William remains the SBC Plodder, when he is not out fishing.
SBC Life has some interesting Cooperative Program statistics in the current issue. Under a short piece entitled, “Interesting (and Important) Facts about the CP?” one finds this:
2,025 churches reported giving a combined amount that equals 50 percent of all Cooperative Program gifts given through the state Baptist conventions — more than 240 million dollars ($240,704,503).*Among churches that gave this amount are:
- 89—churches with more than 2,000 in worship attendance
- 56—churches with 1,501 to 2,000 in worship attendance
- 163—churches with 1,001 to 1,500 in worship attendance
- 158—churches with 751 to 1,000 in worship attendance
- 348—churches with 501 to 750 in worship attendance
- 886—churches with 251 to 500 in worship attendance
- 277—churches with 126 to 250 in worship attendance
- 19—churches with 125 or under in worship attendance
- 29—churches did not report their attendance
I doubt you would have guessed that about 2,000 of the SBC’s 46,000 churches are responsible for half of all the Cooperative Program giving.
And if you look at the listing of the sizes of these churches given above, you may be persuaded away from the old saw that all those average and small SBC churches that give high percentages are the backbone of the CP. Their giving is important and commendable but the backbone seems to be the larger, mid-mega, and megachurches if we’re talking about the dollars that pay all the SBC bills.
These 2,025 churches gave an average of 8.1% of their undesignated receipts through the Cooperative Program. That percentage is significantly above the average, which hovers between five and six percent.
Want some good news about Cooperative Program giving?
For the first time since fiscal 1999-2000, the percentage forwarded by the churches through the Cooperative Program did not decline.
- In 2011, the average percentage giving from all churches was 5.407 percent.
- In 2012, the average percentage giving from all churches rose slightly to 5.414 percent.
Frank Page should declare an SBC party day over the .007 increase in average percentage. It is a miniscule increase but it is an increase. Perhaps the Cooperative Program has reached its percentage floor.
With the health care reform fully taking effect, I think we’ll dip significantly next year. I hope I’m wrong.
Or, you could read this and come away with the stat that over half of these 2,025 churches have less than 501 people on average. Hardly mega-churches. Over 10% of the 2,025 churches are less than 251 people. It is so easy to allow statistics to say what you want. I would like to know how much the 814 churches with 501+ members gave and what that percentage looks like. That would be a little more accurate if we want to focus on what “mega-churches” give. Furthermore, I believe the SBC defines mega-churches as 1000 or more members. So, of… Read more »
I think his point (other than just presenting facts) is that a small percentage of churches are paying the way for the CP. Need to get other churches on board, somehow.
A megachurch is 2000+ and there are around 175 of these in the SBC. There are about 600 with 1000+. You will note that the vast number of the churches in this statistical tabulation are 250+. While I wish I had the database to manipulate it myself, it is unarguable that a small percentage of churches, mostly larger ones, make up half of the CP giving. I didn’t claim that the “non-megachurches aren’t the backbone of the denomination”, so you are arguing with something I did not say. Since less than 200 of the 46,000 SBC churches are megas, non-megas… Read more »
My point William was that this “so-called” statistical picture doesn’t constitute a viewpoint that the SBC’s giving is dominated by extremely large churches. Moreover, as I stated, with over half of the sample having less than 501 members, we don’t know how much of a “backbone” the remainder of those large churches are. Furthermore, the statistics also don’t show the budgets of these churches comparative to their membership, so regardless of the amount, the smaller churches could still be giving far more per family on average than the mega-churches. Which equates to more sacrifice, which is far more of a… Read more »
Nate, the figures SBC Life used show that a tiny percentage of all SBC churches give far beyond their number in CP dollars and that almost all of these churches are much larger than the average sized SBC church. Which category of SBC churches should be called the “backbone” of the CP is entirely subjective but it is often said that average and smaller churches are the backbone. This is not a conclusion based on data if we are talking about the dollars contributed.
