Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, November 6, 1993 TAG: 9311060130
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune
DATELINE: CHICAGO LENGTH: Medium
That's the message of a Christian research and service organization that has spent five years monitoring donations to religion. If certain trends in church giving don't change, the researchers say, churches will be extinct at the national level in the year 2048.
Year after year, a national report on philanthropy shows that Americans are giving more and more to charity and that the biggest share goes to religion.
At the same time, however, more and more religious denominations are finding themselves in financial trouble.
The most recent rosy figures from the "Giving USA" report show that Americans contributed $124 billion to charity last year, up more than 6 percent from the previous year. And of that amount, $57 billion went to religion, a 5 percent increase from 1991.
But that glow doesn't seem to be warming a lot of churches.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America recently attributed a million-dollar cutback in its national budget to income shortfall.
Financial woes also prompted the Presbyterian Church (USA) to combine a $7 million budget cut with staff layoffs at national headquarters. Episcopal, Roman Catholic and Southern Baptist churches complain of similar fiscal headaches.
Why are their coffers getting shallower and shallower even as donors are digging deeper and deeper into their pockets?
There isn't one easy, all-encompassing response. Part of the answer is that increased costs often outpace increased contributions.
But empty tomb inc., a small Christian research group in Champaign, Ill., suggests a simpler truth - namely, that contributions aren't really increasing.
For most of the recent years that the American Association of Fund-Raising Counsel has published "Giving USA" annual reports that Americans are giving more and more to religion, empty tomb has issued reports stating that Americans are giving less and less in terms of percentage of their incomes.
And this year, the researchers at empty tomb think they see the bottom: It is the year 2048.
They say that percentage of income donated by church members has decreased to 2.54 percent from 3.09 percent since 1968. That translates into millions of dollars. And the portion given to "benevolences," including national denominational offices, has dropped to only .44 percent from .65 percent.
If that downward trend isn't slowed, the researchers project that members will be giving nothing to their national church budgets in 55 years.
by CNB