Before he reinvented himself as a start-up founder hawking the transformative potential of his subscription-based church administration software, Dean Sweetman was a charismatic pastor. Onstage at this past October’s Modern Church Leader Conference at the Irving Convention Center, outside Dallas, the natural overlap between these two roles was obvious.
Equal parts TED-talk disrupter and sanctimonious prayer leader, with a silvery Australian accent and the easy charm of an ex-surfer, Sweetman works the crowd by leaning into the similarities between his past and present callings. “A church is a ninety-minute-per-week business,” he preaches. “You’ve got one chance to take that money and pay the bills.” From the crowd comes a murmur of agreement—practical amens.
Sweetman’s company, Tithe.ly, which sponsors and runs this brand-new annual conference, claims to serve more than 37,000 churches in fifty countries with a suite of software products that process financial transactions and provide communications and bookkeeping platforms for all manner of church business. Founded in 2013 and valued at $113.8 million, according to a 2019 Series F funding round that raised $15.2 million, Tithe.ly is a growing player in the U.S. “religious economy”—an estimated $1.2 trillion dollar industry.
The heart of Tithe.ly’s appeal, for the hundreds of head pastors and church administrators in attendance, is its use in encouraging recurring donations—“tithes” in the biblical terminology favored by this set, many of whom represent evangelical, charismatic, and unaffiliated U.S. churches. Sweetman, who for years kept a blog on “Biblical capitalism,” has written that 10 percent of a Christian’s income should be the “floor” for tithing, though 50 percent is preferable. He also spent much of his adult life working as a pastor with the Australia-based C3 Church, which is notorious for pressuring its followers to tithe.
“The number-one reason that donors don’t set up recurring gifts is that churches don’t ask them to,” explains Tithe.ly product manager John Holtkamp in his conference presentation, which is focused on how to move churchgoers to automatic tithes and the life-changing power of making “above and beyond” gifts that “force us to change the way we budget for the foreseeable future.”
Another headwind to recurring donations, Holtkamp adds, is that donors prefer to experience a “giving moment” each time they donate. He suggests that pastors take a moment in service to ask attendees to reflect on the impact of their recurring gifts in their own lives. The payoff, he notes, can be big: One-time donors give an average of $1,246 per year, with a $204 per year median. Recurring donors give an average of $2,740 per year, with a $1,228 per year median.
“A church is a ninety-minute-per-week business,” he preaches. “You’ve got one chance to take that money and pay the bills.” From the crowd comes a murmur of agreement – practical amens.
But few churchgoers will feel called to download an app with the sole purpose of tithing. Perhaps in part for that reason, Tithe.ly aims to offer an everything app for churches—not just back-end donor analytics, accounting, and contact management for administrators, but also flock-facing products like group chats, event calendars, and “prayer walls,” which imitate Facebook or Instagram.
“Mom at night can be scrolling the prayer wall, as opposed to doomscrolling social media,” Tithe.ly employee Natalie Humbert explains on the conference stage, noting that the company boasts “hundreds of thousands” of daily active users.
Among conference attendees, the consensus is that Tithe.ly is great for processing tithes, though there are complaints about its other functions, especially those added during the company’s recent run of acquisitions of smaller church-tech companies. Since 2018, Tithe.ly has absorbed competitors Churchlink, Ascend, Elvanto, and Breeze. Long-time customers of these companies paint a picture of a confusing hodge-podge of overlapping offerings at Tithe.ly, some of which have declined in quality.
“I don’t know that we’re entirely happy about it, to be completely honest,” says Mendy Anderson of Agape Chuch in St. Mary’s, Ga. “It’s slowed down things that used to be easier to do.”
“I’m the pastor, but I’ve been in tech for years,” adds Brian Brophy, lead minister of Reidland Church in Paducah, Kentucky. “I have a small business doing websites and design stuff. It’s still a lot to try and get your mind around all the integrations.”
