The Mannafesto

To the pastors, treasurers and elders reading this,

We started Manna because of a line item. It appears on nearly every church budget we have ever been shown, and almost nobody questions it. A share of everything entrusted to you, paid out every year for the service of moving the church’s own money from one account to another. At a small church it is an irritation. At scale it becomes one of the largest recurring costs in the building, and none of it comes back.

We are not going to tell you what those vendors do with it. We do not know where it ends up, and neither does the church that paid it. What we know is that it leaves the church economy and does not return, and it has been leaving for decades because the tools the church depends on are owned by people outside of it. Processing is treated as a cost of doing ministry, which is exactly why nobody audits it.

We do not think the answer is a cheaper vendor. A cheaper vendor still owns the thing you rely on, still answers to shareholders who have no stake in your ministry, and still decides one day what your terms will be. Trimming the leak is not the same as closing it.

The answer we landed on is ownership. For decades the church’s spend on moving its own money has been the same story: not stolen, not squandered, just handed to vendors who build nothing for the Kingdom with it. Decades of it, and nothing to show for it. When the churches using the platform hold a real stake in it, the same spend changes character entirely: it stops being an expense leaving the Kingdom and starts being a generational asset held inside it. Nothing about the payment changes. Everything about where it ends up does.

So we built it in that order. Round-ups first, because it is the one thing a church can say yes to this week without tearing anything out. Spare change from ordinary purchases, gathered quietly, batched so the processing stays cheap, and sent on. It sits on top of the giving you already have. It replaces nothing.

The name was not decoration. Manna came with the morning, in the middle of an ordinary week, and it came to everyone: whoever gathered much had nothing over, and whoever gathered little had no lack. That is the verse Paul reaches for centuries later when he asks one church to supply another. Round-ups do the same thing in miniature. Nobody spends a dollar more. What is already spent does more.

A limited founding cohort next. The churches who join first should help shape what gets built, and should hold something durable for having done so. The volume those larger churches bring is precisely what allows smaller congregations to join later at a rate they could not otherwise be offered.

That logic runs further than pricing. Ten percent of what Manna earns, calculated on gross revenue rather than on profit, goes to churches that cannot fund what they have been called to do. Profit is a number a company decides on, so a promise measured against it is a promise that waits for a good year. Gross is not, which is the only reason this one is worth writing down.

That is not charity from a company to a church. It is the arrangement Paul organised between the churches he wrote to: the ones with enough at that moment supplying the ones without, on the understanding that the direction could one day reverse. Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.

We are a Public Benefit Corporation, and that was deliberate. Our charter commits us, in writing filed with the state, “to design and operate financial technologies in order to generate sustainable funding for Christ-centered ministries and promote their long-term financial independence and missional capacity.” It is not a marketing posture. It is the corporate form we chose so that these commitments live in the charter rather than in our good intentions.

What Manna earns stays in the Kingdom. The churches are designed to be majority owners of Manna. Not a rewards program, not a discount. A documented stake in the company itself.