Christian writing jobs (remote and freelance)

Last updated October 2026

If you want to write for the church, you probably picture a book deal. The paying work usually looks different: a donor newsletter due before the fiscal year closes, six weeks of small group questions for a curriculum team, thirty devotional entries for an app by Friday. It's quieter work than a book signing. It's also where most of the paychecks are.

Christian writing jobs, remote and freelance, fall into five paths: publishing houses, ministry and nonprofit communications, content marketing for Christian companies, curriculum and Bible study writing, and freelance articles or devotionals. Staff roles pay salaries, and published freelance rates run from $30 devotionals to $2,000 features. Fully remote openings are rarer than most writers expect.

Takeaway	What it means for you
Five paths, not one	Publishing houses, ministry communications, content marketing, curriculum, and freelance each hire differently and pay differently.
Remote is the exception	Just 1,109 of the past year's 20,564 listings on ChristianJobsList.com are remote, about 5%, so build a client base instead of waiting for a remote posting.
The job title is rarely "writer"	Search communications, marketing, development, and content coordinator to surface the roles that actually involve writing all day.
Freelance rates are public	The Upper Room pays $30 per meditation; Faith & Leadership pays $400 for an essay and around $2,000 for a feature.
Many doors open by invitation	David C Cook, for one, reviews book and curriculum proposals only through agents or invitations extended at writers' conferences.

What counts as a Christian writing job?

A Christian writing job is any paid role where you write for a church, ministry, Christian publisher, faith-based school, or Christian-owned business. That covers two very different things, and mixing them up costs writers a lot of wasted pitches.

The first is writing about faith: devotionals, Bible study notes, testimony pieces, theological essays. The second is ordinary business writing done for an organization that happens to be Christian: fundraising appeals, admissions brochures, email campaigns, help-center articles for a giving platform.

The second category hires more often and pays more steadily. The first category is what most aspiring writers pitch. That gap explains a lot of the frustration in this niche.

Both categories include staff jobs and contract jobs. Staff jobs come with a salary and usually an office. Contract jobs come with an invoice and usually a laptop.

Which Christian writing path fits you?

The five writing paths ask for different skills, so pick one lane before you pitch anyone. A curriculum editor and a donor-appeal copywriter are both writers, and almost nothing on their calendars overlaps.

Publishing houses

Publishing houses hire far fewer writers than readers assume, and far more editors, marketers, and copywriters. Zondervan and Thomas Nelson (both under HarperCollins Christian Publishing), Tyndale House, Baker Publishing Group, Crossway, Moody Publishers, B&H, and InterVarsity Press staff up around Nashville, Grand Rapids, Wheaton, Carol Stream, and Colorado Springs, so their salaried roles skew onsite.

There's also contract work: line editing, proofreading, back-cover and catalog copy, endorsement wrangling, and ghostwriting for authors who have a platform but not a manuscript. Ghostwriting a pastor's book is one of the better-paid jobs in this field, and it almost never gets advertised.

Read submission pages before you send anything. David C Cook states plainly that it does not accept unsolicited book or curriculum proposals and returns them unread, considering only agented proposals or ones invited at writers' conferences. Several houses run the same policy.

Ministry and nonprofit communications

Ministry communications roles are the steadiest writing work in the Christian sector. A relief agency, denominational office, mission board, or 3,000-member church needs someone producing donor appeals, annual reports, grant proposals, missionary updates, service programs, and website copy every single week.

Grant writing is the one writing skill on this list with a direct, measurable dollar return for the employer, which makes budget approval easier. If you can write a clean logic model and a defensible budget narrative, you're worth more than a writer who can only produce warm prose. Nonprofit and church fundraising and development roles are worth watching even when the posting doesn't say "writer" anywhere in the title.

Content marketing for Christian companies

Content marketing for Christian companies is where the freelance volume sits. Christian schools, counseling practices, summer camps, adoption agencies, financial advisors, curriculum publishers, and Bible app companies all run blogs, email sequences, and landing pages, and many of them outsource the writing.

