This has nothing to do with this article, but our author is now a national media star, as can be demonstrated from this article in the Washington Post. Interestingly, one of the “Tri-state” areas there is Sioux City (Iowa/Nebraska/South Dakota), where I live, and the IA/MN/SD point is not too far north of here.
This chart shows how CP giving is distributed across all of the Southern Baptist Churches in Oklahoma. I am using Oklahoma for this study since I have the Annual Church Profile information for the state of Oklahoma available in a machine readable form. I can’t prove this, but the chart would probably be similar for most of the state conventions associated with the SBC – at least those in the “South” –spanning clockwise from Virginia to Oklahoma.
Conventional wisdom is this: With the advent of mega-churches in recent decades we now experience a situation where the lion’s share of CP giving comes from a relatively small number of churches. The chart confirms this. But what I was completely blown away to discover, by actually grinding the numbers, is that the concentration of CP giving has been the same for generations. Specifically: 80% of CP giving comes from 20% of the churches. This has remained constant since at least 1960.
To be sure there have been dramatic demographic changes in most of our states since 1960. I’ll use Oklahoma as an example to highlight some of these changes.
We have 77 counties in Oklahoma. The population trends in the Oklahoma counties have been dramatic. Cleveland County – Moore and Norman – has grown by a factor of 5 since 1952. Other suburban counties on the fringes of Tulsa and Oklahoma City have tripled their population since 1952 while the population of Tulsa and Oklahoma Counties has doubled.
At the other end of the scale, 34 of the 77 counties in Oklahoma have lost population. Five of these 34 counties have lost half or more of their population since the 1950s. A number of county seat towns have become virtual ghost towns. They don’t even have a McDonalds and the Sonic has been shut down.
What does all of this mean in terms how CP giving is distributed across the churches? The answer is there is not much change. This is a summary of where the churches were located in 1960, and still are located in 2012, which are giving the bulk of CP funds:
[A] Some First Baptist Churches in County Seat towns.
[B] Within 30 miles from the core of Oklahoma City or Tulsa
[C] Within 10 miles of a dozen key cities such as Enid, Ardmore, Lawton, Elk City, Ada, Claremore, Ponca City, Bartlesville, Durant, and Purcell.
I don’t mean to imply that the churches that were leading in CP giving in 1960 are necessarily the exact same churches that are leading in CP giving today.
All I’m saying is that the distribution of CP giving across all of the churches has stayed the same across generations. There has been migration of large churches from neighborhoods close in the downtowns of Oklahoma City and Tulsa to the suburbs but this has not really changed the big picture.
The bottom line is this: Just like in 1960, CP giving is concentrated in a relatively few large churches. It seems to be a “law of physics” that within any large area –such as a state – the invisible hand of market forces creates a situation where the majority of CP gifts come from a relatively few churches – notwithstanding huge demographic shifts across decades.
There are a number of prominent churches –which are also megachurches based on size [membership / attendance] — whose CP gifts are way low considering their size. I’ll address this in the final post of this series.
So, the 80-20 rule governs CP giving as well as work in our churches?
The chart is still misleading. The largest churches these days are MUCH larger than the largest churches were in 1960. For the percentage giving of the highest quintile to have actually declined speaks volumes.
I am leery of such statistics being given because most people do not know how to interpret them. I do not know statistically how to look at the numbers but I believe there is more there than simply saying the percentages are close.
1) The above graph simply shows that the Pareto Principle applies to SBC CP giving as one should expect. I imagine if you looked at any year in SBC history from 1845 to today you will find a similar breakdown.
2) When making such comparisons it is easy to simply subtract percentages and say they are close, but there is more to it than that.
I do not have Oklahoma CP data, but for illustrative purposes consider the SBC CP giving in 2012 of $481,000,000. Compare the dollar amount signified by the percentage of each quintile if that percentage was applied to 2012 dollars. Also consider the ratio each quintile changed compared to its 1960 percentage.
1st Quintile: 1960% = $393,000,000; 2012% = $386,000,000 or $7,000,000 less a change of -1.8% ($7,000,000/$393,000,000).
