United States
RNS
An annual report on giving to US evangelical Christian non-profits, including churches and other ministries, found that giving to the United States’ largest churches fell by more than 6.6 per cent in 2021, despite a rise of four per cent last year in charitable giving nationwide.
New donors and large donations were especially hard to come by, according to the report.
PICTURE: EBonilla14/iStockphoto.
The findings appeared in the 2022 State of Giving report, released this week by the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, an accreditation organisation that sets standards for ministries’ financial management and reporting.
The report’s authors examined cash-giving patterns to more than 1,800 ECFA members, drawn from financial statements from those non-profits. All told, ECFA members received more than $US19 billion in cash donations in 2021. They also received $US11.3 billion in revenue from fees and investments and $US4.7 billion worth of in-kind donations.
Many Christian groups other than churches saw increases in keeping with the overall rise in philanthropic giving, and some did far better. Donations to Christian foundations (65.8 per cent), anti-human trafficking groups (28.9 per cent), K-12 schools (18.3 per cent), church planting (12.2 per cent) and pregnancy resource centers (14.5 per cent) saw some of the largest increases.
Giving to Christian charities overall was up three per cent, adjusted for inflation, according to the report. That tops overall charitable giving in the United States, which dropped by just under one per cent, according to Giving USA data cited by ECFA.
The report also finds that giving went up by 1.8 per cent from 2016 to 2021.
Those numbers made the decline in giving to churches (-6.6 per cent) and youth ministry (-2.9 per cent) all the more stark. Churches with budgets under $US2 million saw giving go down by eight per cent, while those with budgets of more than $US20 million saw giving go down by 2.5 per cent.
Many charities and churches alike struggled to find staff and volunteers.
The churches in the ECFA are larger than the average church in the United States. According to the 2020 Faith Communities Today study, which looks at congregations from a wide range of faith groups, the median congregation has a budget of $US120,000, down 20 per cent from 2010. Most congregations in the United States have budgets of less than $US100,000, but because larger churches draw so many, about half of Americans (51 per cent) attend a church where the budget is $US1 million or more.
The ECFA study found that 45 per cent of non-profits had trouble finding enough volunteers, 53 per cent had problems finding enough staff, 29 per cent struggled to keep existing donors, and 63 per cent had issues finding major donors who gave $US10,000 a year or more.
More than a third (37 per cent) tapped their reserves in 2021, while 43 per cent left reserves untouched. Just under one in five (17 per cent) were able to grow their reserves.
