TL;DR: Most churches collect giving and membership data but struggle to answer basic leadership questions in real time. The problem isn’t tools, it’s integration. Recurring giving now accounts for 35 percent of digital giving, but many finance committees can’t tell you what share of their own budget comes from recurring donors. This article shows you which questions matter most, how to define metrics like lapsed givers, and what integrated reporting looks like when done right.
Core Insights:
Finance committees need seven core reports: giving totals, recurring trends, lapsed givers (60 to 90 days for monthly donors), new giver conversion, and concentration risk.
Leadership boards need the overlap view: who gives and attends, who attends but doesn’t give, who gives but rarely shows up, and who recently stopped both.
Lapsed giver detection is the highest leverage report most churches aren’t running, especially when nonprofit donor retention sits at 42.9 percent.
Integrated reporting means answering the same questions the same way every month without manual exports.
The integration project is usually smaller than churches think, most have more capability in current systems than they’ve configured.
Table of Contents
Why Most Churches Have Data but No Answers
What Questions Should Your Finance Committee Be Able to Answer
How Do You Define a Lapsed Giver
What Questions Should Your Elder Board or Leadership Team Ask
What Does Reliable Integrated Reporting Look Like
What Should You Know About Digital Giving Channels and Their Data
How Do You Know Whether Your Current Data Picture Is Healthy
Frequently Asked Questions
Key Takeaways
A healthy data picture lets a finance committee, elder board, or staff team answer specific questions about who is giving, who is engaged, and who is drifting, in minutes rather than weeks. The 2025 State of Church Technology Report from Pushpay found 86 percent of surveyed leaders now use church management software, and 70 percent say technology has increased generosity. The tools are in place. The reporting discipline often isn’t.
Why Most Churches Have Data but No Answers
We work with finance committees and elder boards who collect plenty of data but struggle to answer basic questions about retention, engagement, and giving patterns.
The tools are in place. The reporting discipline often isn’t.
Giving data sits in one platform. Attendance and small group data sit in another. Volunteer scheduling sits in a third. The only person who connects them is the staff member who knows how to export from each system.
The 2025 State of Church Technology Report from Pushpay found 86 percent of surveyed leaders now use church management software, and 70 percent say technology has increased generosity. The gap isn’t tools. It’s the reporting framework.
We see this clearly when data silos prevent the picture we’re trying to assemble.
Key Point: Reliable data isn’t about having more dashboards, it’s about answering the same leadership questions the same way every month without a manual export project each time.
What Questions Should Your Finance Committee Be Able to Answer
Finance committees ask the same questions almost every meeting. They’re not exotic. They’re the basic vitals of a church’s financial picture.
Here’s what we see asked most:
What is our giving total this month, this quarter, and year to date compared to the same period last year?
How many giving units contributed this month, and how does that compare to attendance?
What percentage of total giving came from recurring gifts, and is that share growing or shrinking?
Who are our lapsed givers (people who gave consistently and then stopped within the last 60 to 180 days)?
Who are our new givers in the last 90 days, and how many gave a second time?
What is the concentration risk: what percentage of total giving comes from the top 10 percent of giving units?
These aren’t analytics questions. They’re stewardship questions.
The 2025 Ministry Brands data shows recurring giving accounted for 35 percent of digital giving in 2025 and grew 5.4 percent year over year. If a finance committee doesn’t know what share of its own giving is recurring, the committee is governing without a basic fact about how its budget is funded.
Key Point: A finance committee that doesn’t define lapsed givers and pull a list of them isn’t equipped to do donor care, and donor care is the most underused growth lever in church finance.
How Do You Define a Lapsed Giver
The definition has to fit the giving pattern. A lapsed annual donor and a lapsed monthly recurring donor aren’t the same problem. Treating them the same produces a noisy, useless report.
The benchmark we work from comes from the broader nonprofit sector. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project found donor retention at 42.9 percent in 2024, the fifth consecutive year of decline. Repeat donors retain at 69.2 percent. New donors retain at 20 percent.
Lapse signals look different by segment:
Recurring monthly givers: Lapse window is 60 to 90 days from the last expected gift.
Annual givers: Lapse window stretches to 12 to 18 months.
First-time givers: The most important window is the next 90 days because the probability of a second gift drops sharply after that.
The point of defining these windows isn’t technical. It’s so a pastor has a pastoral conversation, not a financial one, before a quiet drift becomes a permanent exit.
Key Point: Lapsed giver definitions must be set per segment, written down, and applied consistently every month, otherwise the report tells you nothing about whether things are getting better or worse.
What Questions Should Your Elder Board or Leadership Team Ask
The elder board and senior leadership operate at a different altitude than the finance committee. They’re looking at engagement health and the strength of the discipleship pipeline, not just the offering plate.
