Chapter 12
Discussion of FairMormon questions and answers
on professional clergy, paid ministry, and
tithing.
The Paid Ministry Issue
The FairMormon site asserts many bold answers
to the question concerning a paid ministry. Unfortunately, essentially none of
their answers are in conformance with the Scriptures or with any kind of
theological logic. They begin with the very questionable assumption that every
religion needs to be run exactly the same way as a modern Fortune 500 company.
Only in that frame of reference do any of their arguments make the slightest
ounce of sense, and there is no basis whatsoever to make that assumption in the
case of the restored church of Christ. Here are the questions and answers they
publish, all of which need to be carefully answered and mostly refuted:
Mormonism and
church finances/No paid ministry
https://www.fairmormon.org/answers/Mormonism_and_church_finances/No_paid_ministry
No paid Latter-day
Saint ("Mormon") ministry
Summary: It is claimed
that Mormonism prides itself in having unpaid clergy as one proof of the
Church's truthfulness. They then point to the fact that some General
Authorities, mission presidents, and others do, in fact, receive a living
stipend while serving the Church, and point to this as evidence of the
“hypocrisy” of the Church.
Subtopics:
Question: What
do the scriptures teach about paid ministry in the Church of Jesus Christ?
Question: Does
the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints employ a professional clergy?
Question: Is the
fact that some General Authorities, mission presidents, and others receive a
living stipend while serving the Church evidence of the “hypocrisy” of the
Church?
Question: Why do
General Authorities receive living stipends?
Question: Do
General Authorities receive a large sum of money when they are called in order
to "keep them quiet"?
Question: Do
General Authorities sign a non-disclosure agreement promising to never divulge
what they are paid?
Question: Who is
the highest-paid Church employee in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints?
Question: What do the scriptures teach
about paid ministry in the Church of Jesus Christ?
Having a paid clergy is not in and of itself a terrible thing. Problems
arise when the issue of money becomes a greater motivator than the things of
God
The scriptures
mention circumstances in which a paid ministry is appropriate, and also provide
several cautions about the practice.
Having a paid
clergy is not in and of itself a terrible thing. Problems arise when the issue
of money becomes a greater motivator than the things of God (and this can
happen to any member). So the members support those who are engaged full time
in the work of the Church if necessary, but we also do not have a system where one
can simply choose to become one of these full-time workers (for example, by
getting a degree and looking for a job as a clergyman). This lack of a professional
clergy acts as one of the checks on helping to
make sure that it is not the financial reward that drives those who serve in
the church.
New Testament: "who feedeth a flock, and eateth not of the milk of the
flock?"
7 Who goeth a warfare any time at his own charges? who planteth a vineyard,
and eateth not of the fruit thereof? or who feedeth a flock, and eateth not of
the milk of the flock?
8 Say I these things as a man? or saith not the law the same also?
9 For it is written in the law of Moses, Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of
the ox that treadeth out the corn. Doth God take care for oxen?
10 Or saith he it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this
is written: that he that ploweth should plow in hope; and that he that
thresheth in hope should be partaker of his hope.
11 If we have sown unto you spiritual things, is it a great thing if we
shall reap your carnal things?
12 If others be partakers of this power over you, are not we rather?
Nevertheless we have not used this power; but suffer all things, lest we should
hinder the gospel of Christ.
13 Do ye not know that they which minister about holy things live of the
things of the temple? and they which wait at the altar are partakers with the
altar?
14 Even so hath the Lord ordained that they which preach the gospel should
live of the gospel.
The King James
language can be a bit archaic; the NIV translation of the last two verses (13
and 14) may be more clear:
13 Don’t you know that those who serve in the temple get their food from
the temple, and that those who serve at the altar share in what is offered on
the altar? 14 In the same way, the Lord has commanded that those who preach the
gospel should receive their living from the gospel.
Most of the early members had a real distrust of paid clergy
Within the
church, we often tend to forget that the context for the "unpaid"
aspect of the church goes back to general distrust of paid clergy at the time
the church was formed (in 1830), which stemmed largely from a Protestant view of
Catholicism—so most of the early members had a real distrust of paid clergy.
Within the
lifetime of Joseph Smith it became apparent that you cannot have a religious
organization with individuals who are devoted to the work of that organization
(full time) without finding a way to provide for their material needs (and
there were swings of opinion as to the extent that the church could or should
support individuals even in the first couple of decades). The New Testament
verse that they used to justify helping support some leaders in the early LDS
Church was Luke 10:7, whose language was reflected in D&C 70:12 –
Luke 10:7: “And in the
same house remain, eating and drinking such things as they give: for the
labourer is worthy of his hire. Go not from house to house.”
D&C 70:12: “He who is
appointed to administer spiritual things, the same is worthy of his hire, even
as those who are appointed to a stewardship to administer in temporal things;”
The Doctrine and
Covenants Student manual notes:
In addition to his many responsibilities in the Church, Joseph Smith had a
family, and he could not neglect them, although his responsibility was chiefly
a spiritual one. Although not completely relieved from responsibility for his
temporal needs at that time, the Prophet was told by the Lord to look to the
Church for temporal support. Elder Bruce R. McConkie commented about those who
are asked to give full-time service to the Church:
“All our service in God’s kingdom is predicated on his eternal law which
states: ‘The laborer in Zion shall labor for Zion; for if they labor for money
they shall perish.’ (2 Nephi 26:31.)
“We know full well that the laborer is worthy of his hire, and that those
who devote all their time to the building up of the kingdom must be provided
with food, clothing, shelter, and the necessaries of life. We must employ
teachers in our schools, architects to design our temples, contractors to build
our synagogues, and managers to run our businesses. But those so employed,
along with the whole membership of the Church, participate also on a freewill
and voluntary basis in otherwise furthering the Lord’s work. Bank presidents
work on welfare projects. Architects leave their drafting boards to go on
missions. Contractors lay down their tools to serve as home teachers or
bishops. Lawyers put aside Corpus Juris and the Civil Code to act as guides on
Temple Square. Teachers leave the classroom to visit the fatherless and widows
in their afflictions. Musicians who make their livelihood from their artistry
willingly direct church choirs and perform in church gatherings. Artists who
paint for a living are pleased to volunteer their services freely.”[1]
Temporal support from the members is probably only part of what is implied
in these verses, however. The members were encouraged to support and sustain
the Prophet in every possible way.[2]
Church members have a particular sensitivity to issues surrounding paid
ministries particularly due to admonitions in the Book of Mormon relative to a
practices known as priestcraft
Perhaps the most
explicit scriptural statement about this issue from a negative perspective
comes from 2 Nephi 26:31 (cited above).
Church members
have a particular sensitivity to issues surrounding paid ministries
particularly due to admonitions in the Book of Mormon relative to a practices
known as priestcraft, which is "that men preach and set themselves
up for a light unto the world, that they may get gain and praise of the world;
but they seek not the welfare of Zion" (see 2 Nephi 26:29). It is warned
against and decried repeatedly (see Alma 1:12,16, 3 Ne 16:10, 3 Ne 21:19, 3 Ne 30:2, D&C 33:4). For this
reason, the idea of compensation for service seems contradictory to strongly
held values of the Latter-day Saint community. However, it should be noted that
priestcraft as it has been defined is a condemnation of intent (to get gain and
praise, and not for the welfare of Zion), and not about an individual receiving
support. Living stipends are not compensations for service, but recognition of
a practical reality that individuals who dedicate their full time to Church
service are sometimes unable to simultaneously provide for their own modest
living needs.
The example of
King Benjamin adds to the LDS value of self sufficiency of leaders in
particular. Benjamin, while king, still labored for his own support (see Mosiah 2:14). This is a
very admirable demonstration of humility on the part of the king. However, this
example was being used in the context of his political position as king, and
would be comparable to a President refusing to accept his salary for his
service. It should not be used to condemn the practice of helping provide for
the modest living needs of full time leaders who are unable to dedicate time to
earning a living.
Many people of other faiths admirably desire to serve as clergy in their
respective churches, and go through extensive training to do so
Many people of
other faiths admirably desire to serve as clergy in their respective churches,
and go through extensive training to do so. Most clergy live on subsistence
level wages. Principles of priestcrafts apply equally to these people as to our
own leadership. The scriptures denounce preaching the gospel solely from
a desire to make money and get rich, or to defraud people (see 1 Peter 5:2). The Book of
Mormon likewise defines "priestcraft" as teaching for the sake of
getting gain while not seeking "the welfare of Zion" (see 2 Nephi 26:29. Likewise, many
members of other faiths devote time to their churches without any monetary
compensation. Certainly they follow the teachings of Jesus by so doing, and
accomplish much good thereby.
Question: Does the Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-day Saints employ a professional clergy?
There can be no doubt that the Church does have an unpaid ministry.
More precisely, it does not have a professional clergy
Some claim that
because some of the General Authorities and mission presidents receive a living
stipend, the Church's claim to have no paid ministry is false.
There can be no
doubt that the Church does have an unpaid ministry. More precisely, it
does not have a professional clergy.
Consider:
● the Church does
not graduate individuals with degrees in theology for the purpose of being used
in an employed position as an ecclesiastical leader.
●the vast majority of leadership positions in the Church are filled by
those who receive absolutely no financial assistance and who have no formal
training in theology or Church administration. This includes bishops, stake
presidents, Area Authority Seventies, Relief Society presidents, priests,
teachers, deacons, and elders, etc.
●Missionaries or their families typically pay for the costs of their
missions.
the Church has no professional ministry — one does not "go into"
the priesthood in Mormonism as a form of employment. The Church believes that
"a man must be called of God, by prophecy, and by the laying on of hands
by those who are in authority, to preach the Gospel and administer in the ordinances
thereof."[3] No one can
enter Church ecclesiastical government or administration as a career.
●those few Church leaders who receive a living allowance, have already
served for many years in unpaid volunteer positions of Church leadership, from
which they derived no financial gain, and from which they could have had little
expectation of making their livelihood by being elevated to high positions in
Church administration.
●the Book of Mormon makes provision for Church leaders to be supported by
donations if they are in a position of financial need: "all their
priests and teachers should labor with their own hands for their support, in
all cases save it were in sickness, or in much want; and doing these things,
they did abound in the grace of God."[4]
●the Doctrine and Covenants makes provisions for Church leaders to be
supported by donations (see DC 42:71-73).
●General Authorities previously sat on the boards of Church-owned businesses.
This practice was discontinued in 1996.[5]
Local leadership
Much of the
day-to-day “ministering” that goes on in the Church takes place at the local,
i.e., ward and/or stake level. Leaders at the local level -- that is, bishops,
stake presidents, relief society presidents, elders quorum presidents, and
other leaders or auxiliary workers -- do not receive any kind of pay for the
temporary, volunteer service they render. They likewise do not receive any kind
of scholastic training to prepare them for their service. A bishop usually
serves for a period of 5 years, for example, but he remains in his normal
occupation (accountant, welder, business owner, etc.) while he serves as a
bishop. Early morning or release-time seminary teachers are an exception, but
they are considered employees of CES (Church Education System).
Mission Leadership
Mission
presidents usually serve for a period of 3 years, and may sometimes receive a
living allowance during their period of service, if it is required. Many
mission presidents are financially able to take time out of work to support themselves
during their service (and return to their vocations when their service is
complete), and do not require a living allowance.
