An Interview with Ron Sellers

Last week, I interviewed Ron Sellers of Grey Matter Research, one of the authors of a new study on giving entitled The Giving Gap: Changes in Evangelical Generosity. The study was done by Infinity Concepts | Grey Matter Research. Due to the length of the interview, I broke it down into two parts. This week, we focus on two key issues related to reversing the decline in giving spiritual engagement and revisiting how we view the tithe.

Mark Brooks:  Ron, last week we discussed the decline in giving. This week, I want to talk about two aspects. The importance of spiritual engagement and your thoughts on how we need to rethink the tithe.

Ron Sellers:  One of the challenges is, we have a variety of ways of looking at how spiritually engaged somebody is. But spiritual activities are, really, largely what we can measure. Are they in church? We can talk about how frequently they pray. We can talk about how frequently they read the Bible. And not just if they’re reading it, but are they studying it? Things like that. What we came up with is a matrix. And it includes frequency of prayer, church attendance, studying the Bible, or reading the Bible and attending a small group. What would we call a typical expectation of full spiritual engagement?

We consider “Full” spiritual engagement to be a minimum of five key disciplines: daily prayer, daily Bible readership, Bible study at least a few times a week, weekly church attendance, and weekly small group attendance.

So, we scored all 5 of these activities in terms of frequency, and somebody who does all five of these activities on the sort of expected basis is considered to have full spiritual engagement. It goes down from there based on your engagement, or lack of engagement, in each of these five disciplines. So, you’ve got high spiritual engagement, so maybe you do all these things, but you’re not part of a small group, or you do all these things but your prayer life is pretty poor, whatever that may be. The result is you have from full engagement to low, and then you have none.

So, we group people according to their level of spiritual engagement and then look at giving: whether people give, how much they give, and how generously they give, according to which of those spiritual engagement categories they fall into. And we see a massive difference in giving according to spiritual engagement.

We find that Evangelicals with full spiritual engagement are about twice as likely to give to charity or ministries outside a church as those with low or no spiritual engagement. They’re nearly three times more likely to give to church than people with lower or no spiritual engagement. Clearly, we need to get people more spiritually engaged.

Mark Brooks:  What you are suggesting sounds like good old-fashioned discipleship.

Ron Sellers:  That is the critical factor here, the most critical factor, discipleship. So, strongly spiritually engaged people are dramatically more likely to give. They give a lot more money, and they give a lot more generously.

There’s all kinds of teaching on generosity, giving, stewardship, money management, things like that, and I don’t want to downplay any of that or say it’s not worthwhile or anything like that. But my big question is, will any of that make sense to people who are not involved spiritually or engaged spiritually? Will any of that make a difference?

Discipleship seems like a very simple answer. It is a matter of discipleship. It’s very simple, but at the same time, it’s exceedingly difficult because we’ve done a lot of other research, and you know the typical American evangelical is not a real strongly Biblically based individual in terms of their Biblical knowledge, in terms of immersing themselves in the Bible. There’s a lot of surface participation and surface belief, and you see that with a lot of surface giving, you know, here’s my $20. I’m good for the month. So, I think that’s one of the big conclusions we came to. Another related to tithing. If the average person already thinks they’re just short of tithing, then what argument is there for saying you need to tithe? The average person is so far away from tithing that it’s an insurmountable goal.

Mark Brooks:  Tithing always causes a war among church leaders, but could you share your thoughts on why you feel we need a new approach? How do we have this discussion about tithing?

Ron Sellers:  Well, I mean in terms of how to have the discussion. I think that is a much bigger issue. How do you have the discussion of whether any drinking is a sin or whether getting drunk is a sin? How do you have a discussion on any controversial subject? To be honest with you, I have no idea how to bridge those gaps, and there are a lot bigger issues than just whether tithing is a Biblical mandate or not.

But in terms of the need for the discussion, there are two things that I see. We at least need to consider how we present this, how we teach about it, what the expectation is, etc. Number one. The typical Evangelical gives an average of 2.3% of household income, so we are not even close to 10%. And you have to look at it. It’s one thing if you see somebody who’s 20 pounds overweight, and you say, Okay, what can I do to help you lose 20 pounds?

Suppose you see somebody who weighs 450 pounds. How do you approach them about their need to lose weight? If somebody is 450 pounds and goes to a dietician or a personal trainer, does that person say you need to get down to 175? I mean, that is such a massive gap. It is such a massive goal that the typical response is going to be I can’t do that. You know you can’t look at a 450-pounder and say you must be a swimsuit model. What’s wrong with you? It’s just unrealistic. It’s not going to happen. They won’t even start.

You start with a reachable goal. Now, you don’t end with that reachable goal, but it’s incremental. And if you talk with people who do gastric bypass surgery very frequently, what they do is they meet with the person beforehand. They tell the patient, “Okay, you’re 600 pounds before I do surgery on you. You need to be seventy-five or fifty pounds lighter. Here’s the plan of how to get you there. We’ll mentor you and work with you. You need to demonstrate that you’re serious enough about this that you, on your own, can lose 50 pounds or whatever the reasonable goal is. Then we can have the surgery, and we can get you down from there. If you can’t even lose 50 pounds, you’re looking at the surgery as a magic wand. You’re never going to get down to your weight. Forget it.

So, I think that’s part of the issue, can we do this incrementally with the long-term goal being tithing or some larger amount?

The other thing that hurts us when we talk about tithing is that tithing is always talked about at 10%. If you ask people, how much money do you give? The average person thinks they’re real close to tithing when we talk about it in percentages. When we look at it in dollar figures and look at the reality, they’re nowhere near. When you talk about tithing for those who know they’re nowhere near, it’s an unreachable goal. For those who don’t realize they’re nowhere near, they think they’re already pretty close. What’s the point of worrying about it? If they’re already pretty close? So, focusing on a percentage often falls on deaf ears. Thus, a better way, in my mind, to increase giving is not to focus on the tithe or percentage giving, but to focus on spiritual engagement.

Mark Brooks:  Ron, please remind us again how church leaders can receive this study and other information you produce.

Ron Sellers: The best way to start would be to visit our site, https://greymatterresearch.com. There, you will find this study, as well as many others, listed for free downloads. You can also sign up for our emails, which will notify you when we have new information, studies, and help for church leaders.

Thanks, Ron! You have left us with great information and a lot to think about.