I always look forward to reviewing The Unstuck Church Report each quarter. In the report, you'll find a comparison of church trends based on survey responses from actual church leaders, just like you.
These reports were analyzed and compiled by Tony Morgan. The Q3 2024 Report was published not long before his passing. He leaves a legacy of a love for the local church, expressed so beautifully in an article by The Unstuck Group.
The report for Q3 2024 focuses on key differences in behavior between churches that are experiencing growth and those that are not.
Churches should aim to hire, value, and retain the best employees. On pages 7 and 8 of the report, we saw an interesting correlation between two data points.
Page 8
Page 7
We can deduce the following:
While an appropriate percentage of the budget is allocated to staff salaries, the number of staff members being hired exceeds the recommended ratio. As a result, the overall compensation of staff salaries is driven down. Consequently, each staff member is receiving significantly less compensation than they deserve. The trend continues tracking the wrong way year over year. Churches are hiring more people but paying them less. Churches should aim to value, utilize, and retain their employees.
Check out our free Staffing Budget Resource and our article about Managing Church Finances in a Recession
We learn on Page 2 of the report that:
This shows us that declining churches are paying their staff members a little bit more, but they have a lot more people on staff than a growing church, which is stressing their financial stability. (A growing church can mean a lot of different things and doesn't necessarily mean a healthy church).
On Page 2 of The Unstuck Church Report, you can see the differences between growing churches and declining churches.
The report shares the finding that "The weekly per capita giving in declining churches is 20% higher than that of growing churches." This sounds positive at first glance.
If a church brings in $2 million every year, but their attendance is going down; then the church must take immediate action.
On Page 8, Joe Park of Horizons Stewardship makes an incredible point saying that churches often miss per capita giving going up in a declining church as a warning sign and instead, represent this as health. Churches in this case should quickly address their declining attendance and other changes.
Giving cannot be your only metric for measuring health and growth in your congregation.
Often, older members are highly consistent with their giving. However, as they age, they either cannot keep up with the same level of giving because of financial constraints or they pass away.
A church needs to replace those givers with younger members and encourage consistency in the discipleship of their giving. The difficulty with younger generations may be their need to understand the 'value' of their giving (where is it going) while older generations view tithing and regular giving as integral to their identity
Churches should focus on the giving of the younger generations in the next ten to fifteen years as the Boomer generation increases in age.
Our challenge to church leaders is - what happens when these older members are gone?
On Page 9, The Unstuck Church Report notes that on average, churches have more than six months in cash reserves.
The Unstuck Group and Church Central Office agree that two to three months in cash reserves is sufficient and beyond 6 months is excessive, (unless you have specific reason, like an older property that may require lots of upkeep).
Churches may feel that it took a long time for them to reach a positive and healthy state. At some point though, enough cash reserves are enough (20-25 weeks operating cash). There just isnโt a reason to have profit at the end of the year.
If your church has 6 months in cash reserves, we suggest changing your position. Donโt hold reserves in fear, and instead use the funds that come in strategically to bring hope, build disciples, support their community, and utilize your entire budget for ministry, living out the mission of the church!
In this post, we walked through just three of the dozens of data points in this quarter's report. We hope you'll download the full PDF from the Unstuck Group, and dig in deeper.
Did we miss anything that interests you? We'd love to hear from you!
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