Critics may be impossible to satisfy
If provision did
not exist for allowing those who are not "independently wealthy" to
provide full-time Church service, critics might well then complain that the
Church "favors the rich" because it would not allow those of lesser
means to serve. Without some mechanism for providing for the needs of those
giving full-time service, only the worldly elite would be able to serve. This
factor becomes increasingly important as the Church expands out of North
America, especially into nations in the Southern Hemisphere who are less
materially well-off than the industrialized west.
Question: Is the fact that some General
Authorities, mission presidents, and others receive a living stipend while
serving the Church evidence of the “hypocrisy” of the Church?
The Church does not train or employ a professional clergy
It is claimed
that Mormonism prides itself in having unpaid clergy as one proof of the
Church's truthfulness. They then point to the fact that some General
Authorities, mission presidents, and others do, in fact, receive a living
stipend while serving the Church, and point to this as evidence of the
“hypocrisy” of the Church. [6]
●Church leaders are "called" by leaders in greater authority to
occupy positions such as Bishop, Stake President, or Area Authority 70. One
does not campaign for nor apply for such positions, and such an effort would
undoubtedly be considered grounds for disqualifications to serve in such a
significant role. Article of Faith 5 states: "We believe that a man must
be called of God, by prophecy, and by the laying on of hands by those who are
in authority, to preach the Gospel and administer in the ordinances thereof."
(A+of+F 1:5) What is more, those who fill these
positions are not compensated.
●No tithing funds provide for General Authorities' living stipends; such
funds are drawn from business income earned by Church investments.
●The Latter-day Saint practice of not paying our ecclesiastical leaders is
not evidence of the truthfulness of the Church. As with other issues, the real
question regarding the "truthfulness" of the Church hinges on the
endowment of priesthood keys and authority on those who lead the Church.
Temporal matters and how they are handled are governed by spiritual principles.
Leaders who serve faithfully should be sustained regardless of their personal
finances or needs for modest financial assistance.
There can be no
doubt that the Church does have an unpaid ministry. More precisely, it
does not have a professional clergy. Much of the day-to-day
“ministering” that goes on in the Church takes place at the local, i.e., ward
and/or stake level. Leaders at the local level -- that is, bishops, stake
presidents, relief society presidents, elders quorum presidents, and other leaders
or auxiliary workers -- do not receive any kind of pay for the temporary,
volunteer service they render. They likewise do not receive any kind of
scholastic training to prepare them for their service.
Some General Authorities receive a modest living stipend
Some members of
the Church are unaware that at least some General Authorities do receive a
modest living stipend. While it is true that some Church leaders receive a
living allowance while they serve in a given position, it cannot be said that
the Church has a professional ministry in the traditional sense.
Receiving a living stipend does not qualify as priestcraft
Church members
have a particular sensitivity to issues surrounding paid ministries
particularly due to admonitions in the Book of Mormon relative to a practices
known as priestcraft, which is "that men preach and set themselves
up for a light unto the world, that they may get gain and praise of the world;
but they seek not the welfare of Zion" (see 2 Nephi 26:29). However, it
should be noted that priestcraft as it has been defined is a condemnation of
intent (to get gain and praise, and not for the welfare of Zion), and not about
an individual receiving support.
Church employees are not compensated for ecclesiastical service
While a small
number of Church members seek full-time teaching positions within the Church
Education System as instructors, they are not compensated for ecclesiastical
leadership or service. No tithing funds are used to pay Church employees. Their
salaries come from church investments in companies that deal with real estate
like Deseret Management Corporation and Deseret Ranches, communications (TV,
radio, Internet) like Bonneville Communications and Deseret News, and property
management and services like Zion's Securities Corporation and Temple Square
Hospitality.
Question: Why do General Authorities
receive living stipends?
Gordon B. Hinckley: "the living allowances given the General Authorities,
which are very modest in comparison with executive compensation in industry and
the professions, come from this business income and not from the tithing of the
people
Some members of
the Church are unaware that some General Authorities receive a modest stipend
as a living allowance. Nevertheless, it cannot be said that the Church has a professional
ministry in the traditional sense.
Calls to serve
in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles or the First Quorum of the Seventy are
calls to “for-life” positions, members of the Twelve serving full-time until
they die and members of the First Quorum of Seventy serving full-time until
retirement to emeritus status at age seventy. At the present time, calls to
other Quorums of the Seventy do not require the same full-time commitment, so
those who serve in these positions do not receive the living allowances.
The fact that
this stipend exists has not been hidden. As President Hinckley noted in General
Conference:
Merchandising interests are an outgrowth of the cooperative movement which
existed among our people in pioneer times. The Church has maintained certain
real estate holdings, particularly those contiguous to Temple Square, to help
preserve the beauty and the integrity of the core of the city. All of these commercial
properties are tax-paying entities.
I repeat, the combined income from all of these business interests is
relatively small and would not keep the work going for longer than a very brief
period.
I should like to add, parenthetically for your information, that the living
allowances given the General Authorities, which are very modest in comparison
with executive compensation in industry and the professions, come from this
business income and not from the tithing of the people.[7]
The stipend has also been discussed many other times in the past
Conference
reports published during 1940s and 1950s and 1960s always included financial reports;
part of this was a "Church Disbursements," of which the first item
read:
Office of the Corporation of the President: Including salaries of 49
employees: expenses of office; equipment; maintenance of the Administration
Building; and the living allowances and traveling expenses of the General
Authorities, all of which are covered by non-tithing income.[8]
In 1979 it was
common knowledge for a non-member to wonder about why a successful banker would
settle for the modest "living allowance":
In Honolulu a few months ago I boarded a plane, sat in my seat, and was
strapping myself in when a man sat by my side. I introduced myself to him and extended
my hand in a greeting of good fellowship. He was of Japanese extraction, spoke
impeccable English, and explained that he was on his way to Boise, Idaho, to attend
a bank directors’ meeting. Immediately I was curious.
“Which bank?” I queried.
“Citizens National,” he replied.
“Then you must be acquainted with Martin Zachreson, who is mission
president in Southern California for the Mormon Church.”
“Yes,” he said. “ I wondered why he would leave the position of chairman of
the board of a successful bank to serve as a mission president for a mere
living allowance.”
As you can imagine, that opened a door that I was anxious to walk through.
So I asked, “May I explain to you?”[9]
We have seen
above President Hinckley's discussion in the mid-1980s.
In the early
1990s, the Encyclopedia of Mormonism (prepared in conjunction with the
Church) noted:
Unlike local leaders, who maintain their normal vocations while serving in
Church assignments, General Authorities set aside their careers to devote their
full time to the ministry of their office. The living allowance given General
Authorities rarely if ever equals the earnings they sacrifice to serve
full-time in the Church.[10]
In 2011, the
Church's official magazine noted:
Serving as a mission president is both a challenging and a spiritually
exhilarating three-year assignment. In dedicating themselves to this call, many
couples essentially put their old lives on hold, including their jobs and
families.
The interruption to professional employment can in some cases mean
financial loss. While the Church provides mission presidents with a minimal
living allowance, the couples usually have the financial means to supplement
that allowance with their own funds.[11]
In a 2013 manual
for Church teens, the text indicates:
In our day, General Authorities of the Church give up their livelihoods to
serve full-time, so they receive a modest living allowance—enough for them to support
themselves and their families.
Why is it appropriate for Church leaders who are called to full-time
service to receive compensation for their needs?[12]
If there were no stipends, only the wealthy could serve
If the Church
did not provide living allowances, then only those who were independently
wealthy would qualify for Church service. Some critics would doubtless be
troubled by this scenario, and would probably then claim that the Church
exalted wealth and personal prosperity, and would not allow any without it to
serve.
Many Church General Authorities come from respected professions from which
they make a substantial living
Dedicating
themselves full time at the sacrifice of substantial careers, these leaders
live modestly, work tirelessly, keep grueling travel schedules, and continue
doing so well past an age when others retire. They are also demonstrably men of
education and accomplishment; one can hardly claim that they were unsuited for
work in the world given their accomplishments prior to being called to
full-time Church service.
Michael
Otterson, formerly head of Church Public Affairs, observed:
I can hardly believe it when I hear people question the motives of the
Brethren for the work they do, or when they imply there is somehow some
monetary reward or motive.
Let me share the reality. Not all the Brethren have been businessmen, but
most have had extraordinarily successful careers by the time they are called to
be an apostle. As President Spencer W. Kimball once pointed out, the ability to
lead people and an organization is a more-than-helpful attribute in a Church of
millions of people, especially when combined with spiritual depth and a rich
understanding of the gospel. Because several have been highly successful in
business careers, when they become apostles their stipend and allowances may
literally be less than a tithe on what they previously earned.
Some of the Brethren have been educators. Elder Scott was a nuclear
physicist, Elder Nelson a heart surgeon. Several were highly successful
lawyers. Right now we have three former university presidents in the Twelve.
President Boyd K. Packer was also an educator by profession, although in his
spare time and in his earlier days he loved to carve beautiful things out of
wood. That sounds curiously related to another scripturally honored profession
— that of a carpenter.
Can you imagine what it would be like to be called to the Twelve? In most
cases you have already had a successful career. You know you will continue to
serve the Church in some volunteer capacity, but you have begun to think of
your future retirement. The First Presidency and the Twelve, of course, do not
retire. Neither are they released. With their call comes the sure knowledge
that they will work every day for the rest of their lives, even if they live
into their 90s, until they literally drop and their minds and bodies give out.
Their workday begins early and does not end at 5:00 p.m. The Twelve get Mondays
off, and those Mondays are frequently spent preparing for the rest of the week.
If they have a weekend assignment, they will often travel on a Friday
afternoon. Periodically, even though in their 80s, they face the grueling
schedule of international speaking conferences and leadership responsibilities.
What about when they are home? I have the cell phone numbers of most of the
Brethren because I sometimes have to call them in the evening, on weekends or when
they are out and about. I’m not naïve enough to think that I am the only Church
officer to do so. So even their downtime is peppered with interruptions. I
invariably begin those calls by apologizing for interrupting them at home. I
have never once been rebuked for calling. They are invariably kind and
reassuring, even early in the morning or late at night.
Their primary time off each year is from the end of the mission presidents’
seminar at the very end of June through the end of July. And while this time is
meant as a break, most of the Brethren use this time to turn their thoughts,
among other things, to October general conference and preparation of their
remarks. During Christmas break they do the same for April conference. Every
one of them takes extraordinary care and time in deciding on a topic and
crafting their messages. The process weighs on them for months as they refine
draft after draft.
This is not a schedule you would wish on anyone. Yet they bear it with
grace and find joy for some overwhelmingly important reasons — their testimony
and commitment to be a witness of the Savior of the world and their desire to
strengthen His children everywhere. They would be the very first to acknowledge
their own faults or failings, just as we can readily point to the apostles of
the New Testament and see imperfect people.[13]
In 1996, the stipend was in the neighborhood of $50,000 per year. In 2014
it was increased from $116,400 to $120,000
In 1996,[14] the church
altered some of the responsibilities given to General Authorities. Prior to
this point in time, they also served on corporate boards of church-owned
companies and for these positions they received a stipend. At that point in
time, some of the financial information was disclosed, indicating that the
stipend was in the neighborhood of $50,000.00 a year.
To give a sense
of proper comparison, US Department of Labor statistics list the 1996 average
salary of a civil engineer at $52,750, that of a computer programmer at
$50,490, and that of the average junior college teacher at $49,200. Therefore,
the living allowance, which provides for most of the normal day-to-day expenses
of a full-time authority and his family (including house payments, personal
transportation, food, clothing, entertainment, etc.), is in line with that of a
professional employee. It is far lower than the large management salaries that
might be expected for someone with the skills that these General Authorities
must have and the responsibilities that they must shoulder.
