If I get a Wikipedia entry for HYFS someday, I’d like it to read something like this:
In May, 2007, David Hicks independently published Healing Your Financial Soul: An interactive guide to restoring your relationship with money, a 264-page book to help Christians identify and clear out their “baggage” regarding money. Hicks dedicated 2006, halftime, to writing HYFS. Hicks saw the need for such a book because:
- He needed it – his own previously healthy finances were shipwrecked while in full-time ministry
- The Church needs it – he saw meagreness and financial impotence condoned as virtue and evidence of faith, accepted as part and parcel to ministry, and equated with humility
- People need it – financial strain had been identified as the #1 marriage buster, and exacts a toll on children
Hicks believed an experiential, participatory book driven by spiritual exercises would be a more effective route for lasting change than foisting budgets, savings plans and teaching on tithing. With his pastoral counseling and prayer ministry background, Hicks applied several counseling models to the reader’s beliefs and behaviours at the conscious, subconscious, emotional, spiritual, familial and kinesthetic levels. The book offers concepts, prayers, reflection, gestures, role-playing and outside activities which identify and interrupt one’s self-fulfilling, self-sabotaging patterns regarding money, and replace them with healthy, constructive ones. His mission is to restore and free up people’s ideas, aspirations and callings held hostage by financial lack and stress.
The book’s core spiritual values reflect Hicks’ own theological stance:
- God the Father’s love, generosity and optimism
- Jesus’ healing ministry to the human heart
- The Holy Spirit’s counsel through interactive prayer
Before publication, he secured endorsements from several influential ministers: John Arnott, Marc Dupont and Mark Virkler. Other respected ministers have since added theirs.
On the heels of the book, Hicks created a website to promote and sell the book:
- an audio book version (TBA)
- an online webinar series working chapter-by-chapter through the book
- conducted weekend seminars to kick start people with the material
- DVDs and audio CDs of the seminar.
HYFS sold out its first printing of 2,000 copies in two years, and David conducted 10 seminars in 18 months. The seminars eclipsed the book as a source of income and testimonies of breakthroughs in marriages, businesses and ministries. David’s own finances flourished and he went on to sell a total of 100,000 copies in 5 years. Still listed, HYFS is on its way to 1 million copies in 2020.
“I am rich in _____!”
