Churchgoers Gave Bigger Gifts but Smaller Shares of Income Over Time

Title: “The State of Church Giving Through 2014″

Organization: Empty Tomb

Summary: The share of their income that members of Christian churches give to religious congregations and related organizations, like church-run food banks, has declined.

Researchers John and Sylvia Ronsvalle studied data collected by dozens of congregations in the United States, analyzing trends from 1968 to 2014.

Among the findings in the latest annual analysis by Empty Tomb, which researches religious philanthropy:

• Total giving to religious causes as a percent of income stood at 2.2 percent, the lowest rate since 1968. In that year, church members gave just over 3 percent of their income to their congregations and related organizations.
• The amount church members give per capita has grown since the late 1960s. Church members gave an average of $804.71 to their church or related charities in 2014. Adjusted for inflation, congregants gave an average of $470.10 to those causes in 1968.
• However, the amount church members give per capita has decreased 2.6 percent from 2010 to 2014, the only decrease recorded in any five-year period since 1950.
• Although some Christian denominations — notably Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants — have gained members in the past few decades, church membership is shrinking as a percentage of the American population because it is being outpaced by the overall growth in population. For instance, the congregations of 15 evangelical denominations studied by the researchers grew 45 percent from 1968 to 2014 but declined 9 percent as a share of the total population.