Louisville, USA - Doug Sweeney, a police officer, watched his credit card balance grow to $13,000, thinking he would never be able to pay it off. Renée Santiago had $40,000 in student loans. Susan Hancock owed $14,000 in credit card debt and could not point to anything in her home to show for it.
“I saw it going up,” Ms. Hancock said, “but I was numb. I thought, that’s just the way of life.”
When the debt got to be too much for them, instead of going to family members or financial professionals for help, they did what many Americans are doing: they turned to their church.
“You need a little help with motivation,” said Mr. Sweeney, 47, who blamed years of impulsive spending for his debt. Recently, he joined two dozen others at Southeast Christian Church for Week 9 of a 13-week debt-reduction program called Financial Peace University. Since joining the group, he had disposed of his credit cards.
“A big part of it is that it has a faith component,” he said. “God wants you to be good stewards of your money. The money’s all his.”
As Americans have run up nonmortgage debt of more than $2.4 trillion, churches and Christian radio stations are supplementing their spiritual counseling with financial counseling, often using programs developed by other Christian organizations and marketed in church circles or over the Internet. They offer a mix of basic budget planning, household cost-cutting and debt management, bolstered by Scripture and with tithing as a goal.
“We want to be relevant and to scratch people where they itch,” said Dave Stone, the senior pastor at Southeast, a nondenominational church that draws 18,000 worshipers each weekend. “For a church not to provide some service for people who are suffocating from too much debt would be burying our head in the sand.” Economists have recognized that the behavior of consumers often ignores their rational best interests. People overestimate their ability to repay loans, or spend more using credit cards than they would with cash. Church-based debt programs provide rules to force changes in spending and saving, then use Scripture to motivate people.
More than 39,000 churches have used debt reduction programs created by Crown Financial Ministries, a group in Gainesville, Ga. About 3,000 churches have bought a $250 Good Sense program developed by Willow Creek Community Church in Barrington, Ill. Both are nonprofit organizations.
“Nothing in the Bible says you can’t borrow,” said Mike Graham, who provides free financial counseling at Southeast Christian Church, in a position he created 10 years ago after stepping down as the church’s financial manager. “What you’re not allowed to do is borrow and not pay it back.”
The programs resemble secular plans, with two exceptions, said Dave Briggs, director of the Good Sense Stewardship Ministry at Willow Creek. “A secular adviser might say, it’s O.K. to stiff your creditors through bankruptcy,” Mr. Briggs said. “Biblically, bankruptcy is only an option if you need time and space to pay back what you owe.”
“The other conflict is in the area of giving,” he said. “We get a sense of devotion to God by being generous. Secular advice says, don’t give until you can afford it.”
The Financial Peace program, a curriculum marketed for profit by a radio host, Dave Ramsey, has been used in more than 10,000 churches, as well as 1,000 corporations and 350 military units or chapels, according to Mr. Ramsey’s representative.
More than 350,000 families have completed the program, at a cost of $80 to $90 each for books, audio CDs and other material, the representative said. Mr. Ramsey declined to answer questions about how much money is taken in by the company.
Stephen Brobeck, executive director of the nonprofit Consumer Federation of America, who reviewed the Financial Peace materials for The New York Times, said the advice was “fundamentally sound,” especially for people with low or middle incomes.
“It’s better than you get from a lot of financial advisers, who make it complicated and possibly subject consumers to avoidable credit risks,” Mr. Brobeck said.
Even tithing might help some Christians feel “empowered to pay back their debt faster, though the secular perspective would be that those funds could be used directly to pay down debt,” he said.
At Southeast Christian Church, a video presentation featuring Mr. Ramsey was followed by an hour of discussion, mixing quotations from Proverbs with advice on buying used cars, time shares and generic drugs. The discussion was led by a retired police officer, Rusty Bittle, 43, who has no financial background but who paid $2,000 to take a 50-hour course to become a certified counselor for Mr. Ramsey’s program.
“If you really start listening to the Scriptures we read each class,” Mr. Bittle told the group, “you’ll see that this isn’t just a finance class, it’s about how to live your life. And if you read the Scriptures you’ll get a blessing out of it.”
Mr. Sweeney said the program’s use of Scripture helped with his overspending. “I realized that I blow a lot of money,” he said. “It takes discipline to manage it, and prayer helps you have discipline. If you think you need something, before you buy it, go home and pray about it.”
Mr. Ramsey said that although the program has a “biblical base,” it was not aimed specifically at Christians, and that his books and radio show were most popular with secular stores and stations.
“Even if you’re not some kind of sold-out believer, you can relate to Proverbs 22, Verse 7, that the borrower is a slave to the lender,” he said. “It’s like a Mark Twain saying.”
Southeast Christian Church uses both the Financial Peace and Crown Ministries courses, and works with a Christian organization called Family Credit Counseling Service in Illinois, as well as secular credit counseling.
Anna and Jon Broster turned to Mr. Graham for help after the interest rate on one of their credit cards rose to 33 percent. Mrs. Broster (pronounced like “Brewster”) paid off the balance of $900, but was left with $3,000 on her other cards.
“I wanted to focus on getting out of credit card debt,” she said. “We live week to week, with no budget.” The couple said they turned to Mr. Graham rather than a professional because they trusted the people at the church. “He’s not making money off us,” Mrs. Broster said. “And he’s a Christian.”
Mr. Broster, 27, earns $15 an hour in a manufacturing job and $140 every two weeks from a part-time job at a Walgreens. Mrs. Broster, 25, attends nursing school part time while raising their 4-year-old daughter.
Each month, when Mrs. Broster receives her credit card statements online, she checks her bank balance, sets aside some money for food and gas, and divides what is left among four or five cards. She tries to pay more than the minimum but finds it hard to get the balances down.
“My dad is more conservative about credit card usage than me,” she said. “If I see something I like, I can just swipe and have it.” She added, “If I had to hand over $70, I’d think twice about it.”
When she went to see Mr. Graham, she said, he prayed with her and said he would help her draw up a household budget, which she said she wanted to include tithes to the church. “We don’t give every week now, and I feel kind of guilty about it,” she said.
Mr. Graham said, “We believe there’s a mandate in Scripture that calls for people to give 10 percent to the church. Until they can get to a tithe, we encourage a sliding scale so they can get their blessing from God.”
In the Financial Peace classroom, Mr. Bittle was finishing the lesson. “Remember,” he told the group, “there’s only one way to attain financial peace, and that’s to walk with the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ.”