The Hartford Institute’s 2026 report on congregational rebound found median in-person worship attendance has risen to 70, surpassing pre-pandemic levels. This marks the first positive gain in 25 years of tracking. Volunteer participation has rebounded, with 40 percent of congregants now volunteering regularly.
Boards that see those patterns in their own data, segmented by age, tenure, and ministry involvement, are positioned to act on them. Boards that don’t are guessing.
Here are the questions a board should be able to ask:
How many adults attended at least once this quarter, and how does that overlap with the giving roster?
What is the trend in weekly volunteer participation, and which ministries are growing or shrinking?
How many new members joined in the last 12 months, and how many are still active by month six?
Where are the gaps between attendance and engagement (people who attend regularly but never give, serve, or join a group)?
Which life stages or age cohorts are underrepresented relative to our community?
Barna’s 2025 State of the Church found weekly volunteering at 24 percent of U.S. adults, surpassing pre-pandemic 2019 levels. Gen Z and Millennials lead at 21 percent and 19 percent respectively.
A board that sees whether its own congregation matches that pattern or diverges from it has something to work with. Without integrated data, it has anecdotes.
Key Point: A leadership team that sees giving and attendance separately is missing the most important picture: the overlap.
What Does Reliable Integrated Reporting Look Like
We’re deliberate about the word “reliable” because it has a specific meaning.
A report is reliable when it returns the same answer every time the same question is asked, regardless of who pulls it, and when the leadership team trusts the numbers enough to make decisions on them.
The Pushpay 2025 year in review found total giving increased 5 percent year over year across more than 14,000 customer churches. Recurring giving climbed 11 percent. There were 1.8 million first-time givers, with 59 percent using Apple Pay.
The churches getting the most value from those numbers aren’t the ones with the most sophisticated dashboards. They’re the ones who decided what the recurring opt-in rate, the first-time second-gift conversion rate, and the digital wallet adoption rate would mean for their own ministry and committed to tracking them.
Here’s what we look for when evaluating a church’s reporting setup:
A single owner for each report, so the same person produces the same number every month.
A documented definition for every metric, written in plain language so a board member understands it.
A consistent reporting cadence: weekly for lapsed giver checks, monthly for the finance committee, quarterly for the board.
Source data that flows automatically from the system of record, with no spreadsheet copy-paste between the ChMS, the giving platform, and the report.
A change log, so if a definition shifts, the leadership team knows when and why.
This is the discipline behind how to evaluate church management software without getting sold. The product question is downstream of the reporting question.
Key Point: Reporting is reliable when the definition is documented, the owner is named, the cadence is fixed, and the data flows automatically from the source.
What Should You Know About Digital Giving Channels and Their Data
Digital giving isn’t just a convenience question anymore. It’s a data question.
Vanco’s 2025 Churchgoer Giving Study found churchgoers are now evenly split between eGivers and traditional givers at 50 percent each. Recurring online givers contribute 120 percent more than non-recurring online givers.
That gap isn’t marketing language. It’s the durable economic reality of digital giving.
A church that hasn’t stood up recurring giving or doesn’t know what percentage of its donors are on it is leaving predictable revenue on the table and accepting more volatility in its monthly budget than it needs to.
Here’s what the integrated data picture should tell you about digital giving:
What percentage of giving units are on recurring, by age cohort.
What the average gift size is by channel: website, mobile app, text to give, in person, digital wallets.
How many recurring gifts failed this month due to expired cards or insufficient funds, and how many were recovered.
What percentage of first-time digital givers gave a second gift within 90 days.
Key Point: Digital giving channels generate data, and that data is only useful when it flows into the same view as membership and engagement, not when it sits in a separate vendor dashboard.
How Do You Know Whether Your Current Data Picture Is Healthy
We ask church leaders to run a simple test.
Pull up the questions in each of the sections above and try to answer them with the systems you have in place. Note which questions get answered in under five minutes, which require an export and a spreadsheet, and which don’t get answered at all without a manual data project.
The honest pattern we see: most churches answer four or five questions easily, eight or nine with effort, and another four or five not at all.
That gap is the integration project. It’s rarely as big as it looks.
Lifeway Research’s Becoming Five study found 46 percent of churches reported 2024 giving higher than 2023, while 16 percent saw giving drop. The churches that acted on that movement are the ones who knew which donors changed their behavior and when.
Key Point: The right test of your data picture isn’t whether you have dashboards, it’s whether your leadership team answers the questions it cares about on the day it needs them answered.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the most important single report a church finance committee should run every month?
The lapsed giver report, segmented by giving frequency. For recurring givers, look at gifts that missed an expected cycle by 60 to 90 days. For annual givers, the window is 12 to 18 months. Donor retention dropped to 42.9 percent in 2024, so identifying lapse signals early is the highest leverage donor care activity.
