhetoric. Does the company pay its people? Does it pay its suppliers? Does it plan for profit rather than summon profit by optimism? Does it give from money actually left after the business has done its work? Does the checkbook corroborate the mission statement? That last question may be blunt, but blunt instruments have their uses. A ledger does not applaud, but it does testify.
The profit chapter is equally important. Jones is not embarrassed by margins. He quotes the familiar “No margins, no mission” principle and reads the parable of the talents as a call to increase what one has been entrusted with rather than bury it in fear. Profit, for him, is not greed by default. It is the condition that keeps payroll, reinvestment, resilience, and giving possible. This is one reason the book is better than a simple exhortation to charity. Jones understands that generosity without financial discipline is often just sentiment dressed as strategy.
The middle chapters move from exhortation to operating discipline. Jones asks owners to identify personal and organizational strengths and weaknesses, define vision and purpose, know their customers, serve niches, study the 80/20 rule, consider reinvention, set personal and business goals, and break those goals into annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily action. He writes about income, cash flow, expense projections, profit targets, staff goals, customer plans, prospecting, tasks, resources, obstacles, timelines, delegation, and accountability. None of this is glamorous, which is the point. In Jones’s worldview, a business that cannot manage Tuesday has no business promising to change the world by Friday.
His best examples come from experience rather than slogan. He writes about building agencies in sports, entertainment, sponsorship, and marketing; losing a sponsorship renewal; outsourcing accounting because he dislikes and does not excel at it; and planning his own weight loss after a heart attack through tasks, resources, obstacles, and timelines. These details keep the manual from lifting off into pious air. Jones has made payroll, chased sponsors, managed staff capacity, watched plans fail, and learned that a good idea still has to be sold, scheduled, funded, staffed, and delivered.
The prose wears work boots to church and brings a spreadsheet to the fellowship hall. It is direct, brisk, openly Christian, and written to be underlined rather than admired from a distance. Jones sounds less like an essayist than like a church-connected business mentor giving a workshop to owners with coffee cooling beside their notebooks. He likes questions followed by answers, principles followed by anecdotes, anecdotes followed by action steps. The vocabulary comes from scripture, sports, business, patriotism, coaching, self-improvement, and family legacy. There are sheep, fish, bait, road maps, recipes, teams, storms, droughts, and checkbooks.
That style gives the book energy and immediacy. It also flattens the music of the prose. Jones often reaches for phrases polished smooth by use: “cash is king,” “walk the talk,” “the rubber meets the road,” “put your money where your mouth is,” “just do it,” “attitude will determine your altitude.” These lines make the book usable, but they also make some pages feel more slide-ready than sentence-made. His own material is stronger than many of the maxims he borrows. When he is describing the ethics of paying suppliers, the anxiety of keeping employees through a shutdown, or the discipline of planning cash flow, he does not need the borrowed brass.
Still, the design is wiser than some of the phrasing. The seven-step frame could have been merely a checklist. Instead, it gives the book its sequence of obligation. The final gift is delayed long enough to become an accounting of all that came before it. A weaker book would say: make money, give some away, feel purposeful. Jones says something sterner: build a company whose daily habits make the gift honest. The structure does not deepen every claim, but it deepens that one, and that one is the book’s reason for existing.
The trouble starts when Jones widens from owner’s-desk stewardship to national diagnosis. He opens with America at a crossroads, capitalism under suspicion, government unable to solve social problems, younger people looking to institutions for rescue, and small business owners called to push back against socialism. He also criticizes capitalism without conscience: insider dealing, inflated medical costs, insurance abandonment after disasters, tax cuts used for share buybacks instead of investment. That acknowledgment matters. Jones is not defending anything a company does simply because a company does it.
But his ethics of behavior are stronger than his civic claim. Better owners, better planning, better prayer, and better giving would help many communities. They would not, by themselves, settle structural problems of poverty, healthcare, taxation, disaster recovery, and scale. At moments, the argument starts writing checks the evidence cannot cash. Voluntary generosity is admirable. It is not a substitute for every public obligation. Jones is convincing with the vendor invoice in hand; he is less convincing when the whole republic is placed on the invoice.
Writing from outside the book’s religious premises, I found the theology respectful and often legible, but practical to the point of foreshortening. Scripture appears as permission, encouragement, and command: Genesis dignifies work, John supplies the flock, Matthew’s talents defend increase, the Lord’s Prayer orders ambition, and Luke places the heart near the treasure. For many Christian entrepreneurs, this will feel direct and bracing. For readers wanting a deeper account of wealth, tithing, charity, justice, labor, debt, suffering, or the difference between personal and corporate giving, the book will feel more like exhortation than inquiry. It prays, plans, gives, and gets back to work. The efficiency has charm. It also leaves whole rooms of theology unvisited.