The work looks like commercial content marketing anywhere else: keyword research, interviews with subject-matter experts, 1,200-word articles, subject-line testing. What faith adds is a tone requirement and a doctrinal review step. Browse marketing and communications openings at Christian organizations to see how those job descriptions are written before you rewrite your own pitch.

Curriculum and Bible study writing

Curriculum writing is work-for-hire on a template. Publishers and large churches hire writers to produce lesson sessions, leader guides, discussion questions, and take-home pages against a fixed scope-and-sequence, a set word budget, and a specified Bible translation.

You'll typically be paid a flat fee per session and asked to sign away rights, so ask about the fee, the revision rounds, and the doctrinal review process before you start. Denominational alignment matters more here than in any other path, since a lesson on baptism gets read very differently in a Baptist church than in a Presbyterian one. Christian schools also contract writers for supplemental material, which shows up alongside their teaching and curriculum roles in Christian education job listings.

Freelance articles, devotionals, and ghostwriting

Freelance article and devotional writing is the most accessible path and the least lucrative per hour. Rates are published, which makes planning easy: The Upper Room pays $30 per meditation of no more than 350 to 400 words, and Faith & Leadership pays $400 for an essay of 800 to 1,000 words and roughly $2,000 for a 1,500 to 2,000-word feature.

Check status before you pitch. Faith & Leadership, as of October 2026, has paused submissions entirely. Markets in this niche open and close with grant cycles and staff changes, so a list you found in a two-year-old blog post is a list of dead ends.

These clips pay little, but three published devotionals plus a byline in a respected outlet is what convinces a ministry to hand you their donor campaign.

How much do Christian writing jobs pay?

Writing-titled roles are thin on our own board. Across the past year's 20,564 listings on ChristianJobsList.com, only 48 are tagged Writing and 32 are tagged Publishing, and just eight of those writing listings published a complete salary range, which is too few to report a median.

The nearest categories with enough salary data tell you more. Across the 30 communications roles on our board with complete salary ranges, typical pay runs about $50k to $83k with a median near $62k, and across the 87 marketing roles with complete ranges, typical pay runs about $56k to $96k with a median near $68k. Both samples are small, so treat them as a rough sense of the market, and note that these are listings at churches, ministries, schools, and Christian nonprofits.

For context outside the faith sector, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that writers and authors earned a median of $76,910 a year as of May 2025. Faith-based employers, most of them nonprofits, generally pay less, and how much less depends on the organization's size and budget.

Path	How it's usually paid	A published reference point
Ministry communications staff	Salary, usually onsite	Communications listings on CJL: median about $62k (n=30)
Content marketing	Salary or monthly retainer	Marketing listings on CJL: median about $68k (n=87)
Devotionals	Per accepted piece	The Upper Room: $30 per meditation
Essays and features	Per accepted piece	Faith & Leadership: $400 per essay, about $2,000 per feature
Curriculum	Flat fee per session, work for hire	Rates are negotiated privately and rarely published

You can compare the full picture on our Christian salary data page.

How common are remote Christian writing jobs?

Remote Christian writing jobs exist, but they're scarce enough that planning around them is a mistake. Remote roles make up about 5% of our board, 1,109 of the 20,564 we tracked in the past year, according to ChristianJobsList.com listing data (as of October 2026). The other 19,455 are onsite or hybrid.

Contract listings are similarly thin. Across the same set of listings, 383 are tagged Contractor and 3,519 are part-time, while 12,568 are full-time.

Ministries hire locally because they think of communications as a team-room job, and because many of them have never managed a remote contractor. So the reliable route to remote work is an ordinary client relationship conducted over email, which is how nearly all freelance work in this niche operates regardless of what any job board says.

Part-time roles are the other underrated door. A church that can't fund a full communications hire will often fund ten hours a week, and you can ask in the interview whether some of those hours could be worked from home.

How do you land your first paid assignment?

Landing a first paid Christian writing assignment comes down to showing an organization work that looks like the work you want them to buy. Follow these five steps in order.

