Navigating Study Participant Shares Impact On His Life & Church

Need for Financial Discipleship Materials

My name is Matthew Bergos and I’m based out of Brooklyn, New York, and I came to hear about Compass Financial Ministry after our church had a membership meeting in January and the pastor and staff had it in their heart to really grow in financial wellness. And one of the areas I raised to the pastor was on financial discipleship and he said go for it. 

When I started looking at different materials, I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, so I actually did a Google search and I typed in financial discipleship. It led me to the Compass website which was actually redesigned this past year. It was awesome. I signed up for the Navigating Finances God’s Way study and bought the eBook. 

Impact of Navigating Finances God’s Way Study

It’s really been a life changing experience for me in my Christian walk this year, particularly in lesson number three where we had to track our finances and our spending. There’s a spending plan in order to really look at all the categories. And although my family and I give to the local church and give to missions and ministries, to be honest with you, the one area that we didn’t really sow into on a monthly basis was benevolence to the poor and needy.

We didn’t make a plan for it. We made a plan for vacations, we made plans if we had to go shopping or go out to eat or birthdays and anniversaries, but it was just as we are paying down a lot of our student loans. This year we realized that there was an opportunity for us to give to the poor and give to the needy. And why is that? There was a verse of scripture where Jesus says, “When you give to the least of these, those that hunger and thirst or in prison you’re giving unto the Lord”. One translation says you’re lending to the Lord. And so that was very eye-opening and created the bridge between the debts that we’re looking to pay as well as being able to be generous to the Lord.

Next Steps

This has been an incredible class that we did with Nick Breach and we’re looking to bring it to the church in the fall and sign folks up to be able to walk through that six-week course of Navigating Finances God’s Way. I’m super excited and thank you so much for the opportunity, God bless.