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,… Read more »
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… Read more »
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… Read more »
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… Read more »
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.… Read more »
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… Read more »
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… Read more »
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”… Read more »
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… Read more »
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… Read more »