2nd Quintile: 1960% = $59,450,000; 2012% = $58,200,000 or $1,250,000 less a change of -2.1% ($1,250,000/$59,450,000)
3rd Quintile: 1960% = $20,410,000; 2012% = $24,650,000 or $4,240,000 more, a change of +20% ($4,240,000/$20,410,000).
4th Quintile: 1960% = $7,800,000; 2012% = $10,160,000 or $2,360,000 more, a change of +30% ($2,360,000/$7,800,000).
5th Quintile: 1960% = $1,107,000; 2012% = $2,696,000 or $1,589,000 more, a change of +143% ($1,589,000).
When looked at this way, the top 40% of churches give a lot less money, and the lower 60% of churches give proportionally much more than what they gave in 1960.
William:
We are saying the same thing in a different way. You are pointing out the CP $ in 1960 within a given quintile compared to the CP $ in 2014 IN THAT SAME quintile.
I am looking at the giving for a given quintile compared to all giving across all quintiles.
Basically you are looking at percentage deltas within the quintile comparing 1960 to 2014.
You have shown that size of the giving in the 5th quintile has grown from .23% of all giving in 1960 to .56% of overall giving In 2012. So as you say this quintile has increased giving by (.56 – .23) / .23 = 1.43 or 43%.
You have given an additional dimension to the data. I was looking at the relative size of the quintiles over time. You are looking at the growth (or shrinkage) over time for a given quintile.
I believe your point is that the 1st quintile churches have not increased their giving as much on a percentage basis within their own quintile as the 5th quintile churches. I totally agree. That will be the topic of my next post which will come up next week. As a matter of fact I’ll argue that there is a subset of larger charges that ARE WAY BELOW THE CURVE when it comes to CP giving. I’ll flesh this out in my next post.
You are right Roger. It appears I was responding to a point you are not making. My background is in Engineering/Math, although statistics are not my forte. It does irk me when I see folks citing statistics without relevant interpretation for those statistics (you are in fact, not doing so. As stated I was in error). One of the biggest abuses of such statistics in the modern era is a display or some form of Pareto’s Principle as an argument for imbalance. Examples include the supposed income inequality, the imbalance of taxes paid by the rich, the proportion of people in megachurches, and recently the amount of CP dollars given by the largest churches. It appears my reflex kicked in, and I responded to those previous arguments, which is not the point you were making.
To my point as you stated, 1) The Pareto Principle applies to CP giving which means one should expect the top 20% to give 80% of all gifts. 2) An effect of the Pareto Principle is that even minor proportional changes for the top 20% has major impacts, whereas even major proportional changes for the bottom 60% has little effect on overall gifts (however, we cannot measure the actual impact even two mites might have on the Kingdom of God).
I look forward to more of your insight.
Good work, Roger.
How about 4% of churches give 50% of all CP gifts, nationwide?
http://sbcplodder.blogspot.com/2013/09/just-4-of-sbc-churches-give-50-of-all.html
Link is in the article above, but the 80/20 is about what the figure is across the SBC.
I predict that where this discussion will be going is the old dollars vs. percentages argument. Some will offer a number of dollars if the average percentage went back to above ten as it was 35 years ago.
Frank Page has no magic wand that can cause 47k autonomous churches to act.
SBC Plodder:
I didn’t know about the article you referenced in the link. Thanks.
I hope I’m not opening Pandora’s Box by bringing up these statistics. I’m simply trying to point out some of the financial realities that, for better or worse, describe the landscape.
The overall terrain is this. It is simultaneously true that the “largest”** 20% of our churches contribute about 80% of CP and also that the smaller churches have significantly increased their giving to the CP on a percentage basis over time. Also it is true that a subset of larger churches are trailing behind the rest of the SBC in terms of CP giving relative to their size.
Put another way if the 1st quintile increased CP giving by 43% in the same way that the 5th quintile did then the IMB would not be cutting back personnel. There wouldn’t be so much pressure for the IMB to adopt self-funding models for missionaries.
** By “largest” I mean in terms of Worship Attendance, Sunday School Attendance, membership or CP $ giving — segregating churches by any one of these proxies for “size” is more or less the “same”.