Pick one lane and one audience. "I write donor communications for child-sponsorship ministries" gets hired. "I'm a Christian writer" does not.
Write three spec samples for specific organizations. Rewrite an actual church's giving page, draft a year-end appeal for a rescue mission you admire, outline a four-week small group study. Keep the organization's name out of the sample's title.
Publish the samples where they have a URL. A simple portfolio page beats attachments. Editors and communications directors will not open a Google Doc from a stranger.
Pitch ten organizations with an idea. Send the communications director one specific, useful proposal: the three stories their annual report is missing, or the email sequence their event page needs.
Ask for a paid trial piece. Offer a small, fixed-scope first project at your full rate. Working free "for exposure" in ministry contexts tends to set a precedent that follows you.

Before you sign anything, settle which Bible translation the client uses and who owns the finished work. Both are awkward to raise later and trivial to raise upfront.

Where should you look for openings?

Openings for Christian writers surface in four places, and general job boards are the weakest of them.

Start with faith-based job boards such as ChristianJobsList.com, and set alerts for communications, content, marketing, and development titles, since these jobs are rarely labeled "writer."
For publisher and magazine guidelines, search a publication's name plus "writer guidelines" or "submissions." The pay rate, word count, and current open or closed status are usually right there, as they are at The Upper Room and Faith & Leadership.
The Evangelical Press Association maintains a freelance member directory, and its member publications are a working list of paying Christian outlets.
Large churches, mission agencies, Christian universities, and camps post to their own careers pages first, and sometimes only there.

What gets Christian writers rejected?

Rejections in Christian writing cluster around a short list of avoidable errors, and most of them come down to fit.

Devotional voice in commercial copy. A ministry's fundraising email needs a clear ask and a deadline, not three paragraphs of reflection.
Sloppy scripture handling. Mixed translations in one piece, missing references, and ignored permission requirements signal an amateur to any editor at a publishing house.
Pitching a book to a magazine. Editors buy articles. Book proposals go to agents or to the invitation-only channels publishers describe on their submissions pages.
Skipping the doctrinal question. Ask early what statement of faith the organization holds. Discovering a mismatch after two rounds of edits wastes everyone's week.
Working without a contract or kill fee. Get scope, fee, revision rounds, deadline, and payment terms in writing, especially with a church you attend.

Frequently asked questions

How do I start a career as a Christian writer?

Start by choosing one type of writing, producing three strong samples of exactly that type, and publishing them at a shareable URL. Then pitch ministries, publishers, or Christian businesses directly with a specific project idea. Paid devotional or essay credits build credibility quickly while you develop client work.

How much do Christian writers get paid?

Pay depends entirely on the format. Devotionals run small and fixed, such as The Upper Room's $30 per meditation, while a longform feature at Faith & Leadership pays around $2,000. Salaried communications and marketing roles at Christian organizations listed on ChristianJobsList.com show medians near $62k and $68k respectively, from small samples.

Can you make a living writing Christian content?

Yes, but usually not from magazine articles alone. Writers who support themselves in this field typically combine a retainer client or two, curriculum or ghostwriting projects, and occasional article work. A staff communications role at a church, ministry, or Christian school is the more predictable path to a stable full-time income.

Do you need a theology degree to write for Christian publishers?

No degree is required for most Christian writing work. Publishers and ministries care about accuracy, doctrinal fit with their statement of faith, and whether you can hit a deadline on a template. Formal theological training helps most for academic publishing, curriculum on doctrine, and ghostwriting for pastors and seminary faculty.

Are there remote Christian writing jobs for beginners?

Remote entry-level postings are limited. Only about 5% of the 20,564 jobs on ChristianJobsList.com over the past year are remote, so beginners generally do better pitching freelance projects, taking a part-time church communications role, or writing for content-marketing clients, all of which can be handled by email regardless of how the role is labeled.

Narrow your focus and start pitching

Christian writing jobs reward writers who narrow their focus and approach organizations as a solution to a specific problem. Pick your lane, build the three samples that prove it, and send ten targeted pitches before you refresh a job board again.

The ministries doing this work are usually short-handed, so write your first sample this week.

Discover Christian job opportunities across every industry at ChristianJobsList.com. You can find work in education, healthcare, counseling, finance, marketing, and more at Christian schools, hospitals, nonprofits, and companies that share your faith and values.