If you read just one of my entries this year, this one is it.
http://www.emptytomb.org/research.html
“The total income of American churchgoers is $5.2 trillion. It would take just a little over 1% of the income of American Christians to lift the poorest one billion people in the world out of extreme poverty.
If we define tithing as giving 10 percent or more of our pretax income to the church or to nonprofit ministries, only about 5 percent of American households tithe. If we look at “born again” Christians in America, the number of tithers improves to 9 percent. For “evangelical Christians,” still only 24 percent tithe.
The average giving of American Church members in 2005 was just 2.58% of their income… If we then look at where the money goes after it is received by the churches, we find that just about 2% of it goes to overseas missions of any kind, whether evangelistic or to assist the poor.
The bottom line is that the commitment that American Christians are making to the world is just about 2% of 2%. In simpler terms, that amounts to about six pennies per person per day that we give through our churches to the rest of the world.
If we gave 10% of our incomes instead of the 2.5% we actually give, we would have an extra $168 billion to spend in funding the work of the Church worldwide. $65 billion could eliminate the most extreme poverty on the planet for more than a billion people. universal primary education for children would cost just $6 billion; the cost to bring clean water to most of the world’s poor, an estimate $9 billion; and basic health and nutrition for everyone in the world, $13 billion.”