Saturday, March 7, 1998

Giving 10 percent of your income to the church

By JOE DEW / Raleigh News & Observer

Collection plates might be full, but churchgoers who give 10 percent of their income to the church are rare.

Roderick Harris, who works as a metal fabricator in Durham, N.C., says it's a 10-year habit, one he never thinks twice about keeping. He says he's simply doing what his Bible tells him to do.

"It's not hard," Harris, 35, says. "When you give, God gives back to you. God is not a debtor."

In the parlance of the church, Harris doesn't just give, he tithes. He pares 10 percent of the gross from each paycheck that he and his wife, Rolesha, bring home and puts it in the collection plate at the Christian Faith Center church in Creedmoor.

He's sure most of the faithful who join him there each Sunday do the same.

But church scholars and researchers say most churchgoers don't tithe. Actually, very few people do, they say, regardless of the church they attend, the doctrine they espouse or the denomination to which they may be linked.

What's more, scholars and researchers say, although church treasuries are larger than ever before, individual members have been putting a smaller percentage of their personal incomes in the collection plate for the past three decades.

"Year after year, it just keeps going down," says Sylvia Ronsvalle, executive vice president of the Empty Tomb, a Christian research organization in Champaign, Ill.

It's a trend clergymen are reticent to preach about or even to discuss with their parishioners because money has such a ticklish spiritual dimension. The way we spend it, the way we save it, the way we share it, Ronsvalle says, defines who we are and what we believe.

"Money is, perhaps, the best thermometer we have to indicate our spiritual condition and where our loyalties lie," she says.

The Bible contains quite a few references to tithing Ñ giving one 10th of everything to the church Ñ but the verse most often cited is Malachi 3:10: " 'Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in My house, and test Me now in this,' says the Lord of hosts, 'if I will not open for you the windows of heaven and pour out for you a blessing until there is no more need.' "

Some Christians interpret that as a promise, an insurance policy of sorts, in which they're guaranteed cash back for the tithe they give in church. Others interpret it to mean the blessings to come may be money, health, a sense of peace.

Dean Hoge, a professor of sociology at Catholic University of America who has studied church giving, says the issue of the tithe often turns into a simple question for many: Does God reward givers?

Many evangelicals, Assemblies of God and Baptist churches among them, tend to believe God does reward givers. They often see the tithe as paying their dues, Hoge says.

Other, often less traditional churches, he says, don't see God as rewarding givers. They might select as their example, Job, a faithful follower of God whose life became a shambles.

"In many cases, it is simply a matter of trust and rapport" between churchgoer and pastor, Hoge says.

In 1996, he and three colleagues published a comprehensive study of American habits as they pertain to church giving. They relied on empirical data supplied by churches as well as meticulous surveys of clergymen and their members.

"It's true, not too many people tithe now," Hoge says. "A majority of people don't."

About 73 percent of Assemblies of God members told Hoge's team they tithe, and 44 percent of Baptists said they do. After, that the numbers fall off dramatically with just 4 percent of Catholics, for instance, saying they tithe.

Hoge and his colleagues also found five overarching motivations for church giving of any kind. They call them simply "The Big Five" and they include: high family income, a high level of involvement in the church, a conservative theology, planning one's giving by the year and smaller congregations.

While evangelicals typically give more to their churches than other denominations, they rank behind Catholic, Lutheran and Presbyterian churches in gifts to other charities, according to Hoge.

Many pastors say charitable giving of any kind can be considered a part of someone's tithe. Others say anything less than 10 percent, for the church, is not a true tithe.

"I just wouldn't be that strict on it," says Rev. David Hailey, pastor at Hayes Barton Baptist Church in Raleigh., N.C. "I recognize some people, some pastors and teachers who might say, 'That is not tithing at all. It all has to go to the local church.'

"I would not find fault. Each person has to determine that within his or her own heart."

Hailey says people tend to obsess over money Ñ no matter how much they have Ñ and what God expects them to do with it.

"I don't care if you make $10,000 or $100,000 a year, we think about money a good bit," he says. "The way we relate to God and the way we relate to money, those two things are interrelated."

Ronsvalle, of the Empty Tomb, says people have spent the past 30 years spending pay raises and growing wealth on everything but the church.

She says that as Americans moved into the 1950s, put World War II behind them, and cranked up the baby boom, affluence spread in ways few people had ever dreamed.

And Americans found plenty to buy: cars, leisure pursuits, newer and bigger houses, color televisions, dishwashers. Everybody, it seems, had a pitch; everybody that is, except the local church.

"It's a kind of crisis of vision and communication," Ronsvalle says. "The church did not have a positive agenda for this affluence. ... Meanwhile, people were being educated about all the other uses of their income."

Over the past three decades, for instance, per capita spending on cars, on houses, on vacations and on clothes has increased significantly. Ronsvalle likes to cite the 463 percent growth in interest payments on credit card debt, between 1975 to 1991, as an example of how people's thinking about money changed.

"Our culture is geared to what is in our face and what is titillating us," says Tim Fretz, administrator of the Ministry of Money, a nonprofit group in Washington, that organizes workshops for people who want to use faith to manage their money.

"We live in a consumer culture in which we're encouraged to value ourselves and devalue others based not on what we give, but we own, consume and spend," Fretz says.

He and others find that the closer a person feels to his church, the more likely he is to donate a substantial portion of his money.

That becomes important, church leaders say, because people may hear a call to tithe and decide the church is simply looking out for its own interests.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)