So, it appears that the Church may have an even bigger stack of investments than many of us thought. In this post, I’m not interested in the possible tax law issues of this giant fund, but rather just the size of the fund. To be blunt, I find it appalling that the Church has this much money available at the same time that General Authorities continuously harp on members to pay tithing, not to mention that they pass other costs on to members like the recently-announced increase in the cost of serving as a missionary and the ongoing requirement for members to clean church buildings.
I was so irritated by this revelation that I started going back through Conference talks and Ensign articles to try to make a comprehensive list of all the times GAs have told stories of members valiantly paying tithing instead of paying for food or rent. But I got sidetracked by a really interesting talk that President Monson gave in 1990 where he discussed changes the Church had made over time to reduce the financial burden on members. He said,
The newly announced local unit budget allowance program is but one of several carefully studied and prayerfully implemented steps taken by the Church to relieve the membership of financial burdens which some simply could not carry.
He then went on to list four changes made in the previous years that were designed to reduce the financial burden of Church membership on members:
- The consolidated meeting schedule was introduced (I assume reducing transportation costs).
- The Church went from paying 50% of the cost of new buildings to 60%, 70%, 96%, and finally 100%
- The per-capita welfare assessment was eliminated.
- Ward/branch budgets became completely funded by the Church.
Older members know all this, of course, but it’s still always kind of surprising to me that the Church used to ask for tithing plus a whole bunch of other donations to make local units run. I think it’s admirable that past Church leaders were concerned about the financial burdens this placed on members, concerned enough that they actually worked to get rid of these additional costs.
But that was 30 years ago, and this is now. I feel like I’ve heard pretty much zero concern from GAs recently about the financial burden of Church membership on the members. I don’t doubt that they might feel such concern (some of them, sometimes), but I haven’t heard it expressed. Rather, it seems quite the opposite, where, for example, President Nelson encouraged members in Africa to be sure to pay their tithing as a way to get out of poverty.
What if Church leaders now were concerned about financial burdens of members like Church leaders of 1990 were? What could they do with the earnings on $100 billion to ease those burdens? I’m not even talking about dipping into the fund itself, just its earnings. Also, in the spirit of President Monson’s talk, I am thinking here about things they could do for members, although I of course realize there are many humanitarian goods they could do for non-Mormons.
Here are a few ideas I’ve come up with (or borrowed from other discussions I’ve read). For each, I’ve included a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the cost. I’m assuming that on a $100 billion fund, the Church could count on earning a few percent return, so a few billion dollars a year. I’d love to hear your ideas in the comments.
- Go back to hiring professional custodians for church buildings. Cleaning the church is a cost in time and energy rather than directly in money, but it ultimately amounts to a similar thing. Doing this would have the added benefit of providing a bunch of jobs that would likely often go to Church members. Cost: 30,500 units × 1 building/2 units = 15,250 buildings × 1 custodian/building × $100,000 wages + benefits/year = $1.5 billion/year.
- Reduce or eliminate the cost of serving missions. Cost: 65,000 missionaries × $500/month × 12 months/year = $400 million/year.
- Offer child care for temple patrons. If increasing temple attendance is a serious goal of GAs, this seems like a great way to remove a potential barrier. Cost: 160 temples × 15 sessions/day × 5 operating days/week × 40 operating weeks/year × 50 patrons/session × 25% of patrons bring a child × $10/child/session = $60 million/year.
- Expand one or more of the BYUs. Demand, especially at BYU-Provo, is extremely high relative to the number of available slots as the Church has grown more quickly than the BYUs have. Or maybe open a new BYU entirely, although I realize a mere few billion dollars probably wouldn’t be enough for this. Cost: I don’t even know how to begin to guess.
- Provide a $500 yearly tithing credit for members in the poorer countries. Cost: 6.5 million members outside North America and Europe (I am not including Asia because most Asian members are in the Philippines) × 30% activity rate × $500/year = $1 billion/year.
- Stop giving talks that tell in glowing terms of members choosing to pay tithing instead of buying food (e.g., 1996 Conference, 2006 Conference, 2017 Conference), paying your debts (1995 Conference), buying a crib for your baby (1998 Conference), or paying for your schooling (2002 Conference). Go ahead and keep teaching tithing as a commandment. Just back off on telling awful stories that tell people that, when push comes to shove, their money is more important to the Church than anything else. Cost: Totally unknown. Certainly no direct cost to the fund, although tithing revenue might decline. But it also might not. I understand that (some) GAs feel like if they don’t push the importance of commandments in the strongest possible terms, deploying all the shame and guilt they can muster, that everything will collapse and the Church will descend into anarchy. But I wonder if they might not actually get more tithing out of people if they backed off a little bit and just said, in effect, “It’s a commandment. Work it out. It’s between you and God.”
- Stop giving talks that openly preach the prosperity gospel, like the idea that you should pay tithing on the salary you hope to make rather than the salary that you have. Cost: Same as previous item.
- Clarify that nobody should be paying tithing on their taxed income. This could go a long way toward relieving members’ financial burdens, particularly for the more scrupulosity-prone among us. Cost: $7 billion/year revenue × 25% paying on gross × 20% average effective tax rate = $350 million.