If any of you want the data I’m using for 1960 and 2012 I’ll send it to you on a couple of spreadsheets. This data is more or less “public” since it is up on the BGCO’s website right now. However, it is not trivial to extract it and convert it into some type of machine-readable format.
I don’t claim to be a statistician. I’m a retired software engineer [BSEE / MBA].
A warning about the data I have. The CP giving is audited data so it should accurate across all of the approximately 1400 [1960] or 1580 [2102] churches.
However, the number for the “size” of the church in my data has two problems. First the ACP for 1960 has “membership” (meaning number of members on the roll of the church) while the ACP for 2012 has “worship attendance”. It is a open issue how either of these really relate to the “giving capacity” of a church. Membership can be way off compared to attendance. I chose “worship attendance” when extracting the ACP data for 2012 thinking it was the best indicator for the “size” of the church. The 1960 data did not have any item comparable to “worship” attendance.
The reason I generated the quintiles the way I did is because nothing in these quintiles is dependent of any type of church size or attendance number. I’m only looking at CP$ across the whole population. Or to say this another way, even though my data has some — maybe crude — index of church size in it; at least for the purposes of my histograms I ignore it.
For what its worth, I could sort both my datasets according to “size” (i.e. membership for 1960 and worship attendance for 2012). This might at least give some clue as to whether there are proportionally more “mega churches” now than back a couple of generations ago. I don’t have any hard data — maybe someone else does — that says that there are proportionally more mega-churches now than before.
If I could get the ACP data for the 45K churches in the SBC I could run some stuff and see what the picture is with mega-churches vis a vis the rest of the churches in the convention.
When the going gets tough I don’t use Excel or Access. I put stuff into C# constructs and then setup LINQ queries. Then I plot stuff.
Roger Oklahoma City
Good information Roger. Even though I am not a statistician, I am a mathematician and I like to analyze numbers. It would be interesting to know the membership numbers that go along with this. I am not asking for you to give us that. It might be numbers over load for some but I wonder if 80% of church members or even better church attenders are in that largest quintile. Membership can be misleading.
I guess I often think in term of the individual church member. For example I am from Arkansas, home state of Ronnie Floyd’s super church. Since he came to Arkansas in the late 80s my home church as always given between 10 and 14 percent to the cooperative program. His church, on average has given somewhere between 1 and 5 percent to the cooperative program though our state convention. Therefore when a member of my church puts a dollar in the offering plate 10 to 14 cents goes to missions giving through the cooperative program. At his church it would be 1 to 5 cents. Therefore if I want my money to have an impact of world missions through the cooperative program I would be better off in my little church that has an attendance about 1/7th of his church even though the total giving by his church is more.
This goes back to saying there many ways to look at statistics and use them to prove whatever point you want. However, your data here and on CP and LM giving trends have been very helpful and I am saving them on computer for future use.
Roger, this is very interesting. When I worked with the Baptist churches in Tarrant (Fort Worth) Association the Pareto Principle was at work but there was an interesting twist. In 2011 and 2012 ten of the largest (worship attendance, membership, and giving) decided to pare back or stop contributing to the Association. They had been prominent members of the 20% up to that point. From 2013 on 80% of the resources came from 20% of the churches but it was a different subset of churches most of whom were much smaller than the first subset. Giving dropped by about a third during that shift.
Thomas Law
Norman, OK
That should have been 2001-2002. Then from 2003 on.
Thomas:
Wow!!! The situation that you describe down there in Tarrant County [Ft. Worth] wouldn’t show up on my histograms. I’m going to go ahead and try to see if I can tease out of the Annual Church Profile data I have for Oklahoma the phenomenon you describe. Namely, showing that for some subset of “large” churches their CP giving has significantly decreased even though the Pareto 80/20 rule [80% of CP funding is coming from 20% of churches] is still present. .
To show this I have to have some value for “church size” / “membership” / “giving capacity” that I can use as the independent variable to plot CP$. I’ll be releasing a chart in a couple of days that does this for a point in time [2012]. I guess I need a similar chart for one or two decades earlier. Then I should be able to see whatever is going on with larger churches drifting to lower CP giving.
