Methodology

Since 2000, the Canadian Charities Directorate has been making Charity Information Returns (CIR) available online.1 CIRs track more than 200 pieces of financial and program data including staffing levels and compensation.2 This paper will consider just two:

• Line 300: The number of permanent, full-time, compensated positions in the fiscal period. This number should represent the number of positions the charity had including both managerial positions and others, and should not include independent contractors; and
• Line 370: The number of part-time or part-year (for example, seasonal) employees the charity employed during the fiscal period.3

This paper looks at Canadian evangelical congregations that, for the purposes of this paper, are defined as congregations affiliated with one of The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada’s (EFC) 39 affiliate denominations.4 The dataset included 5,456 congregations that had a CIR posted online for at least one of the fiscal years from 2003 to 2009 on April 21, 2011.5 These 5,456 congregations make up about three-quarters of the congregations affiliated with one of the EFC’s affiliate denominations, and approximately half of all Canadian evangelical congregations.6

Given that the median budgets of rural congregations are roughly half those of urban congregations, and that salaries are usually the largest line item in a congregation’s budget, I hypothesized that a congregation’s setting would influence its staffing. 7 Therefore it was decided to segment the data into urban and rural congregations. A congregation was identified as rural if the second character of its postal code registered with the Charities Directorate was a zero (per Canada Post procedures) and as urban otherwise.8 Appendix A describes the sample further according to denomination, province, and setting.

I categorized congregations for both full- and part-time staffing complements as follows: 0 staff, 1 staff, 2 staff, 3 staff, 4 staff, and 5 or more staff.9

There are two types of analysis that this paper will follow as we compare evangelical congregational staffing complements in 2003 and 2009. First we will look at the difference in the distributions of staffing complements in 2003 and 2009. Second, we will follow the changes in staffing complements for congregations according to their full-time staffing categories in 2003. This means that when we consider changes in part-time staffing it will be in light of the changes to full-time staffing.

Extra attention will be given to the situation where a congregation has no full-time staff because these congregations will likely find it more difficult to carry on their ministries than those with full-time staff.

When considering a paper on staffing and evangelical congregations one naturally thinks of pastoral staff. However, staff, for the purpose of this study, means all staff, not just clergy. The CIR data do not segment its data according to job descriptions. We are still, however, able to make useful inferences about the meaning of staffing levels and changes to these levels based on experience. We know, for instance, that, typically, the first full-time employee of a congregation is a pastor. This does not mean that the inference is true in all cases, but when we have the benefit of such a large sample, we can be reasonably confident that the descriptions of central tendencies will have a useful correlation with what we know experientially to be typical. This is especially true when we are dealing with smaller staffing complements.

1 http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/ebci/haip/srch/advancedsearch-eng.action.
2 See “Registered Charity Information Return” (T3010) (http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/formspubs/prioryear/t3010b/ t3010b-09e.pdf ), accessed May 10, 2011) for the most recent version of the CIR under consideration in this paper. See also “Completing the Registered Charity Information Return” (http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/formspubs/prioryear/t4033b-09e.pdf, accessed May 10, 2011).
3 Three versions of the CIR were used to collect data between 2003 and 2009: T3010A-03 (http://www.craarc.gc.ca/formspubs/prioryear/t3010a/t3010a-03e.pdf, accessed May 10, 2011); T3010A-05 (http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/formspubs/prioryear/t3010a/t3010a-05e.pdf, accessed May 10, 2011); and T3010B (09) (http://www.craarc.gc.ca/formspubs/prioryear/t3010b/t3010b-09e.pdf, accessed May 10, 2011). The compensation line numbers vary from form to form but the line descriptions are materially the same.
4 See http://www.evangelicalfellowship.ca/netcommunity/page.aspx?pid=848 (accessed May 10, 2011) for a list of the EFC’s affiliate denominations. See Appendix A table 4 for the sample’s denominational distribution of these congregations.
5 http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/ebci/haip/srch/advancedsearch-eng.action.
6 There are between 11,000 and 12,000 evangelical congregations in Canada.
7 For a discussion of urban and rural congregational incomes, see Rick Hiemstra, “Canadian Evangelical Congregational Income, 2003–2008” Church & Faith Trends 3:1 (February 2010): 13 (http://files.efc-canada.net/min/rc/cft/V03I01/CECI-2003- 2008.pdf, accessed May 10, 2011).
8 Canada Post has urbanized New Brunswick postal codes. There are many evangelical congregations in a rural setting in New Brunswick, but the general rule was followed for the analysis in this paper rather than trying to make an independent determination of which New Brunswick congregations were urban and which were rural. Urban and rural counts will not, therefore, add up to counts for the entire dataset because New Brunswick congregations are excluded from urban and rural calculations.
9 Where no staffing data (missing values) were reported those missing values were deemed to be zero for the purpose of this study.