Question: Do General Authorities receive a
large sum of money when they are called in order to "keep them
quiet"?
Claims that General Authorities receive large "hush money"
payments are pure speculation with little data
This type of
criticism seems intended to imply that General Authorities perform their duties
out of greed, rather than sincere belief. This seems implausible, given that
most are at or beyond retirement age when called, and many have been highly
successful outside of Church service.
Furthermore:
●Non-disclosure agreements are standard practice with regard to salary and
compensation.
●The numbers suggested have consistently escalated over time, despite an
absence of hard data.
●Those who provide such accounts attempt to make normal practices seem nefarious
or hidden.
●The Church has not hidden the fact that general authorities receive a
stipend, and there is scriptural warrant for the practice.
These kinds of speculations as to money received almost always comes from
disaffected and former members, and involves large round numbers such as
$300,000, $500,000 or $1,000,000
They all claim
(in true conspiracy theory fashion) to have an inside source. They always make
claims with no evidence - and use nice big eye-catching round numbers such as
$300,000, $500,000, $1,000,000, and so on. Should the church provide some data,
it would almost certainly be dismissed as a cover up of the truth (protected of
course by those NDAs, right?). There may be a lot of reasons why people become
General Authorities, but it seems doubtful that getting wealthy is one of them.
You would think, with hundreds of General Authorities, all supposedly getting
excessive payments from the church (as the allegations go) for the last
century, there might have been some sort of financial scandal that the critics
could pin their speculations to. But it doesn't seem like it, does it?
Question: Do General Authorities sign a
non-disclosure agreement promising to never divulge what they are paid?
It is highly likely that General Authorities sign a non-disclosure
agreement
Not only do many
of the employees of BYU sign such non-disclosure agreements, but, those who
have access to this information are also required to sign such agreements.
Generally speaking, these agreements allow organizations to sue for damages
when a breach of confidentiality occurs. The major point here, though, is that
if general authorities are given a stipend (for living expenses), it is quite
possible that the stipend comes with a non-disclosure agreement (an NDA). This
would be the "contract promising never to divulge to anyone what they are
paid". Of course, it is presented in a way that makes all sorts of
insinuations. But probably if such a thing exists and happens, it follows the
standard boiler plate legal language used elsewhere by the Church's legal team
to handle the same issue. That contract wouldn't actually list the compensation,
and so while this person may have seen the NDA, we can be certain that they
have no personal knowledge of what the compensation actually is. The
$300,000.00 figure is just being tossed out with no real evidence behind it,
save anonymous hearsay.
Now, what is the
point of this sort of agreement? Mentioning the NDA in this kind of discussion
is intended by the critic to demonstrate that something nefarious is going on.
That is, we are meant to conclude that the Church is covering a big secret of
some sort with the use of NDAs.
A non-disclosure agreement does not guarantee secrecy
This, however,
doesn't make much sense. One problem with an NDA is that in order to get relief
the injured party must sue. And in suing, the contract itself would become part
of the court case, and potentially available for public scrutiny. If the
objective is complete secrecy, then the concept of an NDA utterly defeats the
purpose in this case. Not only would it open up hidden information for public
consumption, it would also tend to confirm whatever had been said by the
general authority who offered information. This would only be some sort of
problem if the church was trying to hide something. And so if the church is
trying to hide payments to general authorities, then the whole process of
having a NDA creates far more problems than it would solve.
Question: Who is the highest-paid Church
employee in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?
The head football coach at Brigham Young University is likely the highest
paid employee
Who is the
highest paid church employee? As of 2014, it is probably Bronco Mendenhall (the
head football coach at BYU). His base salary is estimated to be at least
$900,000 a year. With incentives and bonuses, it could be as high as $2,000,000.00
per year. Even at 2 million a year, he would only rank 59th (of 126) college
football coaches (a lot to us individuals, not excessive by the narrow standard
of his peers).[15]
Of course,
nobody is really quite sure how much he makes because, like most employees of
BYU, Bronco Mendenhall has signed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) about his
salary. And being that he works for a private university, you cannot simply
request this information. This is, by the way, standard practice for private
universities in particular, but its also true of most private entities.
Organizations where salary information is widely available are usually managed
by group contracts and are often unionized. The Church does not fit that
particular mold. The business side of the Church (and its corporate employees)
follow business practices that recommend these kinds of NDAs.
Notes
1. Bruce R. McConkie, Conference
Report (Apr. 1975), 77.; or "Obedience,
Consecration, and Sacrifice," Ensign (May
1975), 52.
6. Bill McKeever,
"Mormonism's Paid Ministry," (accessed April 28, 2008); Sandra Tanner,
"Do Mormon Leaders Receive Financial Support?" (accessed April 28,
2008).
8. This example
is from Conference Report (6-8 April 1945), 18.
10. Marvin K.
Gardner, "General
Authorities," in Encyclopedia of
Mormonism, 4 vols., edited by Daniel H. Ludlow, (New
York, Macmillan Publishing, 1992).
11. Heather
Whittle Wrigley, "New Mission
Presidents Blessed for Exercise of Faith," Liahona (December
2011). See also an on-line "Church News" feature which reproduces
this material from 1 July 2011.
12. Unit 15: Day
4, D&C 69-71," Doctrine and
Covenants and Church History Study Guide for Home-Study Seminary Students (Salt Lake
City, UT: Intellectual Reserve, 2013).
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Comments
-- first reactions to paid ministry justification argument
As
long as we are dealing in metaphors concerning flocks, as mentioned above, I
would prefer to use the image of fleecing the flock, something that con men do
for a living.
As
the proponents of a paid ministry point out here, perhaps unintentionally, the
shepherd metaphor is not really the completely correct metaphor for what should
be going on in the church, although it is in fact the correct metaphor for what
is actually going on in the church today. Church leaders are not supposed to be
sacrificing church "lambs" for their own needs, although that is in
fact what shepherds do with portions of their flock. That metaphor is correct
only so far, and falls apart if you exceed its rational application.
In
their bringing up the topic of warfare as part of their argument, they have
inadvertently given away a secret – the church leaders are empire builders at
heart, not religionists. Religion is just an excuse, like Islam -- for building
an empire with an army, like Islam, making the LDS church just another
"warlord religion."
Some
are certainly better than others, but there is no such thing as a completely
righteous paid ministry, where "paid ministry" includes the
ideological feature that people are required to pay money for salvation,
delivered through a self-appointed bureaucracy – a moneymaking "salvation
bureaucracy."
People
may indeed be given priesthood power, but the instructions for the use of that
priesthood is that it was "freely have ye received, freely give." The
instant that that priesthood power is used for money -- to generate personal
income -- we are back with Simon the Sorcerer before he came to understand the
true gospel.
Even
short-term missionary work has its problems. As soon as the church puts
missionaries on its payroll, then they are employees, not free-will
missionaries. If a missionary can pay for his own mission, one way or another,
or perhaps his parents or friends can do so, then the necessary freedom of
choice and charitable attitude is maintained. But the second that a missionary
becomes a church employee, and becomes part of an army, things start to
deteriorate. The church can then start to treat that missionary like an
employee and make them part of their command-and-control system, which gives
the church organization too much power.
At
one point, Joseph Smith was first voted a salary and then was voted to have no
salary. That was the status for the rest of his life, as far as I know. If this
answer implies that Joseph Smith had such an official salary, then it is a
complete lie. Or, if not a lie, then this is what we might call sophistry,
playing games with the truth so that people believe a lie, even if,
technically, there were no lies told. This might involve the skillful parsing
of words, or playing language shell games, to trick the listener.
Most
of the problem here comes from one little logical and ideological trick. It is
true that people who love the gospel and wish it to succeed should be willing
to support those who are actively engaged in moving the church forward. That is
the essence of spontaneous, free-will charity. The difference between the
original church of Christ and today's church is that today's church has taken
this logic the next step and said that a person cannot be a good member of the
church and be assured of salvation unless they pay a mandatory tax to support
the church and purchase their salvation. It is that step of turning charity
into a mandatory tax that is the essence of today's priestcraft. The church
then functions like a typical government where it takes a tax without making
any commitments about exactly where that money will be spent, and then treating
it like a standard government appropriation process where the member/taxpayer
had no say about the money going into the system or how the money is spent once
it's in the system. In a true charity system, the people decide exactly what
they're willing to spend their money on, and they are perfectly welcome to
administer it themselves, if that is more efficient, which it normally is, or
whether they wish to give some or all their money to an organization which
promises to the more efficient than an individual could be. If that promise of
greater efficiency or more effectiveness is not upheld, then the giver is
perfectly justified moving his funds elsewhere. That particular form of
religious freedom is exactly what the current church has removed from its
members, or at least teaches and claims that it has that the vast power over
members' time and resources and the property. That is a clear case of unrighteous
dominion, and it ought to be clearly labeled as such.
Does
a person's having the highest of high priesthoods entitle him to control everyone
and all their property? Like some kind of divine right of Kings? That was
Satan's argument, but the truth, according to God the father, is exactly the
opposite. The one who has the most priesthood power must be the servant of all.
That was the essence of the temptation of Christ, and he passed it with flying
colors, although a very large number of his followers, given similar choices
and opportunities, have failed that test.
mention epistle of 12
- start of coercion
Those
apologists who present the arguments here should get points for clever
sophistry, but they do not get points for complete truth and accuracy. There
are so many things wrong with these assertions, that it could easily take
several books to straighten it all out. I have only one short article I am
planning to write, so I can't cover everything, but hopefully the reader can
get the basics here.
How is tithing calculated
Mormonism and church
finances/Tithing/How is tithing calculated
https://www.fairmormon.org/answers/Mormonism_and_church_finances/Tithing/How_is_tithing_calculated
Calculation of tithing
Summary: I've been told that the Church expects or
teaches its members to tithe on gross income. What can you tell me about how
tithing it taught in the Church?
SUBTOPICS:
Question: Can one pay tithing on only net or surplus income and still be a
temple worthy and faithful Latter-day Saint?
First Presidency statement: "The simplest statement
we know of is the statement of the Lord himself, namely, that the members of
the Church should pay 'one-tenth of all their interest annually,' which is
understood to mean income"
Members of the Church covenant to pay tithing—the word
comes from "tithe," meaning "a tenth."
This has naturally led to the question, "A tenth of
what? Gross income? Net income? Pre-tax? Post-tax?"
Quite simply, the method is left up to the individual.
The First Presidency issued the following statement in 1970, which is repeated
the current (2006) Church Handbook of Instructions:
The simplest statement we know of is the
statement of the Lord himself, namely, that the members of the Church should
pay 'one-tenth of all their interest annually,' which is understood to mean
income. No one is justified in making any other statement than this. [1]
No member is ever to be told how to calculate their
tithing
Each member is to prayerfully decide how to interpret
this statement. No member is ever to be told how to calculate their tithing. No
member is authorized to tell another how to pay tithing.
Each year, members of the Church meet with their bishop
and declare their tithing status—they either indicate that they are full tithe
payers, or not. No questions are asked about the means whereby this is
determined—such matters are between the member and the Lord.
