Key Points:
- Collections for United Methodist general-church ministries dropped in 2024, compared to the previous year.
- The new 2025-2028 denominational budget took effect in January, and the denomination’s financial leaders think it is more in line with current giving capacity.
- A new campaign called United in Impact aims to show the importance of giving to the United Methodist connection.
Giving to The United Methodist Church’s denomination-wide ministries dropped by more than $13 million last year compared to 2023.
At an online meeting Jan. 31, the board of The United Methodist Church’s finance agency — the General Council on Finance and Administration — reviewed a report on 2024 giving.
“We give thanks for these your faithful servants who give faithfully to the ministry of The United Methodist Church,” said Bishop David Graves, board chair, in the meeting’s opening prayer. Graves also leads the Tennessee-Western Kentucky, Kentucky and Central Appalachian Missionary conferences.
“We’ve all been on a journey,” he said “The journey continues. … But we know that you are always with us.”
Overall, the finance agency collected about $91.3 million in 2024 apportionments — requested shares of church giving that support denomination-wide ministries. That’s down from about $105 million in 2023.
The total giving for 2024 is in line with the finance agency’s mid-year projections. Rick King, the agency’s chief financial officer, said that means big changes in the denomination have not affected the traditional seasonality of receipts. The bulk of giving still comes at the end of the year.
The decrease comes after a history-making General Conference that saw delegates end longtime denomination-wide bans against gay clergy and same-sex marriage while also passing a historically low denominational budget.
Paid in full
Seven U.S. annual conferences paid 100% of their apportionments in 2024. They are California-Nevada, Central Appalachian Missionary (formerly Red Bird Missionary), New England, New York, Northwest Texas, Oklahoma Indian Missionary and Wisconsin. Starting this year, Northwest Texas is now part of the new Horizon Texas Conference.
In addition, six episcopal areas in the central conferences paid 100% of apportionments. They are the Central and Southern Europe, Germany, Liberia, Mozambique, Nordic-Baltic and Zimbabwe areas. Together, those episcopal areas encompass multiple annual conferences in Africa and Europe.
Last year’s General Conference delegates approved a 2025-2028 denominational budget of $373.4 million. That total is contingent on apportionment collection rates being at 90% or more in 2025 and 2026. If giving is below that percentage, the budget bottom line will be $353.6 million.
Either way, the new budget is about 40% lower than the $604 million budget the 2016 General Conference approved.
With that significantly smaller four-year budget taking effect this year, United Methodist financial leaders are hopeful that budget expectations moving forward will be more in line with giving.
To the denomination’s financial leaders, a 90% collection rate seems very much within reach in the next two years.
Just for perspective: If the total 2025 apportionment payments end up the same dollar amount as seen in 2024, that would exceed 100% of requested apportionments for this year.
General Council on Finance and Administration and United Methodist Communications also are jointly launching a campaign called United in Impact to emphasize the importance of apportionment giving to the United Methodist connection.
The goal, staff members from both agencies told United Methodist News, is to harness the strength of The United Methodist Church’s connectional system to support and expand ministry efforts worldwide. Staff are also quick to add that they never expect apportionment payments to exceed 100%. But the payments are critically important.
Apportionments are what sustain United Methodist ministry beyond the work of individual congregations. Denomination-wide ministries receive apportionments from annual conferences, regional bodies that in turn receive apportionments from the local churches within their border. About 88% of the offering remains in the local church.
U.S. conferences distribute their apportionments among seven general-church funds. Each fund supports a different category of ministry: bishops, ministerial education, general administration, the Black College Fund, Africa University, ecumenical work and the World Service Fund, which supports the work of most general agencies. United Methodist Communications, where UM News is housed, gets the bulk of its revenue through the World Service Fund.
Central conferences — church regions in Africa, Europe and the Philippines — also pay apportionments but only to the Episcopal and General Administration funds.
U.S. apportionment collections — which fund the bulk of denomination-wide ministries — were 71% of requested apportionments in 2024, compared to nearly 74% in 2023.
The World Service Fund, the biggest of the apportioned funds, saw a collection rate of 68.5% in 2024 compared to 71.1% the previous year. That represents a reduction of nearly $7 million.
Similarly, the General Administration Fund collection rate in the U.S. went down to 70.5% in 2024, compared to 72.6% in 2023. That’s about $807,000 less.
The Episcopal Fund, which supports the work of bishops, had the highest collection rate at 83.4%. But that represents a drop of nearly $3.5 million from 2023, when the Episcopal Fund saw a 90.6% collection rate.
Up until this year, the denomination was still operating officially under the budget General Conference passed in 2016. But in recent years, a number of annual conferences were already paying apportionments based on the significantly reduced budget the finance agency’s board had long planned to submit to last year’s COVID-delayed General Conference.
Contributing to the lower giving and the reduced budget General Conference passed were church disaffiliations. Between 2019 and the end of 2023, about a quarter of the denomination’s U.S. churches withdrew under a now-expired policy that allowed congregations to leave with property if they met certain procedural and financial obligations.
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One of those requirements is that departing churches pay at least two years of apportionments to their annual conferences.
King told the board that GCFA received most of the apportionments from exiting churches in 2023. But the 2024 total included about $3.7 million from exiting churches in the Alabama-West Florida, Florida, Indiana, South Carolina, Rio Texas and Western North Carolina conferences.
Conferences had different experiences with disaffiliation, with some seeing a high number of church departures and others much less. While the disaffiliation policy expired at the end of 2023, a number of churches lost members after General Conference.
While the denomination has fewer people, church leaders often note that those who remain in the United Methodist fold demonstrate a deep commitment to the denomination’s ministries and its mission to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.
The Rev. Sheila Ahler, chair of the GCFA board’s General Agency and Episcopal Matters Committee, struck a hopeful note.
She is also the chair of the North Carolina Conference’s council on finance and administration. She said the conference’s budget has gone down by almost $6 million over the last two years to account for the churches that left. She now expects the conference collection rate will go up, since the conference is asking for less.
“This next year is going to be really interesting around the denomination to see how well we did with our forecasting and how well the impact was adjusted for going forward,” she said.
She acknowledged that it’s still too early to know how the denomination’s finances will fare over the next four years.
“I think the future looks exciting and interesting, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what we do going forward from here,” she told the board. “I left General Conference on a real high, and I think it’s still there. So I hope it is for all of you as well.”
Hahn is assistant news editor for UM News. Contact her at (615) 742-5470 or [email protected]. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free UM News Digest.
