Church Giving by Protestants: Report Cites 30-Year Trends

By DEBRA E. BLUM

Protestants have been making bigger and bigger donations to their churches over the past few decades, but the gifts are accounting for an increasingly smaller share of their incomes, a new report says.

The report, by Empty Tomb, a research and social-services group in Champaign, Ill., analyzes the contributions of millions of church members in 29 Protestant denominations from 1968 to 1998.

It says that total annual contributions rose by an average of $202 to $570 per church member over the three decades, after inflation was taken into account. But the percentage of income those donations represented fell from 3.1 percent in 1968 to 2.5 percent in 1998. That drop meant that church members gave $4-billion less in 1998 than they would have if they were giving at the same rate they did in 1968, according to the report.

The report examines two types of gifts included in the total contributions: gifts to support missions, education, and social services, and gifts that go toward meeting a congregation’s own financial needs. It says that giving for external church activities in 1998 hit a 30-year low as a percentage of income, falling for the first time below 0.4 percent. Gifts to local congregations, on the other hand, which had fallen in 1992 to below 2 percent of income, represented 2.12 percent of church members’ incomes in 1998.

More information from the report, “The State of Church Giving Through 1998,” can be found on Empty Tomb’s Web site at http://www.emptytomb.org. Copies of the report can be purchased for $27.20, including shipping, prepaid, from Empty Tomb, P. O. Box 2404, Champaign, Ill. 61825-2404; (217) 356-9519.