Anyone who claims otherwise bears the burden of proof,
and should be required to produce a statement which differs from the First
Presidency's statement of 1970, to which leaders have repeatedly appealed
since. This includes the most recent Church handbook.[2]
Robert D. Hales: "The First Presidency has written what the law of
tithing is for us today"
Elder Robert D. Hales:
The First Presidency has written what the law of tithing
is for us today: “The simplest statement we know of is the statement of the
Lord himself, namely, that the members of the Church should pay ‘one tenth of
all their interest annually,’ which is understood to mean income. No one is
justified in making any other statement than this.” (First Presidency letter,
19 March 1970.) [3]
Notes
1. First
Presidency letter, 19 March 1970. This letter has been quoted in numerous talks
by general authorities and Church lesson manuals. A convenient examples is
Robert D. Hales, "The Divine Law of Tithing," Ensign (December
1986), 14. off-site
2. Handbook 1:Stake Presidents and Bishops (2010), 14.4.1. In
accordance with Church policy, FairMormon will not reproduce the contents of
the first volume of the handbook here. Members who wish to consult this volume
can do so, however, by asking to see their bishop or branch president's copy.
https://www.fairmormon.org/answers/Mormonism_and_church_finances/Tithing/How_is_tithing_calculated#cite_ref-1
Comments
This 10%, supposedly solely calculated by the members,
is not really a free will gift to the church. The required amount to achieve
salvation should be zero. Obviously, any version of 10% is a great deal more
than zero. And it is not completely spontaneous. People are repeatedly told not
to rob God of the tithes and offerings, and they're also told that it is fire
insurance which they need. They are also told to contribute a generous fast
offering, usually in the same phrase, so that "generous" is the
controlling word. In other words, it would be going much too far to say that it
is left completely up to the membership to decide without constant
encouragement from church leaders to give more. So there are many different
kinds of "full-tithes," and you'll probably never hear someone tell
you to give a minimal tithe.
Responding more formally to the current FAIRMormon answer
I would like to
challenge most of the answers to the main question concerning a paid ministry,
and offer an alternate explanation. In order to appreciate the practical importance
of this issue, an understanding of the strategic situation is very helpful.
However, I have put the 4-page strategic overview at the end of this document
to make it clearly optional reading.
Contents
1. Responding to the current FAIR Mormon answer
2. The Correct Answer
3. A Strategic Overview -- plus conclusions and consequences
I will first
point out the difficulties I see in the logic FairMormon has provided,1
and then go on to lay out what I believe is the correct scripture-based answer.
Your answer
begins by saying that "Having a paid clergy is not in and of itself a
terrible thing." As I intend to point out later, I believe that Christ,
and all the prophets who have written about the question in the scriptures, or
made policy decisions concerning it, including the first three prophets in our
dispensation, would completely disagree, and for very good reasons. A paid ministry is, and has always been, the
main vehicle by which the gospel is gradually distorted and transformed until
it is almost unrecognizable and becomes completely ineffective as we have seen
with the gradual formation and behavior of the Catholic Church over many
centuries.
---Christ's temptations---
We should be
grateful that human nature never changes, but we would also be foolish to give
mortal men the unlimited power, along with ample incentives, to change the
gospel and its administration for their own advantage. Only if mortal men have
no chance whatsoever to benefit financially from the gospel, and are in fact
most likely to have to sacrifice great things for the gospel, are they likely
to stay honest and true. If they "own" a church position and salary
they will inevitably abuse it, even if they are not fully conscious of their
actions. The careerists who might naturally be drawn to the church as a source
of income will go elsewhere to make their fortune, leaving only the truly
committed members to work on behalf of the gospel at their own expense or
dependent on charity. Some may be driven mostly by seeking financial awards,
but others are driven by the opportunity to exercise power over others,
administer large budgets, establish a religious empire, etc. That might be the
most dangerous reason of all, as explained by D&C 121, and that has nothing
to do with whether they have some appropriate college degree or not.
I'm sorry to say that it seems like a very weak and time-specific
argument to say that a paid ministry/priestcraft situation can only come about
by someone seeking a religion degree and then looking for a job as a clergyman.
We can safely guess that Nehor and Korihor in the Book of Mormon did not have
prestigious seminary degrees, nor have thousands of other preachers who felt
the call to the ministry, for whatever reason.
We certainly have situations such as our seminary and Institute
program where someone can indeed "simply choose to become one of these
full-time workers." The system we have might be even more pernicious than
the "professional clergy" argument given. We might actually be better
off if those who take over the top leadership positions had been fully trained
in a rigorous (currently nonexistent) LDS theological seminary before they took
those positions.
As it is, we seem to count vast ignorance of Christian theology and
church history as a net positive in being appointed to church leadership
positions. Top church leaders typically are not theologians or religious historians
or religion management experts, and are usually poorly prepared to make
worldwide gospel policy decisions at the beginning of their calling. It appears
that they are more apt to simply learn the ropes as an apprentice might do,
absorbing all the bad and good biases and prejudices of those they work with.
This might ensure that the leaders have a truly homogenous, not to say
monotonous, view of what a church leader should do, which would tend to
minimize the range of issues that might be considered in new situations. Rather
than having an objective view of exactly what the gospel includes and does not
include, and why, the enormous amount of relativism which is introduced by this
amateur apprenticeship program is a great deal more likely to cause trouble
than to be a benefit. In the process of creating a peer-reviewed
"gold-standard" or "constitutional" curriculum for a formal
course in Mormon doctrine for potential leaders, hopefully many people would
notice any significant differences between what the scriptures teach and what
the church has taught and implemented.
Currently, it is not very difficult for nepotism and attempts at
dynasties to be part of the church organization, since almost anyone can be
considered qualified by a modicum of experience to accept important management
positions. A rigorous meritocracy would be far superior and more
desirable. It appears that many staff
positions are filled by people with no particular qualifications as a religion
content manager. But these people might actually have more effect on day-to-day
policy then even the top church leaders.
I assume there are many different channels through which people can
indicate their interest in becoming a paid worker at church headquarters. These
paths are probably just a little less obvious than the Protestant or Catholic
route of seeking a seminary degree and then seeking a job. Strangely enough,
similar seminary study is the path the church requires for many of its college
level religion teachers, who would otherwise be unqualified to teach many
technical religion topics. Presumably, those who gain experience as a bishop,
stake president, area authority, etc., are part of the feeder system that
results in one receiving a calling at the top levels. This is like going from
the minor leagues to the major leagues, and certainly includes a selection
process and perhaps a competition process. The fact that the process may take
longer than a four-year seminary degree, does not really change the nature of
the selection process. In any event, it becomes as much of a political process
as any other.
These days, most of the men chosen as leaders have served a large
portion of their lives as volunteer church administrators such as bishops and
stake presidents and area authorities. Most of them are indeed good
administrators, and almost without exception will have provided for their own
retirement, with private pensions, Social Security, other personal resources,
etc., so that it would be no great burden for them to serve as central church leaders
without a salary. It is hard to see why they would need a church salary. Some
reasons for supplying a salary might include the church organization's desire
to make it look like a business by paying everyone a salary. That would help
justify the staff getting generous salaries. If only one or two needed
financial assistance, someone might propose paying everyone a salary just so
those one or two would not feel different. But, of course, a salary provides
the church with a control mechanism to maximize cooperation and minimize
dissent. It is very questionable whether that typical bureaucratic control
mechanism should have a place in a church organization.
I think there is still great value in making those top positions
require continual sacrifice on the part of those doing the job, simply to keep
out those who would naturally tend to seek money and power (which is almost
everyone), and to keep them humble and unbiased in the decisions they make
concerning the use of church resources, avoiding any kind of appearance of
self-dealing or self-interest or conflict of interest.
A broader view
Looking
at the world on a broader scale, it is my opinion that anyone who would suggest
that a paid ministry is not a bad thing must be completely ignorant of most of
the world's history, and is intentionally focusing on the microdot-sized bit of
history which might justify that person getting a church salary. No matter
where or when we look at the world and its organizations, the existence of a
paid ministry is always evidence of vast corruption, and always involves some
kind of religious corruption, although it may not be perfectly evident in all
cases. Whether we look at the paid ministries of the Egyptian pharaohs and
their priestly class, the priests of Baal or of Moloch, the priests directing
the worship of Nebuchadnezzar at the time of Daniel, the pagan priests of Rome,
the law of Moses, the Hindus, the Buddhists, the Muslims, the Marxists, the
fascists, the medieval kings and their courts, etc., ad infinitum, we see the
same pattern over and over again. These bureaucracies are set up for the exact
purpose of gaining political and economic power through deception, fear, and
force – whatever it takes. Usually that involves inventing a religion or value
system which strives to convince people that they are not entitled to freedom
and that their personal resources belong to the religious or political or
religious/political governing body.
Worst of
all, when the "true religion" finally and inevitably adopts these
corrupt and exploitative practices, it gives license to every other political
con artist to earn a very generous free lunch through rhetoric, propaganda,
deception, and force. 4 Ne. 1:26. Apparently, historically, it is always the
church which first forms classes based on paid ministry concepts, even while it
teaches that classes are bad thing, indicating the standard hypocrisy involved
in all of this. The extreme cases are in Marxism and Communism where the
rhetoric of avoiding classes is used to create the most rigid set of classes
imaginable. Apparently, people never get any smarter, and they always fall for
this total nonsense every time it is used. Inquisitions are one of the standard
tools of maintaining this corrupt power structure. The LDS church has not yet
gone as far as many of these organizations in killing dissenters, although
"inquisitions" might still be an appropriate title for some of the
"disciplinary councils" that are directed from church headquarters
while deceptively pretending that it is totally a spontaneous local phenomenon.
Does a person's having the highest of high priesthoods entitle him to
control everyone and all their property, like some kind of divine right of
Kings? That was Satan's argument, but the truth, according to God the father,
is exactly the opposite. The one who has the most priesthood power must be the
servant of all. That was the essence of the several temptations of Christ, and
he passed it with flying colors, although a very large number of his followers,
given similar choices and opportunities, have failed that test. That applies to
every one of the tens of thousands of people who are currently part of the LDS
paid ministry.
Are there
really any New Testament Scriptures that defend
a paid ministry?
The scriptures cited by the FAIR Mormon answers seem like very weak
support, if not actually antagonistic to the paid ministry issue.
1 Corinthians 9:7-14 is a rather strange scripture as a beginning
quote on this issue. It mostly seems irrelevant to this paid ministry issue.
The chapter headnotes for 1 Corinthians 9 include the phrase "He preaches
the gospel to all without charge," indicating that the people who added
the headnotes saw no basis for any paid ministry, or that Paul made any actual
claims for payment.
Verse 7 begins with "Who goeth a warfare any time at his own
charges?" We might wonder how warfare has anything at all to do with a
paid ministry question. It may be that those engaged in warfare only go out at
the behest and at the expense of someone else such as a warlord or government
leader. But does that have anything to do with doing missionary work? It is
hard to see how. The disciples and apostles went out individually, on their
own, not under the control of some warlord. They had received special experiences
with the Savior's life and works or other miracles, and it was based on their
personal experience and personal desires to spread the gospel that they were
out teaching. That truly has nothing to do with any kind of warfare thinking or
related military bureaucracy and salary payments. If they were soldiers they
would usually expect to be paid for their labors, but that, again, has nothing
to do with spreading the gospel. This can be nothing more than a bad and
inapplicable analogy.
Worst of all, a soldier is not expected to have anything to do with
setting policy, but only to do his assigned job. How would it work out if every
soldier saw himself as a general? What interesting policies might they invent
to make their lives easier? The apostles were setting church policy at every
moment of their lives, and if they were hoping to become part of some grand
empire, then they were most definitely in the wrong line of activity. Under
Roman rule, they were most likely to be killed for their efforts, as many of them
were, rather than be paid for their efforts.
