Giving and Tithing: Includes Serving and Stewardship is a 64-page booklet by Larry Burkett, published by Moody Publishers in 1998 as part of the Burkett Financial Booklets series.
Let that page count set your expectations. This is a booklet, not a book. You can read the whole thing in an hour. It exists to answer one set of questions well rather than to teach you a financial system.
What it covers
Burkett makes the biblical case for giving to and serving in your local church. He uses church benevolence ministry as his main worked example, showing how God provides for people in need through other Christians. Along the way he takes on the questions people actually ask out loud: does God need my money, how much should I give, do I tithe on gross or on net, and does it have to go to my own church.
His central claim is that giving is an act of worship and trust rather than a bill you owe. He spends more pages on the heart behind the giving than on the arithmetic, which is the right call at this length.
What it is not
There are no budget worksheets or planning tools in here. Burkett wrote plenty of those, but they live in his longer works like the Family Financial Workbook. If your actual problem is that you have no budget, buy one of those instead. This booklet answers the giving question and then stops.
It also shows its age. Written in 1998, it predates online giving, church apps, and donor-advised funds. The biblical reasoning holds up fine. The examples feel like the nineties, because they are.
Who Burkett was
Larry Burkett founded Christian Financial Concepts in 1976 and wrote more than seventy books on money and faith before he died in July 2003. His organization merged with Howard Dayton’s Crown Ministries in 2000 to form Crown Financial Ministries. He is a large part of the reason biblical stewardship is a recognized category at all, and these short booklets were his way of putting one clear answer into one person’s hands for a few dollars.
Who it suits
Good for a man who is unsettled about tithing and wants a short, biblically grounded answer he can trust. Good to hand to a new believer. Good for a men’s group to work through over a couple of weeks, since it is cheap enough to buy in quantity. Not the right purchase if your finances themselves are the crisis.
Bottom line
A clear, short, still useful treatment of why Christians give and how to think about the tithe. Worth the hour. Pair it with a real budgeting resource if money is tight, because this booklet only covers the giving question.
Check the current price of Giving and Tithing on Amazon