Protestants Give Smaller Share of Income to Church Activities, a New Report Finds

Protestants are donating a smaller and smaller share of their after-tax incomes to churches, according to a new report. The main decline has come in the form of gifts to church-run charitable activities, which, as a percentage of take-home pay, dropped to a 36-year low.

An analysis of 146,000 Protestant congregations shows that in 2003 — the latest year for which data are available — church members gave an average of 2.6 percent of their income to churches, marking the second year of decline.

Congregation members gave an average of 0.38 percent of their incomes to “benevolences,” or gifts to support church-related missions, education, and social services. That proportion is the lowest share since 1968, when such data were first collected. At that time, church members gave 0.66 percent of their incomes for church-run charitable programs.

The report, published by Empty Tomb, an Illinois religious research and social-services organization, is based on giving data covering nearly 30 million Protestant church members, reported annually by their churches to the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA.

Church members gave, on average, just under $683 each to their churches in 2003, a slight drop from the previous year, after adjusting for inflation. Of the total contribution, the amount earmarked to meet a congregation’s own financial needs, such as building maintenance and salaries, edged up slightly. Contributions aimed at external church activities, however, dipped for the second straight year.

In all, the churches in the report had $21.2-billion in revenue in 2003, with about 15 percent supporting external church activities. By comparison, benevolences accounted for 21 percent of all church giving in 1968.

Implications for Charities

Sylvia Ronsvalle, a co-founder of Empty Tomb, says the decline in church giving as a share of income and, particularly, the drop in support for activities outside the church may be troubling trends for the entire nonprofit world. Religious groups receive the biggest share of all donations each year.

“The canary in the coal mine is gasping,” she says, “and people ought to be paying attention.”

She says one indicator that churches may not be focusing enough on a key philanthropic value — altruism — is a shift over the past century away from spending church donations on efforts abroad.

Empty Tomb’s own survey of 28 Protestant denominations found that for every dollar donated to a congregation, denominations spent two cents on overseas missions. Similar data from the 1920s, Empty Tomb’s report says, show denominations spending seven cents on every dollar on such efforts.

“It looks like philanthropy is being reinterpreted as giving to things that benefit you,” Ms. Ronsvalle says, “not to things outside yourself, things that demonstrate true altruism.”

For the first time this year, the Empty Tomb report also estimated giving trends by all Americans based on statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor. The report says that, according to its analysis, total cash donations to charities of all types was $91-billion in 2003.

Copies of the report, “The State of Church Giving Through 2003,” are available for $28 each, plus shipping charges, from Empty Tomb, 301 North Fourth Street, P.O. Box 2404, Champaign, Ill. 61824-2404; (217) 356-9519.