Mary Love-Harris Learned the Hard Way: Christian Doesn't Mean Poor

Mary Love-Harris used to charge $30 an hour for work that required a master's degree, years of clinical experience, and a heart broken open by walking alongside women coming out of prison, jail, and addiction treatment. Today she charges $135 an hour, and she doesn't apologize for it.

"Christian does not mean poor," she says now, and the sentence lands with the weight of someone who spent over a decade learning it the hard way. "Don't allow people to manipulate your faith to decrease your value and your worth."

Her story didn't start with pricing strategy. It started with a vision.

A House, A Name, A Calling

In 2004, God gave Mary a name, a vision, and specific instructions: find a three-bedroom house, build programming, file the 501(c)(3) paperwork. Five years later, in 2009, she incorporated Rainbow House Ministries and opened her doors to six women rebuilding their lives after prison, jail, and treatment. She even wrote her own curriculum — PETALS: Preparing Everyone To Advance, Lead and Succeed.

What she didn't fully understand yet was that a nonprofit is still a business. And businesses without boundaries get taken advantage of.

"I found out that people like to unfortunately rip off and use nonprofits," she recalls. So she taught herself grant writing. She earned her bachelor's degree in social work, then a master's in management from Spring Arbor University, then a Seminary & Theology Certificate Degree from Princeton Theological Seminary. Somewhere in the middle of all that education, clients started asking for something beyond counseling — they wanted life coaching, consulting. The lines blurred, and so did her sense of what she was actually running.

By 2013, overwhelmed and financially strained, she brought it straight to God. "I said, God, I just can't do all this and I'm broke." His answer was direct: I never told you to do anything for free. Everything you need is already in your hand. You just need to see the new you. That word became the name of her company — A New Me For You.

When the Fire Gets Hot

The years that followed tested every ounce of that new identity. Her marriage struggled. Rainbow House's funding grew unstable. Her daughter wrestled publicly with substance use and mental illness. In 2018, Mary left a prominent Lansing church deeply wounded — what she calls "church hurt." She stepped away from associate pastoring and into a season she describes simply as "wading in the water."

Just as momentum returned — a major speaking engagement, a partnership with Sean Fair, an event at the Imagine Theater — COVID shut the world down. Her fledgling business had no established footing to absorb the blow.

She pivoted into clinical case management, staying close to the population she'd always served. Two and a half years later, still carrying the calling, she produced a mental health summit, Mental Health, Addiction, and the Intersection of Faith, exploring what she calls the intersection of faith and healing — the idea that recovery from addiction, poverty, or trauma often hinges on whether a person leans into the strength of God or retreats into religious constraints that were never God's design.

Then in early 2025, she lost her clinical case management job in Oakland County. It could have been the final blow. Instead, it became the clearest test of the principle she now builds her entire business around.

"Never have I seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread. And I am the righteousness of Jesus Christ."

She prayed a specific prayer: not for abundance, but for one faithful contract she could operate in with excellence. God sent an author. Then an educator whose classroom, Mary realized, was its own marketplace ministry. Then a client building a faith-based recovery housing model — work that let her merge her clinical training, her nonprofit experience, and Rainbow House's original DNA into something entirely new. A New Me For You had found its footing. In August 2026, she celebrated her first full year back in business.

Clean Hands, Clear Contracts

Not every client relationship has been smooth. One engagement turned into a slow grind of revisions, dissatisfaction, and shifting expectations. Most consultants would have pushed through — the money was good, after all. Mary chose differently.

"It became a question of, am I being effective, or is there something here I need to take my hands off of?" she says. Rather than walk away quietly, she built something lasting: a full quality-control system of 22 forms that now governs every new client relationship — clear scope, documented changes, signed approval before work shifts direction.

"The Bible tells us to be careful how we build," she explains. "If Christ is my firm foundation, then everything I do needs to be solid and clean. I need pure hands, because it comes back on you."

Recognizing the Voice

Mary's obedience shows up in smaller moments too — moments the world might call inefficient. With her company, Rhema Word House Ministries, Inc, she volunteers monthly cooking for Advent House Ministries, a Lansing homeless shelter. One week, the Holy Spirit nudged her mid-errand at a chicken restaurant to bless a young employee with a pot of cabbage. She went home, cooked it, and returned within the hour — not knowing the young man had prayed for two specific things: that she'd keep her word, and that she'd make it back before his break ended.

"I know the Father when I hear him. And I move how God tells me to do it."

That same voice, years earlier, had given her the title for a book — The Doors of the Church — right after she left her wounded church experience in 2018. She assumed it would be a tell-all. God gave her nothing to write. Not through COVID, not through the church's eventual closing. Then, two Sundays ago, listening to a guest minister teach on the fivefold ministry, the entire book downloaded into her spirit — five chapters, titles included. She left church at 2:35pm and had a finished, published manuscript by 11:45 that night.

What She'd Tell You Monday Morning

Ask Mary what she'd tell a Christian entrepreneur just starting out, and she folds the answer into one principle stated two ways. First: write the vision God gives you, plainly, in full — you'll need that record when the path gets confusing. Second: charge what you're worth. Her own years of undercharging weren't humility; they were a misunderstanding of what faith actually requires.

"If they don't want to pay it, they're not your client," she says simply.

And beneath both pieces of advice sits the one she almost forgot to mention until the very end of her story — the one she says is the whole point.

"We always have an opportunity to show the love of God. I think business is the best place to do it, because there are so many wicked people showing their wickedness in some form or fashion every day. The beautiful thing about believers is that we get the opportunity to show the love of God in everything we do, every single day."

That's the real balance sheet Mary Love-Harris is building — one contract, one client, one act of obedience at a time.