Giving to Churches Increases Slightly
Americans are giving slightly more money to their churches, and several denominations have steadied declining membership rolls, according to figures released Friday by the National Council of Churches.
In the council’s 2001 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, the most comprehensive gathering of church statistics, the Roman Catholic Church continues to lead with 62 million members, four times larger than the second-largest church, the 15.8-million-member Southern Baptist Convention.
Several Protestant denominations continue to lose members, but the rate of decline has leveled off and grown into a more natural pattern of gains and losses, said yearbook editor and council Deputy General Secretary Eileen Lindner.
The bulk of churches saw membership gains or losses within a margin of about 1%, down from losses as high as 4% a decade ago. Catholics saw a 0.6% increase, and Southern Baptists grew by 0.7%. The highest growth was recorded by a Pentecostal denomination, the Assemblies of God, which grew 1.9%.
Church giving in 1999 was $26.9 billion, up from $26.2 billion in 1998. Of the $26.9 billion, nearly $4.2 billion went to benevolences.
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