That one conviction sits underneath everything we make. Form hearts first. Fund the plan second.
What we believe
Every one of us learned to say one word before almost any other. Mine. Nobody teaches a two year old to say it; it arrives fully assembled, two small fists clamped around a toy that belongs to someone else. We grow up and keep saying it, only now about the house, the paycheck, even the parking spot.
Scripture opens our hands gently and asks a different question. What we hold was never ours to begin with. We are stewards of what belongs to God, and that single shift reorders everything downstream of it. So we start here, not with your budget.
"The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it."
Psalm 24:1
Our conviction
This is not a set of rules, and not a guilt trip about what you have done wrong. It is a picture: what your financial life looks like when it is fully aligned with how God wants to provide for you and use what you have for His Kingdom.
And vision has to come first. People rarely change because they get better information. They change when they catch a compelling picture of a different future, decide they truly want it, and then find the practices that make it possible. Most money programs start with the budget and lean a very good ladder against nothing. We start with the picture.
Where generosity begins
We believe the tithe, the first tenth of what we receive, belongs to the local church. It is where generosity takes root, and it starts in week one, not once the debt is gone.
"Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse."
Malachi 3:10 (see also Proverbs 3:9)
"For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." — Matthew 6:21
The picture, in three words
In that order. Contentment is the foundation, freedom is built on it, and generosity is what the two naturally do. And generosity begins in week one, not at the finish line.
Freedom from the relentless undertow of more. Receiving today's daily bread with gratitude, and trusting the table God has set.
Money no longer making your decisions for you. You can say yes when God says yes, whatever your balance, whatever your starting point.
Not a weight stacked on top, but what contentment and freedom naturally do. It begins in the very first week, and giving stops feeling like subtraction and starts feeling like exhaling.
The authors
Heart & Treasure grew out of something Chip and Karen kept witnessing: people coming alive when they fully surrender their financial hearts to God.
There is a particular joy in watching someone stop clutching and start trusting, and then watching how God uses them, and their resources, in ways they never expected. That is the heart behind everything here.