The same clarity that will steady some readers will make others feel the doorway narrowing. Christian owners may find the book clarifying. Business readers tired of soft-focus purpose language may appreciate the hard percentage: 10 percent of post-tax profits. Readers of Wayne Grudem’s “Business for the Glory of God” may recognize the belief that business can honor God, though Jones is less systematic. Readers of John Mackey and Raj Sisodia’s “Conscious Capitalism” may hear a stakeholder argument translated into pastoral language and scaled down to the owner’s ledger. Readers of Bob P. Buford’s “Halftime” may recognize the movement from success to significance, especially in the passages addressed to baby boomer founders thinking about exit and legacy.
Others will resist the patriotic church-bulletin frame. The language of traditional American values, the suspicion of government, and the anti-socialism notes narrow a book whose best habits could travel farther than its politics. One can agree with Jones about paying vendors promptly, caring for employees, knowing customers, planning profit, praying with humility, and giving generously while remaining unconvinced by the larger national diagnosis into which he places those actions. The welcome mat is sincere. It is not neutral-colored.
There is also an unsettled crossing in what giving is supposed to accomplish. In “The Business Tithe,” generosity is worship, witness, civic repair, culture-building, and sometimes a possible commercial dividend. These motives can coexist, but they are not the same. The book would be stronger if it distinguished more carefully between charity and justice, philanthropy and marketing, spiritual obedience and reputational benefit, local generosity and public responsibility. A short manual cannot be asked to become a full theology of money. But it can avoid implying that a good check can answer every hard question.
The book is hardest to dismiss when it stops preaching aspiration and opens the receipt drawer. Are you paying yourself responsibly, or making your family absorb your company’s instability? Are employees being treated as people with households? Are suppliers being paid in time for their cash flow, not merely yours? Are customers getting fair value? Is profit planned or merely hoped for? Is giving large enough to show up in the books? These are the book’s best questions because they are difficult to fake.
That is also why the 10 percent rule has force even when it needs more nuance. A percentage cuts through the warm mist of good intentions. Yet Jones does not fully address the practical complications: debt, startups, thin margins, seasonal income, employee participation in choosing causes, or the relationship between the business tithe, personal giving, wages, benefits, and taxes. The rule is easy to remember after one reading; the operating guidance trails behind the rule.
My rating: 70/100, which maps to 3/5 stars. That score reflects a book with a clean central mechanism, sincere conviction, a useful seven-step design, and several strong insights about Christian owner’s-desk stewardship, along with familiar prose, thin footnoting, hurried theology, and a habit of letting a sound owner discipline swell into a civic remedy.
The conclusion lands oddly, closing with a contact note where a benediction should have been. After the culminating chapter on the tithe, the final pages mostly invite readers to contact Jones for resources or speaking engagements. The stronger ending has already arrived in Step Seven, when Jones asks older owners to make charity part of their exit strategy and turn success into significance. There, briefly, the book’s strands meet: business as livelihood, witness, inheritance, and final accounting.
“The Business Tithe” is not built for theological deep water, and it is not much interested in verbal embroidery. It is a short, earnest, sometimes blunt book with a conscience that insists on being itemized. Its best insight is not that generous owners should give after they succeed. It is that success itself should be examined before it is celebrated. The paid invoice, the protected employee, the honest margin, the written plan, the prayer before the sales call, the check cut after the profit is counted: these are Jones’s real sacraments of ownership. He is least persuasive when trying to rescue capitalism in the abstract. He is most persuasive when asking the smaller, sharper question every owner can answer: after the sheep are fed, the road is mapped, the work is done, and the money is in the account, where does it go?
I got arc of the book. This book offers a refreshing and uplifting perspective on what it really means to run a successful business. It blends practical advice with a strong sense of purpose, showing how generosity can actually fuel long-term growth rather than limit it. The idea of giving back a portion of profits is presented in a way that feels both meaningful and achievable, not unrealistic.
What I appreciated most is how clear and actionable the guidance is. The step-by-step framework makes it easy to see how values and profitability can work together, instead of feeling like opposing goals. It also highlights how a strong sense of purpose can improve team culture and build genuine loyalty with customers.
Overall, it’s an inspiring read for anyone who wants their business to stand for something more. It leaves you thinking differently about success—not just in terms of profit, but in terms of positive impact.