Last month I referred to a new guide Giving for Life - Encouraging Generosity in Your Parish. This guide has been commended by General Synod to parishes for prayerful discussion and action. Hopefully every parish will have received copies of the guide and an accompanying leaflet so can now take this forward.
General Synod has challenged church members to assess annually their financial giving as a proportion of income, and to take as an initial target 5 per cent of after-tax income. That is our giving to our Church should be proportionate to our income. How well does each of us measure up to that principle and the 5% target?
Last month I referred also to a survey conducted in 2002/3 in various deaneries and parishes. An optional question had invited respondents to indicate the percentage of disposable income they gave to their church. 3,184 members had answered the question and a chart showed that very few members gave at the average rate of around 3%; the highest number gave at 1% or less and the next highest number at over 5%. This strongly underlined the need for differentiated messages to church members.
It is instructive to analyse this data further by grouping the responses according to whether the respondents had below or above average incomes. These two groups had annual disposable incomes below £10,000 (1665 respondents) or above £15,000 (950 respondents).
.png)
The results for each group are illustrated in the chart which gives the percentage of each group giving at each level. This suggests that members in the lower income group are more likely to be giving a larger percentage of their income than those in the higher income group. Indeed 44% of the lower income group are giving at rate of 4% or more compared with 39% in the higher income group. The differences appear to be particularly marked in the 1% or less and 5% giving categories. Does this result provide food for thought as we each take another step along the journey of generosity?
Canon Don Cardy
22nd October 2009