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In 1988, tax-deductible donations to US charities surpassed $100 billion for the first time in US 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 combined. And if charitable contributions were used as a sales figure, charitable organizations would rank second in the Fortune 500 behind only General Motors and almost Twenty billion ahead of Exxon Mobil. It's no exaggeration to say church fundraising is big business.

The race for charitable donations has soared to new heights in recent years, particularly in church fundraising. To offset reductions 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 increasingly hiring fundraising practitioners and charging them to raise increasingly larger totals of gift profit.

Although no dependable statistics are available, it can be guessed that tens of thousands of women and men today carry out fundraising duties as paid employees 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 greater 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 carry out these jobs, practitioners rely on church fundraising principles that have changed through anecdotal material and studies that have mostly been administrative in function. Collectively, these principles form a powerful perspective of the church fundraising function 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 important questions. Without a base grounded in the literature of academic disciplines, church fundraising usually has been ignored by educators as a subject worthy of scholarly study.

Part-time practitioner/scholars normally have produced research on church fundraising that has been occasional. Even though there has been a dramatic increase of scholarly activity in the domain of philanthropy, church fundraising as an organizational function has not been identified as one of the agreed upon problems that define that domain of study. This lack of scholarly interest in church fundraising is shown 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.