Church Development shares estimates on how much low giving levels shapes the Catholic Church.
One of the books I cite often is Charles Zech’s Why Catholics Don’t Give… and What Can Be Done About It. Even if you’re protestant, this book highlights the issues all churches face in engaging the congregation to give. As mentioned before, even though Protestants give an average of 2.2% of their income to nonprofits (including churches), Catholics give 1.2%. (Only universalists give worse at less than 1%.)
In Why Catholics Don’t Give, Zech cited a statistic from Joseph Harris about how much low Catholic giving costs the church. It’s not cited maliciously, or with some bend of guilt or unrealistic huge giving. Harris just put a number on what the entire Catholic Church could collect if each Catholic gave what the average American gives to charity:
$1.963 billion.
While some of that number is using nominal Catholics, as the statistic used the giving of the average American, the numbers translate over. Why Catholics Don’t Give noted the effect of these giving levels at the Church level:
Sometimes these ramifications have led to dramatic consequences. Joseph Harris (1994) cites the situation in the Chicago Archdiocese, where in 1993 the late Cardinal Bernardin stated, “We will be broke in four years if the Chicago Archdiocese does not address its financial problems immediately.” At that point, annual archdiocesan deficits were running in the range of $12 to $15 million a year. Harris goes on to observe that the Chicago situation, while noteworthy because of the vast amounts of money involved, isn’t all that unique. He pointed to a study in the National Catholic Reporter (Windsor, 1990) that estimated that 10-20% of all U.S. dioceses are operating with a budgetary deficit, while others have already had to make drastic cuts in critical ministries and services in an effort to prevent financial catastrophe. (Page 18)
Now that we’re 20 years on from that study, not much has changed. The numbers have gotten bigger; the problems are still the same. This is one of the many reasons why Church Development steps in to help.
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Denis Greene is the Founder and President of Church Development. He is the author of The Stewardship System, Stewardship-Based Capital Campaigns, and How To Ask For Donations as well as numerous articles on stewardship. Denis has helped over 200 churches across the USA raise more than $200,000,000.
A complete list of Church Development’s services (including capital campaign management and consultation, feasibility studies, and year-round stewardship ministry programming) is available here.