Who gives two cents for missions?

We do, to our shame | Gene Edward Veith

Of every dollar given to a Protestant church, the average amount that goes to overseas missions is two cents. In contrast, of every dollar Antioch Presbyterian Church in Chonju, Korea, takes in, 70 cents goes to missions.

For 15 years, the mission research and advocacy organization Empty Tomb, of Champaign, Ill., has analyzed the contributions and spending patterns of American churches. The latest report, "The State of Church Giving through 2003" (available at emptytomb.org), crunches the numbers for 41 Protestant denominations and surveys giving trends going back almost a century. In doing so, the study gives a not-too-flattering snapshot of the priorities of American Christians today.

The study also gives membership data. We learn, for example, that the "mainline" denominations of liberal Protestantism—defined in this study as those belonging to the National Council of Churches (NCC)—are not mainline anymore. In 1968, those denominations had as members 13.2 percent of the country's population (26,508,288 total members). By 2003, that percentage shrank to only 6.8 percent. Within those 35 years, as the U.S. population grew 45 percent, churches affiliated with the NCC (with nearly 20 million members) declined as a percentage of the population by nearly half.