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What kind of money do the mega-churches burn through?

A review of Financial Data from the Largest Churches in Canada (June 1, 2023)

So, what constitutes a mega-church? Since I am working with T3010 figures, my definition will necessarily focus on money. More specifically, I have chosen gross revenues in 2019 as my measure for this analysis.

However, when you examine the highest revenue earners you see many national associations of churches, mostly mainstream ones. These do not qualify to be called a mega-church as most are not really a church at all; just an association of many churches. To do my analysis I focused on all entities earning over five million dollars per year and only selected those which have a name suggestive of a stand-alone church or campus of churches. This resulted in a list of 44 churches with a span of annual gross revenue from around $5 million to $27 million.

Below is my analysis, identical in format to the one I prepared in a previous article for the 7,697 entities having church in their name.

The only real value in having these figures for mega-churches is to compare them to values relating to all churches. For this analysis I will focus just on medians.

The percentage of revenues from tax-receipted gifts is almost identical. However, mega-churches seem to receive much more income from government grants as a percentage of total income. On the surface, this seems to be the opposite of what one would expect as they are, by definition, the ‘rich’ churches. If you look at the first table in this article, you will see the mean/average values indicate a similar disparity: 41.7% versus 15.1%.

A closer look at the mega-churches shows that this figure is heavily impacted by 5 churches out of the 44 which received between $2.1 million and $4.4 million from the three levels of government, and one other church which received a whopping $17.7 million. (Note that these figures are pre-Covid, so they are not due to any form of Covid grants.)

The one receiving the highest amount particularly stands out as it is way beyond the other five. I looked into this church a bit deeper. A scan of their 2019 T3010 information tells us that they employed 214 full-time and 229 part-time workers during that year. A review of its website shows that it is heavily involved in programs relating to food security, shelter and housing, education and skill development, and early learning. Although the website does not say as much, I expect they are operating some large social programs in partnership with various governments, and accordingly are funded for them. I expect this is similar for some of the other mega-churches, but I can’t be sure.

The only two expense figures that are notable to me relate to occupancy costs and salaries. The occupancy cost median is lower for mega-churches, which is likely due to economy-of-scale, as described in a previous article. The salary level, however, is about 10% higher and thus bucking the economy-of-scale trend. A look at salary scale information in their T3010 shows that they had eight people earning between $80,000 and $119,999, one between $120,000 and $159,999, and one between $160,000 and $199,999. As high as these may seem, they are likely related to the social programs operated by this church, and probably are not out of line with market salary rates for an organization this large (e.g., in comparison to senior government salary rates).

Further, note that they have no truly exorbitant salaries, as occasionally reported for some American mega-churches. I reviewed similar data for the other 43 mega-churches and found only one position inside a higher bracket; namely the $200,000 to $249,999 one.