Considering the rest of the quotation, it is true that the gospel
constantly supports freedom and fairness, which includes ownership of property
and freedom of action, so it makes perfect sense for someone to expect to be
paid or repaid for the work they do in the normal flow of commercial life or in
farming. Slavery is epitomized by forcing someone to do work and then not
paying them a fair wage for that work. But what has that got to do with purely
charitable gospel activity? Paul does make a strange claim to be repaid by the
people whom he has taught "If we have sown unto you spiritual things, is
it a great thing if we shall reap your carnal things?", but then
completely refuses to use that power or claim over them. "Nevertheless we
have not used this power; but suffer all things, lest we should hinder the
gospel of Christ."
(As Alcuin
notices, making people pay huge amounts of money to learn and live the gospel
would have been an enormous restraint on the spreading of the gospel. That was
the exact problem which kept the law of Moses from going any further than among
the Jews. If you want a good message to spread widely, and change the way the
world operates, it must clearly be a net benefit, not a net cost to the
proselyte.) (See Alcuin's comment mentioned in the book on tithing by Rev. Clark?)
If Paul brings up this potential claim against the goods of his
converts (perhaps just playing the super lawyer for the fun of it, perhaps
merely to bring up the point that those who received the gospel had a duty to
repay that gift somehow, just as he felt driven to teach the word), and then
specifically refuses to follow through with any such claim, what is the policy
we are to follow today? Should we not make the exact same choices Paul did, for
the exact same reasons, or do we use his throwaway logic to actually enforce
claims over church members? If we are going to follow Paul's actual policy,
then we take nothing, and we refuse any paid ministry situation. even while we
find other productive ways to "give back" to the larger cause.
Concerning verses 13 and 14, under the Law of Moses which governed
nearly all the practical affairs of the Israelites, yes, it is true that under
the arrangements specified for Levites and non-Levites, the Levites were
provided their living and were paid for their work under the Law of Moses,
especially during their once-a-year visit to the temple, but how far does that
go as a metaphor or analogy in today's world?
The Law of Moses was done away after the death and resurrection of
Christ, including ending the Levite tithing arrangements, which put almost
everything up in the air as unsettled, so exactly what are the rules for today
that you are espousing? Are you saying that we are and should be living the Law
of Moses today? If not, then you have to give a great deal more background than
just cite this one seemingly irrelevant scripture. Rather than having appointed
lifetime priests as under the rigid and cumbersome Law of Moses, as with the
Levites, every man today is his own priest and no one should expect to be paid for
being his own priest. Is every man going to go through the meaningless ritual
of paying himself for his church service?
The next topic is entitled "History of the concern within LDS
thought," but this paragraph doesn't mention a single thing about why
"the early members had a real distrust of paid clergy." Was this a
purely baseless bias, or did they have good reasons that ought to apply to
themselves then and to us now? I don't know of any automatic mechanism that
protects church members from oppressive church leaders.
We might mention that other churches reached the exact same conclusion
as the early Mormons. One incident involved the Baptists in Connecticut writing
to Pres. Thomas Jefferson about the state level persecution of Baptists by
churches incorporated under state law and given political powers. The Baptists
refused to be incorporated, lest they become just as secularized and oppressive
as these other more favored Protestant churches. Whether it was intentional or
not, the Mormons started out agreeing completely with the Baptists on
organizational matters, and only later adopted the potentially repressive
statist Protestant views and procedures and also those of the Catholic Church.
Obviously, the power-seeking of Catholic Church clergy was evidenced by their
constant goals to accumulate property and money, and build a religious empire.
Also obviously, the Catholic Church changed gospel doctrine and policy as a
means to support their vigorous self-aggrandizement and empire building. It has
been amply shown that even the first step down that path is corrupting, no
matter a person's good intentions. The option to change church doctrine and
policy for one's own benefit, especially monetary benefit, will always be
exercised if there is any opportunity whatsoever.
The next citations are Luke 10:7 and D&C 70:12. Notice that Luke
10:4 says "Carry neither purse, nor scrip, nor shoes: and salute no man by
the way." These Seventy who were sent out were clearly missionaries, who
were dependent on the goodwill of their contacts to take care of them. Ideally,
their contacts would be hospitable enough and grateful enough to supply their
needs as they passed by, but there was never the slightest hint that these
local people were required by any law to recompense these missionaries. This is
purely activity in the Good Samaritan kind of charity.
The quoting of Luke 10:7 as support for a paid ministry seems
completely irrelevant and inappropriate.
"And in the same house remain, eating and drinking such things as
they give: for the labourer is worthy of his hire. ..." This has absolutely nothing to do with a
commercial contract for labor. The Seventies could not possibly have a legal
claim for payment. This is pure, direct, individual charity. The teaching by
the missionaries is charity, and the providing of food by their guests and
contacts is charity. There is simply no support whatsoever here for a paid
ministry, unless that "paid ministry" amounts to something as
innocuous as the missionaries having dinner appointments every night with
different members.
As a small sidenote, the phrase "Go not from house to house"
sounds like bad news for our missionary program today. This seems to end
tracting and perhaps refers to some kind of a referral process.
The D&C 70:12 reference is the only one that has any real possible
significance, and that seems to relate only to a short-term historical
situation which doesn't apply at all today. From about 1831 to 1833 Bishop
Partridge was assigned to handle church real estate matters and welfare distribution
matters related to gathering the Saints to Jackson County, Missouri. That was a
critical administrative function, but it mostly came to an end when the Saints
were driven out of Missouri. With a little less chaos and a little better
church organization, most of those functions could be done by volunteers, as is
done today at the ward and stake level.
The story that appears in Acts 18:3 seems relevant even though it is
not cited in the FAIRMormon answer. We find Paul living in Corinth, practicing his
tentmaker trade along with members there who worked in the same trade.
Presumably, Paul worked to earn money to supply his own wants and needs. If he
felt he had broad claim on everyone else's goods, why would he bother to work
himself? Verse 4 tells us "And he reasoned in the synagogue every sabbath,
and persuaded the Jews and Greeks." Does this pattern of working and
preaching sound like someone who has an independent living as a paid preacher?
I believe we can say that Paul taught in the synagogues without pay. Acts 18:4.
The FAIRMormon answer includes the sentence "Although not
completely relieved from responsibility for his temporal needs at that time,
the Prophet was told by the Lord to look to the church for temporal
support." But that statement leaves out a lot of relevant factors.
D&C 24:3
Magnify thine office; and after thou hast sowed thy fields and secured them, go
speedily unto the church which is in Colesville, Fayette, and Manchester, and
they shall support thee; and I will bless them both spiritually and temporally;
4 But if they
receive thee not, I will send upon them a cursing instead of a blessing.
Joseph Smith was not let off the hook for doing all that he reasonably
could to support himself and his family, and the support he was to receive in
Colesville and elsewhere was to be short-term and in the nature of
friend-to-friend charity, with nothing like a legal claim or a commercial
transaction. Those people were to be much blessed for doing good and would be
cursed for not doing good. That keeps it completely in God's charitable realm,
like the widow who fed Elijah from an unending barrel of flour and jar of oil,
with no connection whatsoever with normal business operations. It was all to be
completely informal. There is no talk of paying tithing, no council on the
disposition of the tithe dispensing monies, etc.
It is also a little bit strange that 2 Nephi 26:31 is cited as a proof
text for supporting a paid ministry. Together with verse 30, the two verses
actually argue against the paid ministry conclusion.
2 Nephi 26:30
Behold, the Lord hath forbidden this thing; wherefore, the Lord God hath given
a commandment that all men should have charity, which charity is love. And
except they should have charity they were nothing. Wherefore, if they should
have charity they would not suffer the laborer in Zion to perish.
31 But the
laborer in Zion shall labor for Zion: for if they labor for money they shall
perish.
This actually has two possible interpretations, neither one which support
the paid ministry arguments. I believe verse 31 tells us that all people who
labor in Zion should indeed labor idealistically and altruistically for Zion.
If they labor for money, perhaps as a careerist might do, they shall perish.
That seems like an explicit argument against even the slightest whiff of a paid
ministry.
Looking at it a different way, those who labor for Zion, which might
include missionaries, should receive charity from other people in Zion,
although the missionaries are not ENTITLED to demand it (as a matter of
enforceable religious law). All the Saints should be willing to help other
Saints engaged in a good cause, but none of this is contractual or mandatory.
If the missionaries are not receiving support for their labors, they would be
well advised to go somewhere else where they were made more welcome and WOULD
receive support for their labors.
I believe we can say that a "paid ministry" situation is not
merely a matter of the attitude of the people who are receiving the payments.
The instant that they believe they have the power to change doctrine or policy
or practice for their own convenience, they have already started down the paid
ministry/priestcraft route. No human can resist this force, unless he engages
in extreme determination and preparation. Christ himself might have resisted
it, but he made sure that he was never in a situation where he might have to
compromise the smallest iota. I don't know why we imagine that we can be more
constant and righteous than he, with no external constraints on us.
The FAIRMormon
answer also includes a quotation from Elder McConkie arguing that "those
who devote all their time to the building up of the kingdom must be provided
with food, clothing, shelter, and the necessaries of life." The question
he does not touch on is "Who gets to decide whether central church
payments are needed and for what?" Do the people who are going to receive
those payments get to decide what those payments are? That sounds like an
obvious conflict of interest. We might look to Christ and the Apostle Paul who
both performed many astonishing works, and they never sought or claimed
anything, and only took what was charitably and freely and spontaneously
offered them.
I think we have
an amazing example of the restraint of Christ on these points. At one point He
was starving to death and could have turned stones into bread to relieve his
hunger, but he didn't do it, because that would be a misuse of his sacred
powers for his own selfish needs. Humans might have trouble being as precise as
he was, but we ought to keep that standard before us, and attempt to be as full
of integrity as he was. Freely and enthusiastically embracing the concept of
self-interest is the complete opposite of trying to meet his standard.
If people who never receive anything from the church, and are
considered doctrinally unable to receive anything from the church, directly or
indirectly, make the decision that others should receive something from the
church funds, that might at least lower the risk of corruption. It would be
better if no one gets anything from the church organization so that the
temptation can never arise. That was the process that went on for hundreds of
years (after the life of Christ and for the first 80 years in our own time) and
was very successful, so it has real merit as the ideal situation. In that
situation, EVERYTHING is spontaneous charity so there is no way to do any corrupting
empire-building and bureaucracy-building.
Who decides HOW MUCH needs to be paid out? The normal rules of
fairness and constitutional behavior indicate that those who pay in should be
the ones who decide how much is paid out and for what. Before 1923, the members
had a legal way to put a damper on inappropriate spending or typical
bureaucratic empire building. Unfortunately, after the 1923 secular
incorporation of the church, we now have a "taxation without
representation" situation where all important decisions are totally
uncontrolled. We have no constitutional division of powers, etc. This absolutely
guarantees eventual corruption. No matter how good the men are, they are still
men and need constant constraints.
In the section entitled "Priestcraft," the FAIRMormon answer
tries to limit the question in this way: "However, it should be noted that
priestcraft as it has been defined is a condemnation of intent (to get gain and
praise, and not for the welfare of Zion), and not about that individual receiving
support." I beg to differ. I believe all the scriptural evidence is that
an individual's original good intent has nothing to do with it. If people have
the option to claim money from the church and its members, that alone is a
corrupting influence, and the bad intent will always creep in, no matter what.