Extrapolating from your experience then I guess one of the mechanisms that is impinging on the IMB is that larger churches have walked away from their traditional CP giving levels.
Maybe all of this is reinventing the wheel because the drift away from the CP by some large churches is “common knowledge”. But I’d like to quantify this across a population of significant size.
Roger Simpson Oklahoma City
Wow! I wish I knew stuff…
…reading stuff like this hurts my head…and I have a master’s degree! (But I haven’t taken a math class since high school). 🙂
OK, I have my marching orders. I’ve looked back at the BGCO website at the annuals since 1960. I have only found one consistent item in the ACP for those years which I can use as an index of “size” (i.e. “giving power”) of churches. That item is Sunday School Attendance. This item is listed in all ACPs in the annuals from the present time back to 1987. “Worship Attendance” might be a better gauge of a church’s size but the problem is that the definition of the item changed between 2000 and 2012 from “AM Worship Attendance” to “Worship Attendance”. Also prior to about 1995 [I’d have to look at the data again] there is no listing for any item that is “Worship Attendance” [such as generic worship attendance, AM only, AM/PM, or otherwise].
I have extracted the 1987 ACP off the BGCO website as a PDF. Then I sent the PDF to the Adobe cloud and had it converted to a huge and rather chaotic .xlsx Excel File. I’m now trying to whip the .xlsx file into shape. It is interesting to note that Adobe really did a great favor for me. They took that huge PDF — where all the pages in the PDF where basically scanned graphic images AND THEY DID OPTICAL CHARACTER RECOGNITION ON THE WHOLE DOCUMENT and converted about 8000 lines of text [about 2000 lines of which are the ACP and the rest is other stuff in the annual] — with the number of columns per line averaging about 20 — into a ton of rows and columns in an Excel spreadsheet where each cell has a character string — NOT A GRAPHIC IMAGE. Running on Adobe’s cloud this process took about a half an hour. Of course I was sharing the cloud server’s resources with hundreds / thousands of other people. But still that is really one heavy duty OCR application going on.
Once I whip this into shape I’ll run some kind of chart showing inflation adjusted CP giving across time [1987 vs 2012] and across church size. I believe this methodology will be up to the task of confirming or refuting the null hypothesis that “a significant number of large churches” have markedly cut back on CP giving over the last 25 years.
Roger Simpson Oklahoma City OK
A relatively insightful paper on various distribution-based theorem/explanations of observation including the more generalized Pareto distribution:
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/07/03/benfords-law-zipfs-law-and-the-pareto-distribution/
Short version: short of eliminating large churches by fiat, fussing about them borders on silly because they’re an artifact of demographic ability to provide population to support a broad distribution in size of churches.
I think, similarly, that hand-wringing over faith or lack thereof measured by any measurement of giving seems more likely to embarrass God than man unless God really is a whimsical tyrant who chooses to not influence directly the behavior of any person. This position suggests ALL giving is voluntary and therefore people and only people are responsible for providing resources (in spite of biblical exhortation to pray to the Lord of the Harvest.)
I think the situation of giving is concerning but mainly with respect to how it impacts morale. Vacillating giving requires underspending if the desire is to avoid volatility or the equivalent of binge and purge hiring if spend follows income.
That last sentence takes us to the center of the kerfuffle. Giving is up in absolute terms but declining in purchase power (US-based) terms. Population in churches is both suspected and observed to be relatively flat. The two facts are largely self-reinforcing.
The responses are predictable: emphasize evangelism and giving. That has changed the basic dynamics in no observable way. So the natural instinct is to add emotional appeals to try and convince observers of our sincerity.
How about this instead: pray about the problem then do what the Father leads YOU to do and accept that he is in control of that which we cannot influence??
And if he leads you to finger wag at others because you can’t accept he truly is sovereign? That’s the real faith crisis.
And, no, this isn’t pointed at the original post not at any single commenter. Probably just an expression of my own frustration with not seeing God’s invisible hand at work.