The Earthmover Who Reversed the Tithe

Robert Gilmour LeTourneau started with a sixth-grade education and a rusted-out blacksmith shop in Stockton, California. By the 1930s, he was building the massive earthmoving machines that would reshape highways, airfields, and eventually the beaches of Normandy. But what distinguished LeTourneau was not his engineering genius — it was what he did with the profits.

He reversed the tithe. Instead of giving God ten percent and keeping ninety, LeTourneau gave ninety percent of his income away and lived on the rest. He funded missionary hospitals in Liberia and Peru, built a Christian university in Longview, Texas, and quietly paid the tuition of students he never met. When the Great Depression crushed businesses around him, his company not only survived — it grew. He refused to lay off workers. He extended credit to struggling contractors. Colleagues called it reckless. LeTourneau called it obedience.

"It is not how much of my money I give to God," he said, "but how much of God's money I keep for myself."

He died in 1969, wealthy and unafraid, his legacy scattered across four continents in schools, clinics, and churches that still bear fruit.

The psalmist writes, "They have distributed freely; they have given to the poor; their righteousness endures forever; their horn is exalted in honor." LeTourneau's life reads like a biography of Psalm 112 — a man who feared the Almighty, opened his hands wide, and discovered that generosity is never subtraction. It is always seed.