And if that claim is long-term and general, as opposed to some specific
transaction such as buying building materials to build a specific chapel, and
if there is the slightest opportunity to affect church doctrine and policy in
any way for one's convenience, then corruption is guaranteed.
I believe it is easy to show that the church today has changed several
critical aspects of the gospel and its administration, about six in number, and
they are all a result of first embracing the corrosive effects of a paid
ministry.
Strangely enough, doing church administration the right way seems to
be many times more effective than doing it the empire-building way. That alone
ought to be enough to end the arguments for a paid ministry. In Christ's frame
of reference, building a world church is not something to be carefully and
closely managed in typical profit-making corporate administrative fashion. It
is actually impossible to manage and control it, and even the attempt is very
damaging.
The Correct Answer
I am challenging the conventional LDS answer concerning the issue of a
paid ministry. To do a thorough job of it, my answer and alternative will have
to be rather lengthy, but hopefully it will be worth the trouble concerning
this important issue. It should be useful to briefly explore
the concept of a paid ministry during three historical periods: in the Book of Mormon before Christ, during
Christ's ministry in Jerusalem, and today. The doctrines said to be in effect are
the same in the first two periods but are radically different in the third.
Considering the life of Christ and the writings of the apostles and
prophets in any detail, I don't see how an argument for a paid ministry could
possibly be correct. Unfortunately, that also means that the church today,
which has a very big paid ministry program, is very much out of order when
compared to the scriptures. It may usually be admirable to be defending current
church policy, but in this case, when the central church has deviated on a
grand scale from all scriptural instruction, the honest thing to do is to
acknowledge the problem and try to fix it. I guess the FAIR Mormon organization
has to decide if they are apologists for the basic and eternal GOSPEL, or are
they apologists for current church leadership and staff. Unfortunately, those
are two very different things today.
I consider myself a stalwart defender of the gospel, but I think part
of that includes noting all the many places where the current church has
wandered off the path. In the year 2020, the gospel will have been on the earth
for 200 years in our era (with a formal church organization in place for 190
years), and in every other situation when the church has reached the 200-year
mark, it has been in the process of falling apart. A serious theologian and
historian would take that into account as an inescapable gospel law and look
for the deviations that almost inevitably must have happened at this stage. It
should be no surprise that after 200 years of enduring strong secularizing
pressures, NO organization can remain on course without a very vigorous
self-examination process, and we have no such process. A vigorous self-review
of the church by people who care about such things, as is likely to be found
among the FAIRMormon apologists, might be a way to establish a grassroots
process that keeps the main church on track. One of the things which needs to
be reconsidered is the nature and tasks of living prophets. Granting them
unlimited and unexamined powers to change things has not turned out very well.
I believe this needs to be a grassroots amateur volunteer effort,
simply because anyone who might be considered a professional is probably
already tied in with the paid ministry scheme of things as part of his career
and career options, and is going to defend a paid ministry theory out of
self-interest, even if his logic and scriptural reasoning makes no sense at
all.
Our nation is currently engaged in a great ideological battle
concerning our federal government's Supreme Court. We now have at least four
members of the Supreme Court who see no reason whatsoever to honor the
originalist interpretations of the words of the Constitution. They feel fully
justified in saying that their personal ideologies, which are firmly Marxist,
and which consider the original Constitution nothing more than an unimportant
piece of ancient parchment, ought to override whatever those dead founders may
have had in mind. (I consider Marxism just another term for Satanism).
Unfortunately, the church today has the exact same problem about
understanding and applying the originalist positions of the scriptures, and
like the four leftist members of the Supreme Court, the current church leaders
have decided that their personal preferences about interpreting the scriptures,
usually for their own convenience, with no checks on their behavior by outside
members or theologians, should easily override the original intent of the
scriptures. Do the current prophets get to rewrite the scriptures any day of
the week on a whim, or are they tightly bound by those ancient teachings? With
no one to check up on them, they apparently feel they can do whatever they
wish.
At this late stage of the game, as we near the typical 200-year
implosion, I consider it highly unlikely that the current church leaders'
positions on the paid ministry issue, and on several other issues of about the
same importance, can be corrected so that we somehow avoid the almost
inevitable 200-year gospel meltdown. Nonetheless, it seems worth making a
heroic effort to avoid the crash. We see plenty of symptoms that this crash is
in the process of occurring, but somehow many of us plug our ears and cover our
eyes rather than recognize the obvious.
I am guessing that all the current hubbub about church members
"learning things they never knew before" about the church, and
complaints about lack of "transparency," leading them to doubt or
leave the church, is part of this "winding up scene" in our own time.
Suddenly, for reasons which they often cannot articulate, the church doesn't
make much sense anymore. Most of their lives they were just going through the
motions out of habit without any in-depth understanding of the gospel before,
and all of a sudden, the whole thing seems like an illusion. Any small pebble
thrown by the church's enemies results in an enormous hole in their glass
house. The few answers which the church does offer seem like too little, too
late, to explain why we are where we are. Those few timid and incomplete
answers may actually give rise to a great many more new questions than they
answer.
I believe the gospel can be fully defended, at any philosophical,
doctrinal, or historical depth level that is desired by serious questioners,
but, at this point, there is no place that those questioners can go to get the
fully integrated truth. The central church organization itself seems as
bewildered as anyone else. Like the members, they have been going on autopilot
for 100 years now, and there is no one alive at church headquarters who has the
slightest clue as to how to understand and interpret exactly what happened
during the first 100 years of the church's existence (or for the second 100
years either, for that matter). We either need to find some 200-year old church
member/leader historians and theologians who can just tell us what we need to
know, or we need to improve our game by a factor of 20 or 100 times in the
areas of studying church history and theology. Our continued laziness and broad
ignorance will simply make it absolutely certain that the church will soon fall
apart, as it always has before. One might hope that a fully literate population
would remember important things much longer than a purely verbal society, and
avoid distortions, but apparently the practical difference is not that great.
Christ the
exemplar
It seems like the best place to start would be with the life of Christ
himself. He has been our source of instruction at every phase of the world's
existence, especially during his actual life on earth. He may not have always
presented his teachings in giant black headlines in our current language and
idiom so that we could not possibly make a mistake of interpretation, like
"NEVER ALLOW A PAID MINISTRY OF ANY KIND," but all the important
teachings are there if we will but look for them. For example, he did not spend
a whole chapter of the Gospels telling us what an evil and destructive thing a
paid ministry would be, but he did pattern his own life and instruct everyone
around him to take great pains to avoid even the slightest semblance of a paid
ministry situation. It should not be too hard to understand his teachings on
that point if we simply are asking the right questions as we read the New
Testament.
In reviewing his instructions to us,
it seems very important to start with the Matt. 10:8 "freely ye have
received, freely give" theme before we get into this discussion any
further.
It is a little bit strange to pay
people full-time to dispense charity on behalf of other generous, charitable persons,
which is what the tens of thousands of church employees today are paid to do to
a large extent. Obviously, paying people to dispense charity usually gobbles up
a very large chunk of the charity and can quickly mostly neutralize the effect
of the original charitable giving. It would be far better if the charity
delivery system was itself charitably donated. This is especially true when
what is being donated and passed along is priesthood power to do good. Here are
a few more of the instructions:
Matt. 10:
7 And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at
hand.
8 Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast
out devils: freely ye have received, freely give.
9 Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your
purses,
10 Nor scrip for your journey, neither two coats, neither
shoes, nor yet staves: for the workman is worthy of his meat.
The most critical instructions here
are in verse 8. Without requesting any remuneration, they were to do many
charitable works among the people. "Freely have you received, freely
give." They would be giving away everything, from the benefits of their
priesthood power to earthly goods, if they had that option. In many ways, the
church today has ceased to be a charitable organization, and has become a profit-making
organization, working to charge for all the good it does, as through
centrally-required tithing.
Matt. 10:10 says "for the
workman is worthy of his meat." That may be true, but the big question is
who gets the bill? God accepts that bill, and does not pass it along to men in
any coercive way.
If the apostles are giving away free
teaching and free miracles, is that just a set-up, a teaser, a loss-leader, so
that they can then charge people for the ordinances they get later? We might
notice that baptism and the Gift of the Holy Ghost were given away freely, by
John the Baptist and by Christ himself and his apostles Peter and John, so is
that, again, just a teaser to get people into the system so that they can be
charged for the higher ordinances of endowment and eternal marriage which they
will be taught to desire?
Doesn't it seem a little bit strange
that if the apostles are doing such unusual things as raising the dead and
casting out devils, they would do that for free, but would want to get paid for
officiating at more ordinary events such as temple weddings? If one were
marketing these many services, one might expect that raising the dead would
bring a much higher price than simply officiating at a wedding.
It should be
useful here to mention the case of Simon, sometimes known as a sorcerer, as
described in Acts 8, who later repented of his errors when he learned the full
truth. Simon saw the powerful effects of people receiving the Gift of the Holy
Ghost and wished to be given that same power to bestow the Gift of the Holy Ghost,
and was willing to pay for that power. It was made very clear to him that
priesthood power was not for sale, just as the priesthood ordinances are not
for sale, but are to be freely bestowed where appropriate.
We hear people
arguing that church members are not required to pay for the temple ordinances
they receive today, but that just demonstrates the cleverness and subtleness of
the current system. Today, those higher ordinances are not provided in some
inexpensive endowment house but only in the very expensive temples. And no one
gets into those temples without a temple recommend, and no one gets a temple
recommend without paying a full tithing to the central church. There is no
other pathway. There is nothing so blatant as having a computer records check
of payments before one can get into the temple door, or some kind of cash
register operation, but the same operational effect is achieved by the more
dispersed and low-key temple recommend system.
It seems logical
that a truly charitable organization would give priesthood ordinances based on
people's desires and needs, not their ability to pay. The focus should
logically be on the needs of the one, not the needs of the central
organization. As soon as the needs of the central organization become primary,
we have someone who is trying to build an empire based on dispensing religious
favors and services.
It is always
suspicious to have clergy charging for religious ordinances, regardless of how
that "charging" is done. The question keeps coming back to "are
we a charitable organization or not?" Or are we explicitly a business,
carrying on this activity for profit-making purposes, perhaps trying to build
an empire?
There is a bit
of irony operating here when temple ordinances warn against being able to buy
anything in this world for money, but then require the indirect payment of
money for those very ordinances.
Some tithing and temple recommend history
Without access to detailed church historical records, it is difficult
to give more than a high-level overview as to how tithing policy has changed
radically over time, but it is still possible to indicate a likely beginning
point, middle point, and endpoint. As a beginning point, there was no mention
of the need for a temple recommend until 1856, and tithing was then mentioned
as one of the criteria to be considered. Before that, concerning the Kirtland
and Nauvoo temples, there is no mention of any need for a recommend, and
presumably no specific requirement for tithing payment. As to a middle point, the
1899 series of presentations by President Lorenzo Snow on the topic of tithing
were considered quite a departure from the normal policies on the question of
tithing. It can be shown that Pres. Snow was pleased by the increase in the
central collection of tithing as a result of his messages, but that new level
in the payment of central tithing only came to about one dollar per church
member per year, probably a great deal less than a "full tithing" for
all. Concerning an endpoint, it was not until 1964 that a temple recommend
question asks whether applicants "are" full tithe payers. Before
that, lesser standards such as "undertake to become" a full tithe
payer were often acceptable.2
It appears that
in the late 1800s, arguments were occasionally made that Church members ought
to be required to pay a full tithing to the central church before they could
receive a temple recommend. It appears that there was some justification for
that desire to collect more money centrally, since the Salt Lake Temple had not
been completed, and was not completed until 1893. However, the desire to get
more money flowing into Salt Lake City apparently went far beyond just desiring
to get a temple finished, and really was the beginning of a desire and
agitation to build up a more elaborate and expensive central bureaucracy.