I was careful to say that the contributions of smaller churches are important and commendable.
I think the notable part of this is how many churches of less than 500 in attendance are significantly involved in paying the CP bills! Over half of these churches!
Dave, a church of 250 in attendance is far above the SBC average.
Isn’t the point of CP that every church, no matter how small their ability to participate, makes a difference?
Of course, and that is borne out by the fact the other half of the CP is subscribed by the other churches.
It would be interesting to compare these numbers to the distribution of churches in each numerical category – 43.75% (886 / 2025) of the high-giving churches are in the 251-500 in worship attendance category…does this correspond to the percentage of churches overall in that group?
Percentage distribution might be the only “fair” way to judge whether this is a megachurch-biased pattern or if this is just an expected distribution of churches.
Couldn’t find the overall data on sbc.net – does anyone have access to ACP who can relay it?
These numbers represent a normal distribution. By comparison, consider the United States income tax. According to the National Taxpayers Union, the top 5% pay 58.66% of the tax bill. http://www.ntu.org/tax-basics/who-pays-income-taxes.html
We must remember that our goal is not to give equal amounts, but to sacrifice equally. On that score, some churches at the top are truthfully at the bottom.
I’m with Andrew above, though I doubt we’ll see that number. What % of CP giving comes from each of those attendance bands?
This is a cherry-picked scenario to make a point, rather than useful data. You could recombine and find that 50% of CP giving comes from 20% of churches by dropping the 89 megas off the list and adding smaller churches that equal their giving.
Let’s get a fuller picture before we keep crushing the enthusiasm for CP giving in small churches.
I think the interesting part of this set of statistics is the answer to the question “how did they establish the cutoff?” Why is that interesting? Because it includes churches of all reported sizes and of no size at all. So what they did not do was line up all of the largest churches until they got to 50%. That wasn’t the cutoff. What seems to have been done instead is that the reported percentage of cooperative program passthrough was increased until the 50% mark was reached and then aggregate statistics on the churches giving at or above that percentage… Read more »
I was in a church business meeting years ago when the church voted to increase its giving to the Cooperative Program. One of the dear old saints exclaimed “Good Lord, are we ever going to get that thing paid off?!”
As a young Christian, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry because I wasn’t sure about CP myself at that point. Which brings me to a question: “Do the 20s-30s populating SBC’s new church plants understand and support the CP or are they focused more on funding independent missional efforts?” Any statistics available in that regard?
This is both interesting and useful, Doug. The data were not explained completely but the top 2025 giving churches in dollars give half of the total amount. And why is this crushing the enthusiasm for small churches? If a small church cannot see the importance of the CP and give what they can out of what they have, and do so enthusiastically, then they need to check their motivations. I have never known an SBC or state convention leader to disparage a church that gives a small amount or that gives a small percentage but I have known SBCers to… Read more »
It seems clear to me that the method was to take the largest dollar givers and see how many it took to get to the 50% point and then break them down by reported attendance. Some of the 2025 did not report attendance. To get to the 80% point it took another 6300 churches who averaged 7.6% of their undesignated gifts to the CP. The next 15% was reached by the next 22,000 churches.
…so you have 80% of CP gifts being given by 18% of the churches. There’s your 80/20.
So, I agree that’s the methodology. But there is very little chance that the smaller churches would have been grouped with the larger churches based on raw dollars given. Which is why I suspect this data was assembled by setting a CP percentage threshold.
Since I am completely ignorant of how the numbers were gathered, I feel fully qualified to jump right in here. But I do have what William says. William shows the roughly 80/20 split that we have come to expect in most things human. Based on what he said, they did list the raw money and stopped when they got to 50% of the money and did the count which came up with 2025 churches. I thought the relatively large number of churches in the list with 250-500 members was not surprising. These churches are large enough to have a significant… Read more »
Who’s got the money to give to the CP when you’ve gotta pay for a groundskeeper. Someone’s gotta cut the hedges in front of the witty sign to draw in over 50 folks every week.