Despite Economic Downtown, Churches Stand Strong

Chris Dell
cdell@smu.edu

The dreaded nine-letter word that slammed the investments American individuals and bottom lines of businesses in the last couple years wasn’t able to pin down perhaps its largest foe of all.

Indeed, the big, bad recession that slayed corporate giants like Lehman Brothers, General Motors and Merrill Lynch couldn’t blow down the doors of America’s oldest institution: the church.

In a November 2009 survey by Nashville-based LifeWay Research, more than two-thirds of pastors reported giving was either steady or had increased between 2008 and 2009. Some churches, presumably those in harder-hit areas like California and the East Coast, had taken more significant thumps, but many churches are still alive and healthy. The result is surprising, considering churches are funded almost entirely by member giving, which often is tied to income level.

One of the churches to escape the recession mostly unscathed was Central Christian Church in Enid, Okla. Senior pastor John McLemore said the nearly 116-year-old institution finished in the black in 2009.

McLemore, who has been at Central Christian Church for about a decade, said the members’ high priority on giving helped the church avoid the realization of its worst fears in a volatile economy. He said many people sacrificed family vacations and luxury spending, instead of cutting their pledges.

“I would say we were minimally impacted,” said McLemore. “We have some really faithful givers, a lot of them being on fixed income. They’re not able to increase their pledge year after year after year, but they’re still very faithful in giving.”

Central’s members are not needles in a haystack when it comes to recession resiliency. According to February 2008 research done by Empty Tomb, Inc., a Christian research and service organization, church contributions have mostly held steady during economic downturns. Since 1968, there have been 10 years with at least one month of economic contraction, and church giving per the average member declined in only three of those years.

According to a recent article by LifeWay, 2009 likely will join the list of down years, but most churches escaped catastrophe.

Central’s finance chairperson, David Eck, estimated the recession trimmed about five percent to seven percent off the church’s receipts — actual realized income at the end of the year. That’s not bad considering the stock market dropped nearly 39 percent in 2008 and hit a 12-year low last March. Also, unemployment nearly doubled in those two years.

Eck emphasized the importance of tallying actual receipts instead of simply presuming promised contributions will become actual income. The church receives its pledges late in the year, then formulates the next year’s budget based on those figures, but it may not end up getting all that was promised. For example, the church planned for $512,000 in pledges in 2008 but received about $11,000 less than that. Eck is estimating Central will receive $475,000 in pledges in 2010 after budgeting for only $450,000 in 2009.

McLemore and Eck both are optimistic that the church will experience an uptick in receipts this year primarily because of a successful giving campaign completed in November. Instead of phoning congregation members and asking for pledges, McLemore decided to formulate a new system in which people experienced personal contact from friends and had 24 hours to think and pray about how much of their income they could promise the church.

The campaign was nicknamed “Pony Express”, and saddlebags with pledge cards and church information were sent out on several neighborhood routes. When one family decided how much they could give in 2010, they filled out the card and stuck it in a separate pouch. Then they passed the bag to another family, which often lived nearby.

The new approach resulted in a 21-percent increase in the number of people committed to pledge in 2010. There now are 238 people signed up to give, according to Eck, and 23 of them had never pledged money to Central.

“That was one of the biggest successes we’ve had in a long time,” said McLemore. “The real genius of it is that every family in the church has personal contacts from whom they received the Pony Express bag. And they responded in the privacy of their own home.”

Even with the successful campaign, McLemore said the church still has more issues to consider.

He estimated most of the church’s pledges come from members 50 and older, which has presented not only a fixed-income problem, but also the question of how much longer certain members can attend the church before they die or move to assisted living. In other words, the primary threat for Central is not a market recession, but a people recession. When membership drops, the church suffers much more than when the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummets.

“Each era has its own challenges, but I’m not keenly aware of the church being terribly impacted either to the positive or the negative as a result of economy,” said McLemore. “In some churches, that would very much be the case. At least in my experience, I haven’t seen that. The decline in the total number of people participating has a greater impact.”

McLemore said the church’s congregation has shrunk in the last decade from about 380 to 320. However, he said membership slightly increased in 2009.