It appears that
those early arguments for keeping members out of temples unless they had paid a
full central tithe had little effect, quite possibly because at that point the
church members were considered to be the real owners of the church and its
property, even though the church members appointed a trustee to act on their
behalf, usually, but not always, whoever held the office of the church
president. In other words, there was no church officer who had complete control
of the temples as against any claims of the members. The trustee would need the
permission of the church members in order to take such radical and separate
control of the temples, and it was unlikely that the members would be willing
to agree to that.
This issue of
needing to pay a full central tithing to receive a recommend was probably
further advanced in 1923 when the church leaders (quietly, even secretly, I
presume) executed what I will call a lawyers coup and rejected the church
organization which had been in effect for nearly 100 years in which the church
members acted as an unincorporated religious association which periodically
appointed a trustee to manage their affairs, and instead incorporated the
church headquarters as an arm of the new Utah state government, partially
merging church and state. Where before the church had been a creature of the
membership, it now became a creature of the political state and got a good
start on its gradual and inevitable secularization.
It was a coup
in another sense, simply because there was no such thing as a
"purchase" or an "investment" by the church leaders. They
just took control of it through some imagined "right of conquest"
kind of thinking. This self-perpetuating headquarters autonomy continues today
as leaders are invited from the normal commercial activities of the world to
become church apostles and managers today without investing a dime of their own
money, while they are given unconstrained control of many billions of dollars
in income and assets.
We should note
that the original scriptural pattern was that the members would assist in
choosing the candidates for leadership, thus avoiding a completely isolated
leadership monoculture at the apostle level.
Acts 1.
Apparently this
1923 action meant that the church leaders were able to take central control of
all church properties, especially including temples, however illegitimate that
new control was, and now, as the exclusive owners of the temples, they could
set the rules for attending the temples and exclude anyone they wished.
Obviously, at the top of the list, was a requirement that people pay in a full
tithing to the central church organization before they could have access to the
temples. For nearly 100 years before that, people had paid tithing locally, and
managed it themselves mostly, with only some of it being directed to central
church headquarters, presumably based on the members' perception of centralized
needs. I believe we can say that that 1923 event was the beginning of a very
serious and determined paid ministry regime in which access to the temples was
limited to those who paid their tithing to the central church in exactly the
way specified by the new "owners" of the temples.
Having supplied all the resources and labor, I believe the members
legally did own the temples, and the church trustee did not. He was only an
agent of the members. That is why this was corrupt, since the leaders took
control of something that was never theirs, and never should be theirs. If the
members felt they owned the temples at least as much as leaders, they had good
reason to think that, based on logic and history. The temples are a charitable
effort to be shared by the church members, church leaders, and all the world
who are willing to accept the gospel. Anything else is certainly priestcraft,
trying to extract money out of people based on religious arguments and
trickery, including guilt trips.
As I will
explain in more detail later, I believe this lawyers' coup was a great
curtailment of LDS personal responsibility and their religious freedom to
manage their own religious resources, and was an example of an exercise of
unrighteous dominion under the terms of D&C 121. That was the beginning of
the end for the church in our time. Nearly all other deviations from the
scriptures stem from this one, since defending their coup, their winnings, and
the promise of its eternal flow of income became the prime directive.
Everything that might interfere with that flow of money or the personal ease
and convenience of the leaders would naturally be curtailed, especially
including any potentially expensive and troublesome commitments to make any
positive changes to the society around them, in accordance with their actual
scriptural charges.
Historically, one of the main goals of operating a religion business
was to find a way to sell that which many people desire the most -- salvation,
and a sure place in heaven. The Catholic practice of indulgences is an
interesting example, where people were told they could buy forgiveness of their
sins before or after the fact, with the church pretending to act as the Savior
himself in issuing "forgivenesses" or pardons.
Even though the scriptures tell us that priesthood power is freely
received and should be freely given, the first impulse of any one who desires
to be part of a paid ministry is to get control of that pathway to heaven and
start charging tolls. The LDS headquarters has managed to do that through
charging for access to its temples, and that has apparently turned out to be a
very profitable "tollbooth." With these policies in effect, those
"tollbooths" are naturally concentrated where people have the most
money and have the most anxiety about assuring their place in heaven, including
places for their families and ancestors and friends. It also helps that we have
a very glorious description of heaven, and people's possible experiences there,
which increases the desire to qualify. If people had a much more modest view of
what heaven entails for them (or the possible horrors of hell), they might be
much less driven to make extreme sacrifices here to try to add certainty to
their own religious future.
To further bind down the members and make sure that the income was
dependable, for many years those recommends had to be renewed every year, where
now it is reduced to only every two years. That would help get rid of the
possibility of people only seeking a recommend (and paying a centralized
tithing) when they actually needed it. This way, people would feel that they
were not in good standing in the church if they did not have a current
recommend, even though they were in fact doing everything that the gospel
requires them to do, including distributing tithing to the poor and to other
good purposes. Put another way, a person without a centrally-sanctioned
recommend (from paying central tithing) is considered to be partially
disfellowshipped, out-of-favor with the church. Their salvation insurance
policy has lapsed. This is a useful fear factor in controlling the masses and
their money.
The real truth is that most people only need to go through the temple
once for their own purposes, but that doesn't make the temples work very well
as highly productive and dependable tollbooths. To overcome that problem, you need
to put a huge effort into promoting genealogy research, family history work,
and temple work. People need to be made to worry anxiously and continuously
about the fate of their ancestors once they have taken care of themselves. This
is very much like lighting the candles in the Catholic or Russian Orthodox
churches to give prayers for the dead to help their eternal progress. That
should seem like a strange process to us since we know that lighting candles is
a very ineffective way to do proxy work for the dead. But the proxy work we do
for the dead is only slightly more effective and it is enormously more
expensive. (As I present in detail elsewhere, the cost for each new unique name
which is processed through the temple system is about $2000, instead of the $2
that it could be with a better procedure.)3
But, again, the truth there is that the best evidence we have is that
those on the other side will be taken care of just fine, with or without our
help. Going to the temple multiple times is mostly for our personal benefit,
not for the benefit of the dead. Under current conditions, we can never do the
temple work for more than a microscopic fraction of the 70 billion people who
probably have lived on this earth, all of whom are our ancestors, and still only
the tiniest fraction of even the 7 billion people for whom there might be
records remaining.
Obviously, for fairness purposes, we should expect there are heavenly
contingency plans for all these people that have nothing to do with our
responsibilities and abilities during our lifetimes. We have reason to believe
that there have already been millions of people resurrected in the First
Resurrection which started with the resurrection of Christ. How does such a
person get judged, resurrected, and exalted without any of the basic
ordinances? Presumably someone already has a plan to take care of that little
administrative problem. Perhaps there are processes going on right now on this
very earth that we know nothing about that deal with this little detail.
We have the interesting case of Joseph Smith's brother Alvin who had
gone on to his celestial glory long before there even was any system available
to do any temple work for him. D&C 137. (It doesn't specifically say
whether he had been resurrected or not, but it seems hard to imagine that he
would not have been resurrected if he was already in the celestial kingdom.)
Perhaps the righteous people among those 70 billion people will all simply
revisit the Earth during the millennium and take care of their own ordinance
work for themselves without any help from us.
The important thing from the church paid ministry viewpoint as that
people have to have a reason to be constantly going to the temple which means
they will constantly pay their tithing so that the generous income to the
central church will be guaranteed. This conclusion is a great deal more than
just speculation on my part. From my very extensive research on genealogy
computer systems, it is easy to demonstrate that with the current level of
resources being put into genealogy work and temple work, we could finish the
United States in less than a year, and the entire world in about 10 years. But
notice that we have been carrying on this process for more than 100 years and for
the last 18 years have been spending enormous amounts of time and money on the
new Family Search system. We have spent about $36 billion so far on that
system, far more than enough to finish the United States and the entire world,
if the process were done as efficiently as it has been easy to do since about
2003 with newer technology.
But notice that the central church has not the slightest interest in
adopting any of these new highly efficient procedures, presumably because that
would greatly damage their paid ministry arguments and arrangements. To support
that paid ministry argument, and all the money that flows to the central church
because of it, the central church will continue to use their current procedures
which require an essentially infinite amount of time and energy and cost to
finish even the United States, let alone the world. (Actually it would cost
about $960 trillion to finish the United States using current methods.) Their
unstated but controlling fear is apparently that if we finished this project as
quickly as we could -- this project in which the church has been assigned to
prepare all available records for temple work -- their current generous flow of
income might dry up, and that cannot be allowed to happen. What might it mean
about their job security, pensions, etc.? I consider this a serious and ongoing
example of unrighteous dominion on the part of church headquarters.
Paid ministry in the Book of Mormon, before the life of Christ
We have many
examples from the Book of Mormon which severely condemn the concept of a paid
ministry, or priestcraft, its darker cousin, which may be barely
distinguishable in theory. We have King Benjamin and King Mosiah and Alma the
Chief Judge who would take no money from the populace to support themselves, in
either their political roles or in their religious roles. And then in the starkest possible contrast,
we have Nehor and Korihor who apparently both instituted paid ministries among
the Nephites, while, at the same time, showing all the worst forms of
corruption that can come through that process, even including murder, a murder
that came about apparently because of the unlimited ambition fostered by the
hope of great riches and power to be acquired through the mechanism of a paid
ministry, a kind of religious labor union exploiting a potentially monopolistic
source of income -- religious control over the pathway to heaven. (Marxist
government arguments for centralization, regulation, and bureaucracy are simply
an atheist version of the same religious or ideology-based impulse. Marxism
simply promises its heaven will be on earth.)
The scriptures
tell us that that pathway to heaven should be free, but the goal of all
professional priests is to extract some serious income from their claimed
control of that pathway. Good intentions are not good enough. People will do
the wrong thing no matter what, if they are allowed to. The profit and power
logic is overwhelming, and humans will always be bent towards it.
Here is part of
the scriptural story:
Alma 1
2 And it came to pass that in
the first year of the reign of Alma in the judgment-seat, there was a man
[Nehor] brought before him to be judged, a man who was large, and was noted for
his much strength.
3 And he had gone about among
the people, preaching to them that which he termed to be the word of God,
bearing down against the church; declaring unto the people that every priest
and teacher ought to become popular; and they ought not to labor with their
hands, but that they ought to be supported by the people.
4 And he also testified unto
the people that all mankind should be saved at the last day, and that they need
not fear nor tremble, but that they might lift up their heads and rejoice; for
the Lord had created all men, and had also redeemed all men; and, in the end,
all men should have eternal life.
5 And it came to pass that he
did teach these things so much that many did believe on his words, even so many
that they began to support him and give him money.
6 And he began to be lifted up
in the pride of his heart, and to wear very costly apparel, yea, and even began
to establish a church after the manner of his preaching.
...
12 But Alma said unto him: Behold, this is the first time that
priestcraft has been introduced among this people. And behold, thou art not
only guilty of priestcraft, but hast endeavored to enforce it by the sword; and
were priestcraft to be enforced among this people it would prove their entire
destruction.
...
16 Nevertheless, this did not put an end to the spreading of priestcraft
through the land; for there were many who loved the vain things of the world,
and they went forth preaching false doctrines; and this they did for the
sake of riches and honor.
