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When Bowser pokes a cold, wet nose under my arm to signal it's time to pet him, the nose tells me he's healthy. When the nurse announces "120 over 80" for my blood pressure, I know I'm healthy. But when my church treasurer flings a file of figures across the table in his report, how do I know if my church is financially healthy?

What are some vital signs of churches that are fiscally fit?

No one set of statistical canons will measure the fiscal fitness of every church. For every gauge, there's a thriving church mocking its credibility. God makes each church unique.

Churches also vary greatly by denomination, locale, membership demographics, era of church life, size, and other factors. And statistics are notoriously malleable and fallible. As one blunt writer has said, "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics!"

So, what's left?

General indicators—not bold, universal, unassailable facts. Generally speaking, though, certain factors point toward church fiscal health, and others indicate possible concern.

Church-expert Lyle Schaller provides a simple benchmark for annual contributions. He writes in The Interventionist: "A useful beginning point is to multiply the average worship attendance times $1,000." If my church has 125 attenders on an average Sunday, and annual giving is $125,000, we're in the ballpark.

Another way to look at the same figures is to multiply $20 per head in worship for any given week. If my church averages two hundred in attendance, it should be receiving about $4,000 a week. Of course such figures need to be adjusted for churches in particularly wealthy or poverty-stricken areas, for especially small or large churches, for new church plants—well, for just about any church, because there is no typical church.

"The 'price' of church is rising faster than the cost of a movie ticket," notes Schaller. "It used to be the per capita 'cost' of church was close to the cost of going to a movie. Now it's closer to the expense of going to a professional sporting event—about $20." Of course, no church charges attenders their proportion of the weekly church expenses ("Marge, I've only got two twenties on me. We can't afford to bring Billy to church this week!"). But Schaller's analysis does show the comparative costs of "doing church."

Another way to look at annual giving is to compare this year's receipts per attender to 1968's figures. Between 1968 and now, according to Schaller, the Consumer Price Index went up roughly 400 percent, and personal income rose even more. So if my church received an average of $200 per attender per year in 1968, and now it receives an average of $900, we're ahead!

A third way to look at annual receipts is comparing them with total household income. What percentage of members' income is being given to the church?

A little sleuthing at the local planning agency will probably produce a figure for average household income. Multiply that by the number of households in the congregation (and adjust a little for the comparative wealth of a given church), and this approximates church members' total earnings.

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