Why discuss per person giving in a Church Growth series? How do these metrics and topics relate to church salaries?
Everything is interrelated
Series Overview
Learn more about how staffing and compensation changes as churches grow. And how your church can adapt.
- Average Per Person Giving in the Church
- Don’t Expect Exponential: Churches and Salaries Grow Logarithmically
- How Much Does the Average Church Spend on Payroll?
- How Many Staff Members Should Your Church Have?
- Three Key Complexity Hurdles That Churches Face
Each of the metrics discussed in this series captures the relationship of one or more fundamental aspects of a church—specifically as they relate to staffing and compensation.
There are four cornerstone metrics that quantify the organizational size of a church—in terms of finances, people, and staff.
- Total budget, as ChurchSalary uses the term, quantifies the total annual operating budget of a church (minus capital campaigns, pre-K, daycare, private schools, etc.).
- Attendance quantifies the average total attendance, including children.
- Payroll budget quantifies the total amount of money set aside on an annual basis to cover staffing expenses (benefits, salaries, taxes, etc.).
- FTE staff quantifies the number of full-time equivalent staff employed by the church.
The metrics discussed in this series are nothing more than the ratio between these four cornerstone metrics.
- Per person budget or giving captures the relationship of total budget to attendance.
- Payroll percentage reflects the relationship of total budget to payroll budget.
- Average employment cost quantifies the amount of money that a church spends every year, on average, for a full-time employee (including salary and benefits).
- Staffing ratio quantifies the number of ratio of attendance to FTE staff as "attendees per 1 FTE."
- Per person payroll budget represents the amount of money, on average every year, that a church decides to spend on a per person basis for staffing expenses.
The model below captures how these four cornerstone metrics—total budget, payroll budget, attendance, and staff size (FTE)—relate to one another in terms of these five ratios—per person giving, payroll percentage, per person payroll budget, and average employment cost.
[insert staffing curve explanation here]
The key insight behind this model is that the staffing ratio of a church is inversely correlated to their per person budget (or per person giving). More affluent churches tend to spend their "extra money" on hiring more staff relative to their size, rather than on raising wages for their existing employees. And conversely, churches with lower giving levels and a lower per person budget simply cannot afford to hire as many staff members and are forced to operate on a higher staffing ratio (more attendees for every 1 FTE staff).
The ceiling that we have observed so far for staffing ratio is somewhere between 120 and 150 to 1. Churches with a staffing ratio above this number simply cannot exist in modern America. Paid staff cannot organize enough volunteers and personally care for congregants at a church with a staffing ratio this high.
On the other end of the spectrum, the lowest staffing ratio we have observed is in the teens—something like 10 to 1. The normal floor is around 28:1. It simply does not make much sense for a church to pay for 1 full-time staff member to care for fewer than 25–28 people as this is generally the of two small groups. This is the extremely challenging organizational structure that church plants must navigate—paying for a staff member to care for such a small group requires a per person giving level of at least $5,277. For a family of 3, this is something like $15,830 a year. As a 10% tithe, this small family of 3 people would need a household income of $159,000. These families certainly exist but they are subsegment of middle class churches. Most modern American churches simply don't have enough wealthy people in attendance to sustain this staffing level on tithing alone. All of the churches that ChurchSalary observes at this elite level are relying heavily on grants, endowments, and extra sources of income.
The Staff & Giving Analyzer
To help churches apply these insights and the Staffing Curve in particular to their church, we have created an app called The Staff & Giving Analyzer.
The Analyzer app compares the four cornerstone metrics of your church and the four ratios between them against nationwide trends. And, more importantly, it helps your church game out different growth and organizational changes.
- What do we need to change if we want to hire a full-time staff member?
- Is our church over- or understaffed? Why?
- Are we paying more or less than the nationwide average for our staff?
- How are our giving levels preventing us from hiring more staff? And forcing us to rely so heavily on volunteers?
- How can we optimize the organizational structure of our church?