A Rainy day is HERE!!
For decades, Christian churches have prospered in regards to financial assets and at the same time bled out their congregations. American churches of all denominational flavors have
accumulated financial capital while their cultural and demographic position has plummeted. There is no comprehensive national database tracking every church endowment or brokerage account back to the 1950s, so any long-run estimate is merely an educated guess. Still, the direction is difficult to argue with. A reasonable reconstruction given the knowns of the culture, the economy, and my unique vantage point of working alongside and within so many Christian organizations suggests that American
churches and closely related denominational foundations may have held the equivalent of roughly $10 billion to $25 billion in invested financial assets in today's dollars in the 1950s (meaning we are adjusting numbers for inflation). Today, depending on what is included, a reasonable range is perhaps $75 billion to $190 billion or more in endowments, securities, denominational investment pools and similar accounts. Even if those estimates are off substantially, it is very likely that the real
purchasing power of Christian investment assets has multiplied several times over since the middle of the twentieth century. READ THAT LINE AGAIN! MULTIPLIED SEVERAL TIMES OVER.
We can see the scale in institutions that actually publish numbers. The Presbyterian Foundation reported $3.1 billion in assets stewarded in 2025, including more than $1 billion held in 7,200 endowment funds supporting churches and ministries. It also
reports that a hypothetical $100,000 permanent endowment established in 1980 would have distributed more than $569,000 to mission while still ending 2025 with a principal value above $351,000, based on an average annual investment return of 7.99 percent. The Episcopal Church Pension Fund, while importantly a pension system rather than ordinary parish savings, reported more than $17 billion in investments in 2025. These examples do not prove a national total, but they demonstrate how large
Christian institutional pools of capital have become.
At the same time, the pews In these churches are often a ghost town. Gallup reported that 49 percent of American adults said they had attended a religious service during the previous seven days in 1958. By 2000 that figure was 44 percent. By 2023 it was only 32 percent. The long-term decline in Christian identity is just as striking. Pew Research Center found that 78 percent
of American adults identified as Christian in 2007, 71 percent in 2014 and only 62 percent in its 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study. Pew also notes that in the 1970s roughly nine in ten American adults still identified as Christian. Today, 29 percent of adults identify with no religion at all.
Put those two trajectories beside one another and an uncomfortable picture emerges. Christian America has become richer in financial
assets while becoming poorer in practicing Christians. The investment accounts have compounded while attendance has declined. Endowments have matured while churches have closed. Capital has been preserved while Christian identification has fallen. One can debate the exact dollar figures, but it is difficult to debate the direction. The Church has accumulated extraordinary financial resources during the same period in which its hold on the American population has weakened dramatically. I know I
just stated the same thing like 5 different ways but it requires a lot of added emphasis to drive the point home.
So the uncomfortable question is no longer avoidable: What exactly are we saving for? Investment accounts exist for a reason. Prudence matters. Churches need reserves. Roofs fail, furnaces break, schools struggle and ministries face unexpected costs. I understand the need to have some cash reserves. But prudence
can become a cover name for fear, and stewardship can become a cover name for hoarding. If an endowment exists for a rainy day, then someone eventually has to explain what qualifies as rain.
Is it not raining when weekly religious attendance falls from nearly half the country to roughly one-third? Is it not raining when the Christian share of American adults falls from nearly eight in ten in 2007 to barely six in ten today? Is it not raining when baptized
Christians abandon the faith, churches close, schools disappear, marriages collapse, vocations decline and children grow up knowing more about influencers than the Gospel? If this does not qualify as a crisis worthy of deploying Christian capital, what exactly are we waiting for? I doubt Jesus will need our funds at the Second Coming.
Meanwhile, billions of dollars continue compounding in stocks, bonds and funds. The
instinct is understandable. Preserve the principal. Spend the income. Protect the endowment so the institution survives forever. But Christianity was not founded to preserve institutions for their own sake. God will preserve His Church despite poor management. I mean, come on, just look at the Church I call home, the Catholic Church, the one true Church. It has at times been run so poorly that a group of fifth graders might have done a better job, and yet it has endured for 2,000 years. Churches
exist to preach the Gospel and help save souls. Our Lord did not tell the Church to finish history with the largest possible investment account. He commanded us to make disciples of all nations.
There is something deeply disordered about becoming richer on paper while becoming weaker in reality. If a Christian endowment earns 8 percent in a year while another generation walks away from Christ, was that actually a successful year?
The answer depends entirely on what we believe money is for. Money is not the mission. Money exists to serve the mission. If Christians truly believe that one soul is worth more than all the wealth of the world, eventually our financial decisions should begin to look as though we believe it.
Imagine what even a fraction of this accumulated capital could accomplish if deployed with urgency and intelligence. We could fund missionaries, rescue Catholic and
Protestant schools, train apologists, subsidize education for large families, build serious campus ministries, plant churches, revitalize dying parishes, train priests and pastors, produce films and documentaries, build publishing houses and create Christian media institutions capable of competing for the imagination of the next generation. We routinely speak about evangelization as though its primary limitation were enthusiasm. In many places the limitation is resources, organization and scale.
Christianity has resources. The question is whether we are willing to risk them for the mission.
Wall Street understands opportunity cost. Every dollar invested in one place is a dollar that cannot be invested somewhere else. The Church should understand this better than anyone. A dollar sitting in an index fund for another thirty years may eventually become four dollars or eight dollars. That is financially impressive and I
think morally illicit but my readers know this already. But what if that dollar, deployed now, helps form a child who becomes a faithful father, funds a missionary who brings a family into the Church, keeps a Christian school alive, supports a seminarian or puts serious Christian ideas in front of millions of young people? The return on that investment cannot be measured by the S&P 500.
There will always be another roof,
another renovation, another capital campaign, another recession and another reason to tell ourselves that the principal should remain untouched for just a little longer. But souls do not live on an institutional investment horizon. The twenty-year-old abandoning Christianity today will not be twenty forever. The child growing up without the Gospel does not get another childhood. The parish that closes may never reopen. The Christian school that disappears may never return. Souls live
now.
If Christianity in America were flourishing, perhaps enormous and ever-growing investment accounts would be easier to defend (though I think they would still be despicable). But the numbers tell us that Christianity has spent much of the last seventy years losing ground while its financial capital has grown in real purchasing power. At some point, a balance sheet can become an indictment. The question is not whether Christians should invest (AKA
speculate on markets). The question is whether preservation of capital has quietly become a higher institutional priority than deployment of capital for the Great Commission.
Eventually Christ may ask us a far more uncomfortable question than any finance committee ever will: What did you do with what I gave you? The greatest return on Christian capital will never appear on an investment statement. It is the salvation of souls.
And if declining attendance, mass disaffiliation and an increasingly post-Christian culture do not constitute the rainy day we have been saving for, it is difficult to imagine what would.
