What Are Tithes Used For? Where the Money Actually Goes
Someone puts a check in the plate or taps their card on the giving kiosk, and it disappears into the church’s general fund. Fair question: where does it actually go?
Scripture answers this directly, and the answer has not changed much in three thousand years. The tithe funded people, a place, and the vulnerable. It still does.
What the Tithe Funded in the Bible
The Levites, Because They Owned No Land
When Israel divided up the promised land, eleven tribes got territory. The tribe of Levi got none.
“To the Levites I have given every tithe in Israel for an inheritance, in return for their service that they do, their service in the tent of meeting” (Numbers 18:21). The Levites ran the tabernacle, later the temple. That was their full-time work, and it left no time to farm or raise livestock the way the other tribes did. God’s solution was not a special offering plate. It was the tithe, redirected from the other eleven tribes to the one tribe that served everybody else.
Numbers 18:24 makes the logic explicit: the tithe stood in place of the inheritance the Levites never received. Verses 25-28 add a wrinkle worth noting - the Levites themselves tithed on what they received, giving a tenth of the tenth to the priests. Nobody was exempt, not even the people running the system.
The Temple and the Worship Happening There
Malachi 3:10 is the verse everyone quotes: “Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house.” The storehouse was a literal room in the temple complex where the tithe was collected and stored, then distributed to the Levites and priests for their support and for temple upkeep.
Centuries later, Nehemiah found that storehouse empty. The Levites had gone back to farming because nobody was bringing the tithe, and temple worship had stalled out for lack of funding. Nehemiah 13:12 records the fix: “Then all Judah brought the tithe of the grain, wine, and oil into the storehouses.” Restore the funding, restore the worship. The connection between the two was not incidental. It was the whole point of the system.
The Festival Tithe, Eaten Before the Lord
Not every tithe in the Old Testament left the giver’s hands. Deuteronomy 14:22-27 describes a tithe the family brought to Jerusalem and ate themselves, in God’s presence, as a feast. “And you shall eat before the Lord your God, in the place that he will choose… the tithe of your grain, of your wine, and of your oil” (14:23). If you lived too far to carry the actual grain and wine, you converted it to silver, traveled to Jerusalem, and spent that silver on whatever your appetite wanted - herd or flock, wine or strong drink (14:26) - and ate it as a family celebration before God.
This one gets skipped in most tithing sermons because it complicates a simple “give it away” message. But it is in the text. Part of what the tithe funded was joyful worship, a family celebrating God’s provision together, not just institutional upkeep.
The Third-Year Tithe, for the Poor Among You
Every third year, the destination changed again. “At the end of every three years you shall bring out all the tithe… and you shall give it to the Levite… and to the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow” (Deuteronomy 14:28-29). This was not a suggestion tacked onto the main system. It was a scheduled, built-in redistribution to the people with no land, no inheritance, and often no advocate: the foreigner working someone else’s field, the child who lost his father, the widow with no husband to provide.
Put the layers together and a clear picture forms. The tithe was never one thing. It was worship infrastructure (the temple), income for the people who ran that infrastructure (the Levites), a family’s own act of celebration (the festival tithe), and a safety net for the people society tends to forget (the poor, the widow, the orphan, the foreigner).
What Churches Do With It Today
Walk into a healthy church’s finance committee meeting and you will find the same four categories, wearing modern names.
Staff salaries. This is usually the largest single line item, and it should not surprise anyone. Pastors, worship leaders, children’s ministry staff, administrators - they work for the church the way the Levites worked for the tabernacle. Paul draws the line straight from Numbers 18 to the New Testament church: “The laborer deserves his wages” (1 Timothy 5:18), applied specifically to elders who “labor in preaching and teaching” (5:17). A pastor drawing a salary from tithes is not a compromise of the system. It is the system, doing what it was built to do.
Building and operations. Utilities, mortgage or rent, maintenance, insurance, the unglamorous cost of having a physical place to gather. This is the modern equivalent of temple upkeep - less dramatic than Nehemiah’s storehouse repairs, same basic function. A building is not the church, but the church needs somewhere to be the church.
Ministries. Kids’ programs, youth group, small groups, counseling, worship production. This is where a lot of the discipleship and community actually happens week to week, funded the same way the festival tithe funded worship: so people can gather, eat, celebrate, and grow together.
Missions and benevolence. Support for missionaries, church plants, and local benevolence funds for members hitting a genuine crisis. This is the clearest modern echo of the third-year tithe - money set aside on purpose for people with real need, inside the church and beyond it.
Budgets vary by church size, denomination, and region, and that is fine. What should not vary is transparency. A healthy church publishes its budget, or makes it available to anyone who asks. If a church won’t tell you where the money goes, that is worth paying attention to before you keep giving.
Where Should You Give Your Tithe?
Malachi calls the local church “the storehouse.” That is where the tithe goes first - the church that feeds you, teaches you, and walks with you. If you want to read the fuller case for why the tithe belongs to the local church specifically, see What Is a Tithe?
Giving beyond that, to a missions organization, a parachurch ministry, a friend planting a church in another city, is good and biblical. Scripture just frames it differently. That is offering, layered on top of the tithe, not a substitute for it. If you’re unsure how the two categories differ in practice, Tithes vs Offerings works through it.
And if you have not landed on a number yet, How Much Should I Tithe? walks through gross versus net and what ten percent actually looks like on a real paycheck. You can run your own numbers with the tithe calculator in under a minute.
The Short Version
The tithe was never a blank check into a void. In the Old Testament it paid the people who served full time at the tabernacle, kept the temple running, funded a family’s own worship, and fed the poor on a fixed schedule. Today it pays your pastor, keeps the lights on, runs the ministries that disciple your kids, and reaches people your church may never meet. Same four categories. Same reasoning. Ask your church where the money goes. A good one will be glad to tell you.