Church Support of Local Charities Continues to Erode
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
In Anderson, the Sunday collection plate is still passed down the pews, still polished by the same careful hands, but for the county’s biggest charities the plate has become something closer to a polite gesture than a lifeline. None of the ten largest nonprofits in Anderson County now receive more than three percent of their annual budgets from churches, a quiet statistical shrug in a place where nearly every fundraiser still begins with an invocation. The lone exception, The Lot Project—a scrappy ministry on West Market Street —manages to draw a little more than eight percent of its support from congregations, making it, by local standards, practically old-fashioned.
The rest of the ecosystem runs on other currents: a little from private foundations, individual donors, a few corporate matching programs, and the occasional government grant. The Salvation Army, AIM, Meals on Wheels, and the Hope Missions of the Upstate long ago learned to speak the language of year-end campaigns and donor-advised funds, even as they still send speakers on Sunday mornings to stand behind pulpits and show slides of canned-goods drives. The churches nod, pray, and, increasingly, save their own money for mortgage payments, streaming setups, and the costly work of keeping half-empty buildings lit and air-conditioned.
The shift is not unique to Anderson; nationally, the share of charitable giving that goes to religious organizations has fallen from more than half of all donations a few decades ago to the mid-twenties, and fewer than half of American households now give to any charity at all. Evangelical giving to churches has slipped, tithers are rarer, and a growing slice of would-be donors prefers to click “donate” for a specific project—digging a well, funding a scholarship, sponsoring a charity event or project—rather than drop a check into an envelope labelled “general fund.” In Anderson, that means that when nonprofits look at their revenue pie charts, the once-dominant “local churches” slice has become a sliver, while lines labeled “online gifts,” “corporate partners” and “community foundation” fatten in cheerful colors.
Into this landscape comes Giving Tuesday, the global, hashtag-ready answer to the long weekend that begins with gratitude and ends with free shipping. After the turkey, the football and the retail stampede, Giving Tuesday materializes on screens in Anderson the same way it does everywhere else—through emails from familiar organizations, Instagram stories from volunteers, and earnest videos reminding viewers that “every act of generosity counts.” For charities headquartered on Murray Avenue or Main Street, the day has become a kind of high-stakes popularity contest, a 24-hour window in which to coax enough clicks to offset the year’s shortfalls.
Churches, for their part, tend to participate half in and half out of frame. Some share links to local ministries, some run their own online campaigns for building repairs or youth trips, and some simply post a graphic that says “Be Generous” and leave the rest to conscience and bandwidth. The old habit of routing benevolence through the church missions committee has been replaced by a more atomized model: congregants scroll past the church post and donate directly to the food pantry or homeless shelter whose video moved them most.
At The Lot Project, Giving Tuesday is both a test and a small vindication. Because the organization still receives a noticeable share of its budget from churches, its feed on that day is a collage of congregational logos: youth groups standing in the clothing room, men’s Bible studies grilling hot dogs on Alphabet Streets, women’s circles packing hygiene kits. The online gifts matter, but so does the signal that, at least here, the connection between Sunday worship and weekday service has not fully migrated into the cloud.
Elsewhere in the county, pastors talk quietly about donor fatigue and shrinking membership rolls. They compete not only with one another but with every hospital foundation, animal rescue, environmental nonprofit and alma mater that has learned to send elegantly designed appeals directly to their members’ phones. On any given Tuesday—not just the branded one—a churchgoer in Anderson may be asked, within the span of a few scrolls, to help fund a scholarship in Clemson, a cancer center in Charleston and a community project in Nairobi before being reminded of the church’s own budget shortfall.
For the charities that grew up assuming the church would always be their anchor, the new math is sobering. When less than three percent of a budget comes from the institution that once birthed you—as AIM’s origin story, proudly told on church websites, makes clear—the relationship becomes more symbolic than structural. The mission statements still mention “partnering with local congregations,” but the operating spreadsheets tell another story, one in which sustainability depends more on cultivating distant donors with donor-advised funds than on passing the plate down familiar pews.
Yet the language of faith has a way of lingering even as the dollars move on. Giving Tuesday campaigns in Anderson are laced with words like “blessing,” “calling,” and “stewardship,” a liturgy adapted for the age of hyperlinks. A GIF of a spinning heart replaces the brass offering plate; the click of a mouse takes the place of the rustle of envelopes.
If there is a hopeful reading of the trend, it may be that generosity in Anderson has not vanished so much as rerouted itself through new channels, bypassing institutions that once felt automatic. The question, for churches and charities alike, is whether that flow can be coaxed back into something more like a partnership, rather than a polite exchange of borrowed language and borrowed days on the calendar. On the first Tuesday after Thanksgiving, with the inbox filling and the phone buzzing, the answer briefly seems to hinge on a simple, measurable thing: who, exactly, people decide to respond with support.
