In 1988, tax-deductible donations to US charities surpassed $100 billion for the first time in history and church fundraising was a large portion of that number. To put it in perspective, $100 billion is more than the profits of all the Fortune 500 companies put together. And if charitable contributions were used as a sales figure, charitable organizations would rank #2 in the Fortune 500 behind only General Motors and almost $20 billion ahead of Exxon Mobil. It's no exaggeration to say church fundraising is big business.

The chase for charitable donations has soared to new levels in recent years, particularly in church fundraising. To offset a decline in government funding during the 1980s and to maximize their share of philanthropic giving, the estimated 800,000 organizations that are categorized by the IRS as charities are more commonly hiring fundraising practitioners and challenging them to raise increasingly larger totals of gift revenue.

Although no dependable statistics are available, it can be guessed that tens of thousands of men and women today carry out fundraising jobs as paid workers involved in church fundraising as well as activities for other non-profit organizations. One meter of this growth is that membership in the National Society of Fund Raising Executives has risen from fewer than 2,000 to more than than 10,000 in only 10 years.

The practitioners, whether they are involved in church fundraising or raising donations for another organization, conduct prospect searches to identify potential givers, process payments from contributors, coordinate special events to cultivate givers, solicit gifts by direct mail, phonathons, proposals, and face-to-face meetings; and write and edit publications to report fundraising results and to recognize givers.

To help them fulfill these jobs, practitioners rely on church fundraising principles that have changed through anecdotal material and studies that have primarily been administrative in function. Collectively, these principles form a powerful perspective of the church fundraising purpose that focuses on how to generate money without questioning the rationale for the function of its effect on recipient organizations and society.

Although different opinions may be offered in response, church fundraising research has made little progress in answering these questions. Without a theoretical base grounded in the literature of academic disciplines, church fundraising traditionally has been ignored by educators as a subject worthy of scholarly study.

Part-time practitioner/scholars generally have provided research on church fundraising that has been sporadic. Even though there has been a dramatic increase of scholarly activity in the area of philanthropy, church fundraising as an organizational function has not been targeted as one of the agreed upon problems that define that domain of study. This lack of scholarly interest in church fundraising is illustrated by the fact that only 3% of research projects on philanthropy and nonprofit organizations over the last 5 years have focused on church fundraising, but interest in this area continues to increase.