How do we know if our membership and giving data are integrated?
The honest test is the five minute test. If your team answers “how many of our regular givers attended at least twice this quarter” without an export and a spreadsheet, the data is integrated for that question. If it requires merging two reports by hand, it’s not integrated, even if the platforms claim to be.
What share of church giving comes from recurring donors today?
Recurring giving accounted for 35 percent of digital giving in 2025 according to Ministry Brands, and 37 percent of total donations according to Tithely’s 2025 trends report. The figures vary by platform and church size, but the direction is consistent. Recurring is now a meaningful share of the offering, and tracking it as a distinct metric matters.
How long should we wait before we consider a recurring giver lapsed?
For most churches, a 60 to 90 day window from the last expected gift is the right trigger for a pastoral check-in. The threshold should be documented and applied consistently. The point isn’t to flag every late payment as a crisis. It’s to notice the quiet drift before it becomes a quiet exit.
What should we do about digital wallets and giving data?
Track adoption as a distinct metric. Pushpay reported 59 percent of first-time givers used Apple Pay in 2025, and Ministry Brands found digital wallet giving more than doubled to 5.1 percent of digital donations. A church that doesn’t know its digital wallet adoption rate doesn’t know whether it’s reaching younger givers or excluding them.
How often should a leadership board review engagement data?
We recommend quarterly for engagement and attendance trends, monthly for giving and recurring metrics, and weekly for lapsed giver flags handled at the staff level. The cadence matters more than the dashboard. Boards that review the same numbers every quarter develop pattern recognition that boards looking at fresh metrics each meeting never build.
Do we need to replace our church management software to get integrated reporting?
Often not. The first step is to define the reports you need and check whether your current systems support them with native integrations or scheduled exports. Many churches have more capability than they’ve configured. A clean reporting setup on existing software almost always beats a new platform with unclear definitions.
What is the single biggest data mistake we see church boards make?
Reporting on giving and attendance in isolation. The most important picture is the overlap: who attends and gives, who attends and doesn’t give, who gives and rarely attends, and who has been doing both and recently stopped one. None of those segments are visible in a single channel report.
Key Takeaways
Questions answered, not dashboards produced: A healthy data picture is defined by the questions it answers. Reliable reporting means the same question returns the same answer every month, regardless of who pulls it.
Lapsed giver detection drives retention: This is the highest leverage report most churches aren’t running. Define lapse windows by giving segment and review the report weekly to turn a 42.9 percent industry retention rate into improvement opportunity.
Recurring giving is now frontline, not back office: Recurring gifts account for 35 to 42 percent of digital giving, and recurring givers contribute 120 percent more than non-recurring online givers.
The overlap view matters most: The most important integrated view is the overlap of giving, attendance, and engagement. Boards and leadership teams don’t govern well when those data sets sit in separate reports.
Discipline trumps tools: Reliable reporting requires a named owner, a documented definition, a fixed cadence, and source data that flows automatically. Tools matter less than discipline.
Start with questions, not products: The integration project is usually smaller than churches think. Most have more reporting capability in current systems than they’ve configured. The right starting point is the list of questions, not the list of products.
Sources and References
Pushpay. 2025 State of Church Technology Report. April 30, 2025.
Pushpay. Behind the Numbers: What 2025 Revealed About Church Engagement. January 26, 2026.
Ministry Brands. 2026 Annual Church Giving Report. 2026.
Vanco. A Decade of Church Giving Trends: 2015 to 2025. 2025.
Barna Group, via Baptist Press. State of the Church: More Men Attending Than Women, Volunteering Rebounding. March 25, 2025.
Lifeway Research. Half of Churches Experiencing Post-Pandemic Attendance Growth. March 18, 2025.
Hartford Institute for Religion Research. Signs of Rebound Amid Uneven Recovery: The Changing Congregational Landscape. 2026.
Association of Fundraising Professionals. Fundraising Effectiveness Project Q4 2024 Quarterly Report. 2025.
Tithely. Church Giving Trends and Tithing Statistics, 2025 Data and Insights. September 6, 2025.
Where We Go From Here
Reliable giving and membership data isn’t a software problem. It’s a discipline problem, anchored in a written list of questions the leadership team agrees to answer the same way every month.
If your board, finance committee, or staff team has been asked questions about giving, retention, or engagement that nobody answered with confidence, that gap is the most useful map you have for the work ahead.
Our data, analytics, and church health metrics resource covers the broader framework this piece sits inside. If your ministry is working through what reliable reporting should look like in your context, and which questions matter most for your stage and size, we would be glad to think it through with you.
We offer no pressure consultations where we listen first, then share what we’ve learned helping ministries set up reporting they trust. Schedule a consultation.
