It started 10 years ago.

Troubled by the direction of American/Western Christianity, an award-winning documentary filmmaker named Nathan Apffel teamed up with successful businessman and former military officer Chris Ayoub to do extensive research, interviews, and creative work to produce something that might make a difference. The result is “The Religion Business,” a 7-part docuseries that will be released in just a few months, aimed at exposing the rampant fraud, theft, and mission drift running through our religious institutions.

“I am not on this journey with Nate to be a critic,” Chris says, “I am here to use the skillset God blessed me with to do the work necessary to bring positive change by providing religious institutions and donors the tools necessary to execute their intended purpose.”
The Religion Business’s Instagram account, which launched only in October of last year and has gained 100,000 followers in just five months, focuses on the need for financial accountability, transparency, and what happens when we do not address rampant hypocrisy and abuse inside the church. A lot of the talk is about the money.

“If you repurposed 27 cents of every dollar that the Western Christian church has, it could radically transform the face of the world – and be the light of the world – literally tomorrow,” Nate says in a conversation with the host of the popular social media account PreachersNSneakers. “So then all the people who are hating on Christianity as Christianity is declining are gonna say, ‘You know what? They’re actually doing some cool stuff. I don’t mind going back.’ And that’s what we see on TikTok and on our social media channels – especially TikTok – is there are so many people out there angry at the institution. They aren’t angry at God or their faith; they’re angry at the institution, and they have every right to be.”

According to the numbers, he may have a point:

$890 billion dollars is donated to the Western Christian church every year. “Where does all that money go?” one person asked online.

The answer is not terribly impressive.

“44% goes to salaries, 6% leaves the institutional walls for outside purposes such as missions, and 6% is stolen internally by church staff,” Chris reports, tackling a few key areas of concern.

The theft is, naturally, a problem – the same amount is stolen as is given to mission work! It seems pathetic that we can only manage to give 6% of people’s hard-earned money to spread the good news. What’s worse is the theft numbers do not include obviously immoral, greedy practices, such as a megachurch pastor or televangelist purchasing a private jet that is “owned” by the ministry, or over-the-top salaries and benefits, such as Kenneth Copeland’s $50 million annual earnings. Some of the more PR-savvy, extreme net-worth individuals do not take a technical salary but extract millions from the church in other ways, so they are taking exorbitant amounts of money while trumpeting that they “don’t take a salary.”

“It’s just so amazing that that hustle still works. The prosperity ones are so gross because they go after people that are so poor and destitute that they can’t pay their bills, and they say, ‘If you send me money, God will pay you back tenfold,’” says popular podcaster Joe Rogan. “You have a private jet – it’s so obvious,” he said on another occasion. “You have a mansion – it’s so obvious.” He’s quick to say that a lot of churches do a lot of good, and he isn’t against religion in general, but the large number of grifters make him sick.

This, unfortunately, is often the perception of the church outside the church.
It isn’t just theft and corruption that causes issues with how we handle money. It’s also inefficiency, carelessness, and waste.

For comparison, the American Red Cross keeps administrative and fundraising expenses under 10% of its budget. World Vision is around 11%. When you look at the average church, however, and add together building expenses, personnel expenses (including salaries), and administrative expenses – it comes out to over 80% of the budget.

“I’ve reviewed hundreds of church income statements,” says Christopher Pavkovich, a commenter on The Religion Business’s IG account online. “Most goes to the pastor, organist, assistant pastor, treasurer, secretary. Little goes to actually doing anything good for the community.”

Some viewers online have been greatly encouraged to see this work of exposing very real problems within our churches, which have gone from being “the ecclesia, to a philosophy, to an institution, to a culture, to an enterprise,” and want to see it restored to being the ecclesia, the gathering of the saints for the purpose of being equipped to do the work of ministry in the world.
Other viewers… have had a different reaction.

The Religion Business posted this quote and question on X: “‘The way to preserve the peace of the church is to preserve the purity of it.’ – Matthew Henry. How can we do this?”

In response, one user replied, “The way to preserve the peace of the church is to preach the gospel and not create these hypocritical self-aggrandizing 501c-3 organizations whose ‘mission’ is to supposedly expose large successful ministries they disagree with.”

This is a common theme in the comment section online whenever The Religion Business posts a video, especially when it comes to discussing how tithes and offerings are used. Still, most of the responses seem, on balance, to be generally positive so far.

No doubt, Apffel, and Ayoub will be under increased scrutiny as their findings and recommendations come out through their docuseries in a few months. Apffel has a couple of strange credits on his IMDB account and no doubt Ayoub’s attempts to create an app to help improve financial transparency for churches will be interpreted as a cynical play for financial gain from the problem. (We don’t have a lot of details as of now on that front, nor any indication that a product will be sold off of this production, and we have reason to believe that any app provided may end up being free. Time will tell.) As it stands, it seems that the motive of the film series is simply to expose corruption, to spark positive reform, and to take away the stain of greed, manipulation, and poor stewardship from our churches.
That is something, by the numbers, that we badly need.

Quick Hits

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• Christianity Today asks: Are Christian influencers on social media having a greater effect on congregations than pastors?
• A federal probe investigates whether Meta (parent company of Facebook and Instagram) facilitated the sale of illegal drugs.
• A Boeing 737 lost an external panel during a flight last week amid ongoing investigations into Boeing’s allegedly negligent quality control and manufacturing practices. No passengers were harmed in the incident.
• Inflation remained elevated in February, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• Concluding an 18-month investigation, the DOJ has not filed any charges against the Southern Baptist Convention.
• The CDC reports the marriage rate has returned to pre-COVID levels.