Why we built it
Church lending is a $1.2+ billion a year market serving hundreds of thousands of congregations, and almost every tool in it was built to serve lenders, not the churches borrowing from them. We came at that problem from opposite ends of lending, and decided to fix it together.
Church lending still ran on pen and paper, spreadsheets, fax machines, and gut feel. The information that decided a church’s future lived almost entirely on the lender’s side of the table.
Congregations walked into loans blind: months of paperwork for applications no one explained, $20K to $40K spent on feasibility studies before learning they didn’t qualify, first offers accepted because there was no benchmark to compare them to.
Jon had spent twenty years inside lending and knew exactly what the underwriting demanded. Riley could turn that knowledge into software. Put together, those two skills could hand churches the same intelligence lenders had kept to themselves.
So we built it, fast, and gave it away free. One rule has not changed since day one: every decision serves the church’s interests, never a lender’s sales pipeline.
Who's behind ChurchLend
A lender who spent two decades learning what churches get wrong, and a technologist who turned that knowledge into tools any congregation can use. When you reach out, you work with them directly.
Co-Founder
CA DRE #01522741Twenty years on the lender’s side of church finance, now spent on yours. Jon guides churches from the first conversation through closing, and the books in between.
Co-Founder
A consumer-lending technologist who turned Jon’s underwriting playbook into software any volunteer treasurer can run in fifteen minutes.
Where the ball drops
After twenty years, Jon will tell you the same thing every time: the single biggest reason a church gets turned down is not its mission or its giving. It is the accounting. Financials that are incomplete, inconsistent, or simply never translated into the numbers a lender needs to see.
“Help a church understand its own books, and you have done more for its future than any rate ever could.”
Most churches keep faithful records that were never built to be read by a lender. We help you organize three years of financials into a picture an underwriter can actually evaluate.
Debt-service coverage, cash reserves, giving trend. We walk leadership through what each one means and where your church really stands, before anyone applies.
When the numbers are clear, the path opens: the right loan, the right lender, and a building plan the congregation can sustain while it grows and serves its community.
Whose side we’re on
A church that approaches a single lender has no leverage and no benchmark. It accepts whatever it is offered and hopes it was fair. We flip that. We bring your church to multiple lenders at once and let them compete, so the offer on the table is the best one available, not the only one you saw.
First time shopping for a church loan, or with the same lender for twenty years? Let us see what rate we can find before you sign your renewal.
From real estate to guidance
Between us we have originated, underwritten, refinanced, and advised on nearly every situation a congregation can face.
Buying a first building or adding a campus, evaluated for affordability before you make an offer.
Ground-up builds and worship-center expansions, scoped against what lenders will actually fund.
Roofs, HVAC, and the deferred maintenance that piles up. Financing the unglamorous work that keeps the doors open.
Knowing when a refinance or consolidation saves real money, and when it just resets the clock.
Sizing a capital campaign and structuring financing around where your ministry is headed, not just where it is today.
A free 0 to 100 readiness score, denomination-specific guidance, and a match to the right lender.
What we believe
Every tool in church lending today was built for lenders. ChurchLend is built for the pastor, the treasurer, and the board trying to figure out if a loan makes sense for their congregation.
A megachurch with a CFO and a 200-member church with a volunteer bookkeeper should both reach the same financial intelligence. Our platform makes that possible: free, instant, and available to every congregation.
If your church is not ready for a loan, we will tell you directly and give you a specific roadmap to get there. We will never push a church toward financing it cannot sustain.
Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal, Lutheran, Catholic, non-denominational, independent. We serve the full spectrum of Christian faith communities, and we account for the way each one actually borrows.
A note from the founders
If you are reading this, you are probably weighing a decision that feels bigger than your church has faced in years: a building, an expansion, a refinance, a leap of faith with a number attached.
We built ChurchLend because we have watched that moment go wrong too many times, not because churches made bad choices, but because no one gave them the same information the lender had. We decided to be the people who hand it over, for free, before you ever sign anything.
And when you reach out, you are not getting a call center. You are getting the two of us, the same people who built this. That is a promise we intend to keep as we grow.
With you on your side of the table,