- Clarify that tithing should only be paid on increase/interest like it was originally written, rather than on income without considering costs, as the Church now interprets it. Cost: I’m not sure how to estimate, but probably most of the $7 billion annual income would go away.
One last point to note is that, other than the tithing credit (which I totally admit may be difficult to fit into our current understanding of tithing) none of these changes would require a change to the 10% aspect of tithing. It makes sense to me that leaders wouldn’t want to get away from that number, even if they changed some of the framing around how it’s interpreted. In the past, though, what was paid to the Church was clearly higher than 10% of people’s income. That number changed before, as the talk by President Monson shows. It could change again, if the GAs wanted it to.
Geez, Wendy’s a freaking menace.
There are so many things in this story that demand consideration. I think you have some very good points on the relationship between members and leadership regarding tithes.
The ethics of taking tithes and using them for what Joseph Smith would likely have considered speculation just feels wrong. And we could have a similarly long conversation about using those resources to support large, for profit capitalist ventures like an insurance company or a shopping mall.
I think the potential tax law concerns certainly deserve discussion, though I can certainly understand that it is likely to carry more controversy. Honestly it is what disturbed me most about the headline. I can reconcile myself with the fact that the church has a ton of money stashed away, and I’m even ok with not knowing its purpose. But I have within me a deeply rooted conviction that our relationship with our government, despite its flaws and especially in a democracy, is a social contract. I feel my respect for the laws of the land is something that has been instilled in me by my LDS faith and culture. In the end I often feel the conservative contempt for taxes in the end is no more than putting love of money over love of society (ie others). I’ll certainly acknowledge potential concerns for inefficiency and even corruption in the government, but like tithing, I kind of feel like it’s a duty, and you do it in the end because your honest.
I feel like if the gains from this vast fund don’t meet the legal definition of charitable assets, they at the very least should have been reported and taxed as the law demands. But beyond that, even if the churches accountants or attorneys can magic away the potential legal ramifications and in the end explain that it was really ok, I feel like the optical damage of this is perhaps what’s most hurtful. Even if it ended up being “legal”, it certainly feels like someone high up felt like it was ok to be less than honest in their dealings with their fellow men. Given that we’re talking about the highest levels of leadership in the church, it’s going to force me to pause and question things I’ve never questioned before.
One difference between now and 30 years ago are those 160 temples mentioned above. The expense and effort of travelling to a temple is much reduced for almost every member who had been distant from a temple.
The monthly mission expense, which it was announced last summer will increase to $500 next summer, has been kept at $400 since 2003. When mission equalization was introduced in 1991, the cost was $350. That increase of only 43% over the last 29 years means either drastic cost containment, or an increase of funding missions from other sources besides the missionaries’ contributions.
Your calculations for the building custodian could actually come out even lower: outside of the American west, a custodian could possibly clean an entire stake’s buildings in some cases. The building upkeep is a huge personal issue for me that I’d love to see changed. Our ward building smells so terrible that I’d be embarrassed to bring visitors. Participation in the volunteer cleaning is around 30%. It’s pretty sad.
Scw, she’s a unique one for sure. I don’t recall any previous Church President’s wife in my lifetime who seemed like such a public figure.
Great points, Lee. I feel the same way about taxation in general. The fact that wealthy people and big corporations can figure out ways to make it *legal* for them to do tax trickery to me just suggests that the system is messed up. I don’t care (much) that they were able to make it legal. I want it to be moral. It’s deeply disappointing that the Church has this fund that exists in the same space, even if they’ve likewise been able to find a way to make it legal.
John, that’s an excellent point. The cost of missions is surely rising more slowly than inflation. I appreciate that that clearly shows some concern on the part of current and recent GAs for financial burdens on members.
Bro. Jones, agreed. I was trying to be conservative in my estimation so my estimate would come out high if anything, but I’m sure you’re right. And I agree that it would be a great change to have. I’m sorry that your building is in such bad shape. I don’t feel that way about my ward’s building, but I’m sure it’s a crapshoot, dependent on the willingness of ward members to pitch in and clean.
Good ideas, except for the $500 tithing credit for poor countries. All this would do is encourage many people to join the Church for no other reason. We already baptize lots of people who don’t last more than a few months. This would simply encourage people to get baptized and then disappear, although they would leave their membership intact and show up maybe once a year (at Christmas?) like any good Christian.
Ah, good point, Wally. I guess I was thinking of it as a nonrefundable credit, so it would just remove the obligation to pay on their first $5000 of titheable income (however that’s defined). But you’re right I’m sure that if you could get money back, it would lead to a change in the incentive for people to convert!
So in 1990, church leadership talked about reducing the financial burden from members? In 2019 they seem to think a financial burden is good for members (pay the tithing you want to earn / can’t afford not to pay tithing). They aren’t quite young enough for an “ok, boomer” retort to apply. Sigh.
Sidenote: thanks for suggesting a living wage for the custodians.
Rockwell, I agree. It’s really sad to me that anyone in difficult financial straits who’s on the fence about paying tithing is now seen as needing to learn to sacrifice. I get no sense of concern for people in such situations from the Church at all.
The Community of Christ also practices tithing, but they do it differently. They have a little form you fill out, and they only tithe after basic living expenses like housing and food.