December 16, 1999 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Protestants are giving a smaller and smaller share of their incomes to their churches, according to a new report on giving by members of 29 denominations.
The report, which looked at contributions by millions of church members
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Giving to Religious Causes by Protestants
from 1968 to 1997, found that total contributions rose by an average of $147 per church member, after inflation was taken into account.
But the percentage of income that donors contributed in 1997 was only 2.56 per cent, compared with 3.12 per cent in 1968. The report also said that donors’ incomes grew by 73 per cent over that time period but that their gifts rose by only 42 per cent.
The report, released by Empty Tomb, a Champaign, Ill., research organization, also examined two types of gifts included in total contributions: gifts to support missions, education, and social services, and gifts that go toward meeting a congregation’s own financial needs, such as building maintenance and salaries.
Gifts to support missions and other good works rose slightly in 1997, the first rise in such gifts to be reported in a dozen years. Although the increase was small — just under 1 per cent — the researchers said the increased donations had produced several million dollars for church missions and other such activities.
Despite the increase in giving to good works in 1997, most of the money contributed by church members since 1968 — 96 per cent, when adjusted for inflation — has gone to meet congregations’ own financial needs, rather than to missions and other services to help others.
Sylvia Ronsvalle, Empty Tomb’s executive vice-president, said religious leaders should be disturbed by the report’s finding. She said the data clearly show that charitable giving “is becoming less important in the spending patterns of church members.”
Some researchers have criticized the way Empty Tomb came up with that conclusion. Empty Tomb relies on per-capita income data for all Americans to estimate the income levels of churchgoers. However, some researchers say it is not necessarily the case that church members’ incomes have grown at the same rate as have those of the average American.
Ms. Ronsvalle, however, argued that the Empty Tomb study does accurately reflect an overall decline in the percentage of income that church members give — because its conclusions are drawn from a large-enough sample of church members who are representative of the general population.
The analysis, Ms. Ronsvalle noted, is based on detailed data on giving by some 30 million church members reported annually by 100,000 congregations to the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA.
Copies of the study, “The State of Church Giving Through 1997,” are expected to be available as of December 15. To purchase a copy, send a check for $17, plus $3.20 for shipping and handling, to Empty Tomb, P.O. Box 2404, Champaign, Ill. 61825-2404; e-mail: yokingmap@aol.com. (Illinois residents must add $1.28 sales tax to the cost per copy.)
