How does our church stack up financially?

A Review of Church Financial Information in Canada (June 1, 2023)

As every Canadian charity administrator knows, their organization must submit an annual Registered Charities Information Return to the federal government summarizing key operational and financial information for the year.  This report is commonly referred to by its form number: T3010.  Much of the information reported is considered public information, and the Charities Directorate of the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) provides access to this information on a charity-by-charity basis through its web portal1.

However, considering the large number of churches in Canada, comparing your church of interest to others can be an onerous job.  Luckily, the government provides data for all registered charities in a series of data files available through its Open Government Portal.2  I accessed and worked with data for 2019 to provide key information which may be of some use in making such comparisons.

First, some high-level information.  The number of charities listed for 2019 totalled 83,520.  When all of the charities which contain the word ‘church’ in their name were separated, this list totalled 13,962.  Thus, 17% of all registered charities in Canada are churches.

Now for the financials.  First, I think we should take a brief diversion into rudimentary statistics theory.  The two figures that I will be summarizing are statistical mean and median.  Feel free to skip the next three paragraphs if you are already knowledgeable in this area. 

Means are easy to understand as it is just another word for average.  To get a mean, total a list of numbers and divide by the number of items in the list.  Means are useful when the numbers are closely grouped in value.  If the group of numbers are not, statistical means can be misleading.  This is best shown by way of example.  

Imagine there is a small business employing five staff members.  If their salaries were, say: $35,000; $37,000; $40,000; $45,000 and $48,000, the mean salary of $41,000 is useful information that conveys a sense of salary levels at the business.  Now imagine the case where the last figure was for the business owner.  The business is very profitable and she decides to take out the profit in the form of a salary of $200,000.  The mean salary for the business is now $71,400.  Telling people this number gives very little real information on salary levels at the business and can be very misleading.

In such cases, statisticians calculate medians.  Simply put, you get the median by sorting all of the numbers from smallest to largest, and then selecting the middle number.  In the imaginary case above, the median will be $40,000 in both scenarios provided above (i.e., the middle salary in each list).  The skewing effect of the owner’s high salary is negated.

I provide both means and medians in the analysis below, with the understanding that the median figures will help negate the effect that mega-churches have on the information provided.  Further, to get more detailed financial information, I focused on only churches which prepared the T3010’s Schedule 6, required for charities having revenues of greater than $100,000.  This is because there is insufficient financial information provided by the smaller churches to enable a detailed analysis.  Accordingly, the following analysis uses data from 7,697 churches in Canada.