TITHING Fiscal support of churches declines

The commitment of the faithful to tithing is waning.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
Jean and Jim Darrell are a Los Angeles couple of modest means who live frugally by necessity.
He works part time for an internist, doing office work, and she augments the family income by house-sitting and taking care of a friend's pets. They drive a 1989 Mazda and seldom go out to eat.
Yet they've been giving one-tenth of their gross income to their church for the past 20 years -- even when Jim Darrell was laid off.
"Leaping out in faith" to commit 10 percent of their earnings ahead of time has been "an adventure," they concede. But, they say, they have always managed.
"God always provides," says Jim Darrell, who, with his wife, is a longtime member of the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood. "Nothing extra -- just the essentials, which is all we need."
But people such as the Darrells -- those who hew to the biblical mandate of tithing -- are increasingly rare, according to surveys and church records of contributions.
Churches and nonprofit Christian ministries across the United States have been reporting a significant decline in financial support in the past year and a half.
Some attribute the change to competition for charitable dollars since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks; others blame the poor economy.
Consistent tithers are a small group -- about 3 percent of American adults last year, according to a recent study. And the proportion of tithers appears to be dropping, the survey indicates.
In 2001, 8 percent of adults surveyed reported that they tithed, according to the poll of 1,010 adults by the Oxnard, Calif.-based Barna Research Group.
Surveys
The independent marketing research firm has tracked cultural trends related to beliefs, values, attitudes and behaviors since 1984.
Even among born-again Christians, just 6 percent tithed last year, compared with 14 percent in 2001, the survey shows.
Among evangelicals -- defined for the survey as people who believe they have a personal responsibility to share their religious beliefs about Jesus with non-Christians -- 9 percent tithed, according to the survey.
Pollster George Barna attributes the decline in the number of people tithing to the soft economy, the threat of terrorism, the scandals involving Catholic priests and long-term demographic shifts.
"We are losing many of the people who have a habit of tithing," he says, "while the proportion of homes headed by younger adults, who have never tithed and don't plan to, is growing."
According to Barna's survey, people older than 55 are far more likely to tithe than younger people. Tithing has more typically been a significant tenet of Protestant than of Catholic traditions.
Long process
For Jeff Traintime, a Universal Music Sales Division executive, working up to tithing was a 10-year process.
"I was the kind of a person who thought that it was a big deal if I dropped $5 on the plate at church on Sunday," Traintime says. But in the 1980s, when he returned to the church after a 20-year hiatus, he began to think differently.
After he and his wife, Jana Loner, talked it over, they pledged 2 percent. When that worked out, they upped it to 3 percent the following year, until they finally reached 10 percent a decade later.
"It was a step-by-step process of learning that we could do it, and we would be taken care of even though we didn't have that money in our pockets anymore," Traintime says.
He still has no earthly explanation for what happened to him within three months after making the pledge.
"This may seem a little too spooky for a newspaper, but ... I suddenly got the biggest raise I'd ever had," he recalls.
The bonus exceeded the sum he had committed. "I've never quite gotten over the astonishment of that."
The Rev. Ken Fong, senior pastor of the predominantly Asian-American Evergreen Baptist Church of Los Angeles, says the traditional way of urging congregants to tithe -- "because it's the right thing to do" -- won't persuade the younger generation.
"When you look at the generational shift, they don't give to support a budget or an institution," he says. "But, at the same time, they say, 'I want my life to count for something.'"
So, churches need to take a different tack by making congregants "investors" in their ministries, he says.