‘Thank you very much and thank you very kindly,’ all of you who support our parish financially year after year. This happens in the Sunday offertory, online giving, contributions made through the parish office or arrangements made for distributions from retirement accounts, along with sales of stock and gift matching in the workplace. However it occurs, we are grateful that it does.
Registered parishioners who donated to the parish with traceable means (offertory envelope, check or online giving) should receive your annual contribution statement in the coming days, detailing our accounting of your financial stewardship in 2024. If you do not get one or our numbers do not match yours, please contact us at the parish office.
This distribution of the annual contribution statements allows me an opportunity to address those who attend Mass at Queens but are not contributors, and to encourage those who give modestly to make their support of Queens more robust.
Statistics from the Pew Research Center suggest that Catholics on average donate 1% of their annual income to the church while Protestant Christians average 2%. The average Catholic parish is often much larger in terms of membership than those of the Protestant churches, meaning we have to stretch those donations even further. Studies show this 1% of income donated to the church has remained unchanged for 50 years, seemingly unaffected by increased wealth, wages or inflation. Hmmm.
If you do give, have you ever sat down to estimate the percentage of your stewardship compared to your income? Take the amount you give and divide it by the amount you make, and multiply that answer by 100. For example, an individual or married couple who take home $60,000 a year in after-tax salary, who give $1,000 annually to the church is donating 1.6% of their after tax income to the Church. If that same individual or couple were giving, let’s say, $300 a year to the church, it would amount to .5% of their take home pay.
If you are giving $0, that is a problem in and of itself. Most of our more generous donors are aging out and dying, and that makes Queens’ financial outlook uncertain at best. $5 a week or $10 a month from someone currently giving nothing could make a big difference if you add it up over the course of a year.
If you do the math and find out your giving has fallen below 1% or that your income has never reached that level, would you consider doing what it takes to at least get it to 1%? They don’t call it sacrificial giving for nothing.
If you currently give more than 1%, please don’t lower it! You are the ones we depend on to keep the lights on! I hope and pray others will learn from your example.
You see, churches depend completely on donations for their existence and survival. Queens is no exception. The annual budget between the parish and school is over $3,000,000. Half of that is the school budget and half of the school expense is covered by tuition, leaving about $2.25 million for us to cover through charitable giving. That is where all of you come in.
If you are open to looking into this issue, praying about it and discussing it with your family, you could use the chart below to choose a more ambitious percentage of income to donate. In no way do we want to interfere or take away from other charities you may be supporting. It is both/and, not either/or.
Many have commented that the more they give, the more they tend to receive, just as Jesus promised. God will not be outdone in generosity!