These church leaders—current and prospective customers of Tithe.ly, mostly here for the training sessions and to learn about the promised future mega-integration “Tithe.ly 3.0”—make up perhaps two thirds of conference attendees. They’re a humble lot, many of whom have built careers around service to their churches and who depend on donations to pay their salaries and to support their families.
The rest of those on hand are regulars of the evangelical/charismatic church convention circuit, plying their wares or honing their act. Downstairs in the exhibition hall, one can visit the booths of American Christian Credit Union (“A bank for times such as these”), Godly Money (portfolio services for those shunning investments that might support abortion rights or the “LGBT agenda”), and Pastoral Transitions (a consultancy for churches undergoing shifts in leadership), among others.
Meanwhile, upstairs in the ballroom, panels hyping Tithel.y’s software offerings alternate with entertainment from stand-up comedians, illusionists, and culture-war preachers like Pastor John Amanchukwu, a fiery opponent of critical race theory. Convention emcee Owen Video (a YouTube moniker) introduces the acts with lines like, “We may see some tricks, but I think you’re gonna see … a paradigm shift!”
After dark, comedian Andrew Stanley, grandson of well-known televangelist Charles Stanley, provides a PG-rated comedy set of light riffs on life in the church, recounting, for example, a school kid’s unenvious perspective on his pastor dad’s job of “writing a new book report every week on the same book for the rest of his life.” He closes with an almost-risqué bit about evenings when he sees his wife wearing her dowdier pajamas and knows it’s okay to put his retainers in.
Then there are the true conference VIPs: industry leaders like venture capitalist and ex-pastor Blue Van Dyke of Studio C and start-up founder Michael Whittle of Pulpit AI, a platform that helps pastors write those weekly book reports. These are Sweetman’s fellow members in an informal entrepreneurs’ club, driving the future of church technology.
Attendees get a taste of the tenor of these conversations in a panel where Whittle notes ruefully, “People tell me my company is demonic because we use AI.” Sweetman, for his part, prefers to focus on the positives of emerging technology. “Can you imagine, a hologram of me, we could drop it into the middle of a war, and I could start preaching the Gospel?” he asks the crowd. It’s perhaps his biggest line of the day in terms of stoking crowd excitement.
The rest of those on hand are regulars of the evangelical/charismatic church convention circuit, plying their wares or honing their act.
In time, Sweetman shares his life story—one it’s clear he has told many times before. He grew up secular, dropped out of school in tenth grade, and pursued surfing as a career. At some point, as it became obvious that his surfing plan wouldn’t work out, a friend brought him to church. He loved it and wanted more. He boasts of planting churches across Asia and Africa before moving to Atlanta in 1996 to found an American branch of C3. He jokes that, of his early Atlanta followers, “One hundred percent, they were just there to listen to the accent.”
Even as C3 faced ongoing scrutiny for financial predation and other scam-adjacent behavior—including in the U.S.—Sweetman helped plant another sixty churches in the U.S. and Canada. All the time, he was honing his own take on the Prosperity Gospel. “The reason God gives us the ability to create more than we need as individuals is to have extra to give to those who are in need,” he wrote in a typical 2021 blog post. “It’s that simple. If you have the ability but are not in pursuit of extra, then you are being selfish. I’m not saying everyone has to start a business, what I am saying is every Christian should pursue having an abundance and more of what they need.”
These days, with his company cornering the market on church software—especially if the promised “Tithe.ly 3.0,” which will “manage giving, people data, communication, and engagement in one easy-to-use platform,” lives up to the hype—Sweetman is poised to have quite a lot of abundance to pass on to the needy. As he shuffles around the stage, preferring standing or a high stool to sitting down, reading glasses hanging down over chest, button-down shirt likewise draped over his athlete’s form gone to seed, he looks like a guy who could use some well-deserved rest.
“Has anyone here ever started a business?” he asks the audience with a sigh. “It’s like planting a church, times a thousand.”