Free is of great value to us at Mars Hill Church. We give away a lot of music, Bibles, articles, ebooks, and all of Pastor Mark’s sermons. We give away even more at our campuses (most recently my new book, Money: God or Gift). We give away ten percent of our budget to church planting. We give away money for MicroMission projects in the community. Why?

God is a giver.

Author Gordon MacDonald describes how each member of the Trinity demonstrates this characteristic: "God the Father is the first generous giver, God the Son is the chief of generous givers, and God the Holy Spirit is the ongoing expression of God’s generosity in us." All people are God’s image-bearers, and one way to "image" him as clearly as possible is to be generous like him.

We love people.

We want to serve our church by providing access to teaching and resources to help them grow in their relationship with Jesus (increasing their joy, freedom, faithfulness, and worship) and share him with others. God’s grace is free, and by giving away as much as we can for free, we hope to provide small pictures of what his greater, eternal generosity is all about.

We want to set an example.

By giving away a lot of stuff for free, we hope that other churches, ministries, and individuals will be encouraged to be generous with their resources as well. It can be a costly endeavor, but the return we’re after is more valuable than anything we could sacrifice in the meantime (Luke 12:33).

The gospel is free.

We give stuff away because we want as many people as possible to hear the gospel and meet Jesus. We recently received a note from a college student in upstate New York:

I just wanted to express how much I appreciate and how blessed we have been at my school due to Mars Hill putting its sermons online . . . We have never had a campus ministry before, and our school is also not within walking distance to any churches/chapels, so what we've started doing in the last several weeks is that we have begun our own chapel services in a general purpose room inside of the school, and we are using your video podcasts. My friends and I have been immensely blessed by them. Please keep them up and thank you again!

Why do we give? To paraphrase the Apostle Paul, we do it all for the sake of the gospel, that we may share with others its blessings (1 Cor. 9:23). Read more about money, stewardship, and giving in Pastor Jamie’s new book, Money: God or Gift, available for free at Mars Hill and for cheap online. Also, while we are committed to providing our resources at no cost, we can't exactly let people go hog-wild with it all and modify our content either. To that extent, if you have any questions about the permissible ways to use the free content, please read our Media FAQ page.