March 5, 2008 Silver Spring, Maryland, United States…Elizabeth Lechleitner/ANN
Yen, euros, rubles and francs — the currencies members of the global Seventh-day Adventist Church use to return their tithes and offerings vary as widely as do their lifestyles and the financial footing of their respective countries.
All that incongruity begs for an evenhanded means to compare stewardship among church members and peg giving trends from country to country. Adventist pastor and businessman Claude Richli's third Global Tithe Index report, released this month, uses what he calls an “objective yardstick” to measure faithfulness and trace several positive developments in giving.
Here's how it works. By comparing each country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita with tithe per capita — or how much the average Adventist returns in tithe every year — the GTI formula accounts for currency exchanges and “huge economic disparities” among countries to indicate where the church is best supported, Richli says. A GTI ratio close to 1 suggests a country's members are by and large faithful.
Richli, who now directs marketing for the church's flagship journal, the Adventist Review, developed the formula in 2003 during his stint as associate executive secretary for the church's then newly-formed East-Central Africa region. There, promoting financial self-sufficiency in fledgling areas of the church became one of his primary concerns.
“I hadn't seen anything that levels the playing field before, and that's really the reason why I started doing these reports,” Richli says of his first GTI report, completed in 2004. That report, and the two that have followed, are based on the church's annual Statistical Report and figures from the United States' Central Intelligence Agency Factbook.
While not yet an official church document, the report is a valuable resource for comparing levels of giving worldwide, says Gerry Karst, chair of the church's Use of Tithe Study Commission and a world church vice president. “Are people sacrificing at the same level? Are [they] giving at the same level? You can make those comparisons,” he says.
Richli singles out statistics from Africa as one of the report's most notable trends. In many African countries long dogged by corrupt governments and hyperinflation, the church has found securing an economic toehold difficult. This year's figures suggest the situation is improving. Also positive are the figures from former communist countries, some of which are now lockstep with affluent Western countries, Richli says.
Between 2005 and 2006, global tithe returns increased 8.3 percent, and discounting the church's North American region, the jump was even more dramatic: 17.4 percent. “Certainly, the loss of value of the U.S. dollar against other currencies explains part of these changes, but in the case of Brazil, we have real improvement,” Richli says — despite the dollar losing 12 percent against Brazil's real, overall tithes grew by 25 percent. As the church's second largest contributor, growth in Brazil is particularly encouraging and, he says, suggests a broader “positive trend” in tithe returns that “continues to gain momentum” globally.
Figures from Mexico represent another “bright spot” in this year's report, Richi says. Following a 25 percent decrease in tithe returns for that country between 2002 and 2003, Mexican Adventists shrugged off the peso's 1 percent loss against the dollar to grow their country's tithe returns a “remarkable” 78.6 percent, Richli says.
Other Latin American countries, however, lag in tithe returns. Consider Peru's “very weak” GTI ratio of 47.3 percent and Belize at 13.3 on the same scale. Richli speculates large influxes of members into the church in South America may keep stewardship leaders scrambling to educate new Adventists on faithful giving, thus explaining the low faithfulness levels.
Because several factors can skew GTI ratios, Richli admits its accuracy is limited. In countries where Adventists are largely from lower classes — because the church may be new and underdeveloped, or members may have faced discrimination — comparing tithe per capita to GDP may inaccurately reflect faithfulness. The same is true in countries where members are predominantly women, young, or rural — groups that Richli says often face economic disadvantages.
However, the report contradicts the idea that a country's economic status or the culture of its people should somehow predict faithfulness, Richli says, citing figures from the eastern African nation of Burkina Faso. “It's gone from 6.3 to 2.6 — that's on par with Germany,” he says. “And Burkina Faso is not necessarily a rich country. We need to find out what they're doing right there and see if it can be duplicated in other countries.”
Despite the encouraging reports, Richli says countries under the umbrella of the church's East-Central Africa region, apart from Rwanda, show little progress. Improvements in Kenya and Ethiopia are minuscule, and other countries, such as Uganda, have backtracked.
“This is particularly disappointing as greater progress seems to take place in other parts of Africa,” Richli says. Even Zimbabwe, he says, continues to improve its GTI ratio after a “tremendous jump” in 2005 — from a GTI of 68.5 to 20.3.
Tremendous, in part, due to that year's membership audits, Richli says, explaining that thousands of former or inactive members were removed from official church tallies as a result. “It didn't impact tithe volume,” Richli says, “but it certainly improved GTI ratios.”
Still, improvements in Zimbabwe and other African countries should “go a long way toward dispelling the notion that low ratios cannot be achieved in Africa and that educating our members [about stewardship] there is too difficult,” Richli says.
-Adventist News Network
