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Local church giving drops
April, 2002
Nearly 150 Massachusetts Conference churches gave less to Our Church’s Wider Mission Basic Support in 2001 than they did in 2000, meaning a drop in income at both the Conference and national settings of the United Church of Christ.
See chart depicting 10 years of giving to OCWM Basic Support
> Comment on this article through our Discussion Forum According to pre-audit figures, Basic Support came in at $2,240,519 – a 2.3 percent decline from contributions in 2000. This marked the first time total OCWM Basic Support contributions have dropped since 1995.
That figure was also significantly less then the minimum goal of $2,385,500 set by last year’s Annual Meeting.
Just over 100 churches increased their OCWM Basic Support contributions.
Meredith Hutchison, Associate Conference Minister for Stewardship and Financial Development, said there are a number of factors at work in the decrease.
“Many churches were impacted by the downturn and uncertainly of the economy,” she said. “We have several communities where job cuts severely impacted giving to the churches.”
But what appears to be having even more of an effect, she said, is a change in the way people are choosing to contribute to charity. More and more, people are choosing to give to programs where they can see direct results, rather than to something like OCWM.
“OCWM’s reach is broad and deep, but sometimes out of sight – and therefore, out of mind – of some of the people in our pews,” said Conference Minister and President Nancy S. Taylor.
Taylor cited the example of one local church that wanted to give money directly to a particular missionary and not to OCWM. “The church failed to take into account the infrastructure needed to provide our missionaries with health insurance, pensions and other vital benefits and resources without which they could not function in the mission field.”
This change in giving patterns is coupled with an apparent lack of denominational loyalty among some church members.
“Our Church’s Wider Mission Basic Support is built on a model that relies on trust and loyalty. With the changing faces of our congregations, where many of our new members come from traditions outside of the United Church of Christ, or from no faith tradition, that which used to work is now being challenged,” Hutchison said.
“The challenge before us as a Conference and as a denomination is to take these motivations into account, while building denominational identity, and working to garner trust and loyalty once again,” she said.
Fellowship Dues, a per-member contribution that churches pay through their Associations, also dropped in 2001. Churches paid $774,001 in Dues in 2001, down from $780,718 in 2000.
All in all, Conference income from local churches came in approximately $46,000 below budget, and the amount of OCWM Basic Support forwarded to the national setting of the church was $59,000 below budget.
Despite the decrease in contributions, the Conference was still able to end the year in the black, due to higher then expected income from other areas, said Dawn Hammond, Associate Conference Minister for Policy and Finance.
Hammond said that net income from Pilgrim Day Camp and the other conference facilities was up, and that revenue from program fees was higher then expected, which offset spending on programming. Also, the part-time Planned Giving Director job was vacant for a portion of the year.
According to pre-audit figures, the Conference ended the year with a $58,809 surplus. The Board of Directors voted to forward $25,000 of that to the national setting of the UCC, to partially compensate for the OCWM Basic Support shortfall. The rest was added to the general fund, to act as an operating reserve – a standard practice for non-profit organizations, Hammond said.
Due to concern about the drop in local church support, the Board of Directors cut $51,000 from the 2002 program budget.
Unlike in previous years, however, the Board did not scale back salary increases for Conference staff. Last year’s Annual Meeting voted a $3 per person increase in Fellowship Dues for 2002, to fund salary increases of between 12 and 23½ percent. Those increases were enacted to compensate for many years when increases either were nonexistent or lagged behind cost of living increases, and to bring Conference salaries up to competitive levels.
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