17 Nevertheless, they durst not
lie, if it were known, for fear of the law, for liars were punished; therefore
they pretended to preach according to their belief; and now the law could
have no power on any man for his belief.
...
26 And when the priests left their labor to impart the word of God
unto the people, the people also left their labors to hear the word of God. And
when the priest had imparted unto them the word of God they all returned again
diligently unto their labors; and the priest, not esteeming himself above his
hearers, for the preacher was no better than the hearer, neither was the
teacher any better than the learner; and thus they were all equal, and they
did all labor, every man according to his strength.
27 And they did impart of their
substance, every man according to that which he had, to the poor, and the
needy, and the sick, and the afflicted; and they did not wear costly apparel,
yet they were neat and comely.
28 And thus they did establish
the affairs of the church; and thus they began to have continual peace again,
notwithstanding all their persecutions.
Alma 30
12 and this Anti-christ, whose name was Korihor, (and the law could
have no hold upon him) began to preach unto the people that there should be no
Christ. ...
In this Alma 1
situation, there appears to have been no church-required centralization of
contributions of any kind, indeed no central bureaucracy at all, and the
decentralized administration of aid to the poor was perfectly effective.
One might raise
the sensitive question as to whether a church's policy of centralized
collection of nearly all contributions, on pain of being partially
disfellowshipped, as in denial of temple attendance, could be considered an
enforcing of priestcraft. It is perfectly obvious that most contributions are,
in the end, spent locally among the members, or ought to be spent locally, and
having them be required to pass through a central site employing a paid
ministry makes those funds subject to the standard fraud, waste, abuse, and
mismanagement found in every centralized government.
We also might
wonder how we should analyze and process the situation today where church
leaders' expressed beliefs and actions do not match the scriptures on several
important points. There may be no obvious legal case against them, no way to
enforce their adherence to and compliance with the scriptures, since it may be
a matter of their belief, but should they nonetheless continue to have
untrammeled management authority over nearly all member resources?
The paid ministry issue at the time of Christ
We might naturally wonder whether
Christ himself taught us any lessons on this topic or not, and it seems that he
did. One of his early temptations from
Satan was that with his enormous innate powers he could own the earth and rule
the earth. Actually, as our god before
coming to earth, he had "owned", and always would "own" the
earth in one sense already, and could rule it to the extent he chose. But
notice that, as part of his teachings to us, he wanted absolutely nothing to do
with having any of that direct ownership and control when he was actually a
mortal. Apparently, Christ was incorruptible, but even he had to prove it, at
least to himself and to Satan and to God, if not to anyone else. And if he
still took every possible step to avoid being corrupted himself, in spite of
all the tests he had passed already, why would we imagine that mere mortals
could toy with, and even embrace, all the most corrupting powers which he
avoided, and have those mortals still come off perfectly clean and blameless
and correct in all their policies?
Considering Christ's prayer: "Oh my
Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I
will, but as thou wilt," Matt. 26:39, perhaps he would have been even more
tempted to skip his atonement assignment if he were living a really pleasant
and luxurious earthly life. That is the problem with too much prosperity,
potentially supplied by a paid ministry system.
Christ had this overwhelming job to
do, and that was to give up his life, and any potential control over anyone or
anything, when he could have had control over everyone and everything, exactly
as Satan had wanted to do himself. But he stayed away from that impulse and
opportunity completely, apparently so that he could carry out his critical
mission. Other people had obviously been tempted, and had quickly and eagerly
failed that test, as we see in the case of the Scribes and the Pharisees and
the Sadducees who DID have complete control of the earth as far as the Jews
were concerned, and would have liked to increase their physical control of the
earth and its peoples.
Today's Sanhedrin?
It is hard to
imagine that, after all the bad things Christ said about the scribes and the
Pharisees, the members of the Sanhedrin, that Christ would do even the tiniest
thing that looked like the behavior of the members of the Sanhedrin. And yet
today the church central headquarters looks and operates very much like the old
Jewish Sanhedrin, complete with hundreds of lawyers, as it attempts to
centralize control over every aspect of the church worldwide, and keep and
defend its power base from any internal or external threats.
With perhaps a
$12 billion annual resource budget, the church is a larger governmental agency
than any one of about 69 countries in the world today. That makes them quite a
bit larger religious government than the original local Sanhedrin, I assume.
The LDS church probably does not have the income of the Catholic Church, which
is estimated to be about $170 billion from its United States operations,
probably the largest single source of its income, but the LDS church seems to
take the Catholic Church as its model in empire building. One difference is
that the Catholic Church spends enormous amounts of money on schools and
hospitals, something which the LDS church doesn't do, leaving the LDS church
with a much larger percentage of uncommitted "disposable income" from
its income sources. We might guess that the total worldwide Catholic church
income is about $240 billion, making it about 20 times the size of the LDS church,
making the LDS church budget actually relatively larger than one might guess
from its being only 2% or 1/50 the size of the United States, or 0.2% of the
size of the world.
Instead of getting involved in even
an ounce of this ego-feeding earthly control of everything, Christ made sure
that he did not have the slightest amount of earthly bureaucratic powers, and
not even the appearance of any such powers. He told Pilate that his kingdom was
not of this Earth, and Pilate believed him, and would have released him from
any charges of being a power-seeking political competitor. And we can be sure that Pilate was extremely
sensitive to such questions. That would
be the first thing he would worry about at all times, perhaps especially
because he would surely know that the Jews were looking for a Messiah to come
and save them from what they considered to be bondage under the Romans. (Are we
just like the Jews in wanting a Messiah to come and solve all our problems for
us? If so, that simply means we have no idea who the Messiah is, or will be, in
spite of all his teachings.)
So apparently Christ's actions and
statements were quite convincing, at least to Pilate. And perhaps we could also
say that his actions and words were quite convincing to the Jews in a different
way, in that he sought no earthly powers of any kind. He did not even collect
and keep enough income to pay his taxes, and relied on miracles or good fortune
to provide even his tax payments, as with the coin found in a fish's mouth.
Matt. 17:27. They convicted him of blasphemy and wished to kill him for that
crime they had defined. They were
looking for a Messiah, someone who would come and use his great powers to free
them from the Romans and make the Jews a great power on the earth. Anyone who claimed to be the Messiah and then
did NOT destroy their enemies and set them up with earthly powers would be a
great disappointment, apparently worthy of death for even tantalizing them with
that possibility of that greater power for themselves.
We might notice that he made not the
slightest effort to build up an earthly bureaucracy with paid armies and
thousands of paid minions to do his will -- all the accoutrements of a secular
power structure. Not only did he not do any of this himself, but he constantly
warned any potential followers that there was absolutely no chance, at least as
long as he was around, that there would be any paid ministry situations which
then might become personally lucrative and also therefore personally
corrupting.
Christ was the epitome of idealism
and altruism, as he surely had to be to carry out his assigned mission
concerning the atonement. He told everyone who followed him that they could not
expect to have the slightest bit of earthly goods or power over anyone as a
result of their position. ("The Son of man hath not where to lay
his head," the lilies of the field and the ravens are taken care of by
God, etc.)
Matthew 8
19 And a certain scribe came, and said unto him, Master, I
will follow thee whithersoever thou goest.
20 And Jesus saith
unto him, The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the
Son of man hath not where to lay his head.
Luke 12
22 ¶And he said unto
his disciples, Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye
shall eat; neither for the body, what ye shall put on.
23 The life is more
than meat, and the body is more than raiment.
24 Consider the
ravens: for they neither sow nor reap; which neither have storehouse nor
barn; and God feedeth them: how much more are ye better than the fowls?
25 And which of you
with taking thought can add to his stature one cubit?
26 If ye then be not
able to do that thing which is least, why take ye thought for the rest?
27 Consider the
lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you,
that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
28 If then God so
clothe the grass, which is to day in the field, and tomorrow is cast into the
oven; how much more will he clothe you, O ye of little faith?
29 And seek not ye
what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, neither be ye of doubtful mind.
30 For all these
things do the nations of the world seek after: and your Father knoweth that
ye have need of these things.
One rich young man who wanted to
follow Christ was told to sell all his goods and give the money to the poor and
come and follow Christ, indicating that it would COST this young man a great
deal to have the honor of being a disciple or an apostle, perhaps just the
opposite of what this ambitious young man had in mind. Matt. 19:16-22.
Latter-day attempts to downplay the "vow of poverty" implications are
not very convincing. Perhaps some of the Catholic monastic orders had it partly
right after all. We might wonder whether these religious orders were a
reaction to the excesses of the main Catholic Church.
We might notice that Christ and his
group did collect some money which was then distributed to the poor, but even
that was not something he considered to be his job, apparently, or the job of
his main group of disciples. When that process of transferring money to the
poor became burdensome, he transferred that function to a completely separate
organization and apparently had nothing more to do with it.
Not only would his time have been
largely wasted in welfare administration, but perhaps he specifically did not
want any temptations to arise, for him or his followers, from having that
amount of money concentrated among his followers who were charged with teaching
the Gospel and setting church policy.
We might notice that Judas was the
treasurer, the one who carried the purse for their group, and he was also the
one who some think wanted to force Christ to take on the role of the Messiah,
if that was possible, presumably with Judas and other followers thereby gaining
great power by being near the all-powerful Christ. Judas was also the one who
allowed himself to be corrupted by the blood money of 30 pieces of silver. This seems to indicate that money handling
for the church has a way of corrupting those who handle the money (or
attracting those who are easily corruptible) to the point where they think only
of themselves and are willing to commit a kind of treason by selling the
members into slavery, so to speak.
Removing the vast financial and
physical power of today's top church leaders would go a long way to remove any
distrust or sense of unease about ANYONE having such completely unbridled power,
whether religious or not. Christ made sure he had no such power, so why should
it be counted as righteousness for men to seek or accept that kind of
church-related power today? Just as a curiosity, we might notice
that a resource budget of $12 billion makes the LDS church a larger operation
than about 69 different countries in the world. That certainly seems like a
large enough government to have proper constitutional principles apply4
(although some of today's church leaders might argue that the gospel overrides
and cancels out the U.S. Constitution in some situations).
We might recall the parable of the servant who
expected to be released from his position so he quickly sold many of his
master's goods to other masters at fire-sale prices. Luke 16:1-12. That meant that
he would be well received by other masters when he left the employ of the first
master. Our current system might discourage some of this behavior because the
lifetime assignments of leaders would tend to remove some of the future value
from this kind of disloyal behavior. However, in contrast, there is also the
much worse possibility that servants might change gospel policy or misuse or
give away valuable assets to make their lives easier, especially because they
could expect to always maintain their office and never be challenged by anyone.
Being a "president for life" is inevitably an indicator of
corruption.
This corresponds to the usually very
lucrative "president for life" leaders we see in so many Third World
countries. In those cases, the chief lawgiver can also be the worst lawbreaker
with impunity, because he totally controls the application of the law. As part
of the church's teaching mission to the world, one might expect the church
leaders to carefully apply internally the principles of fairness contained in
the U.S. Constitution, but I don't see that happening. The church headquarters
may not necessarily behave like an unrestrained dictatorship, but if it is
formally set up to operate that way, as it is today, that appears to teach a
very bad lesson about the church approving and modeling the concentration of
absolute power in one or a few men. As in times past, apostles should be able
to operate perfectly well without a large and complex church attached, although
the church might have difficulty operating without such leaders.
Finally, we might ask ourselves if we have
accepted some of the Jews' logic today about expecting a mighty Messiah or,
something similar, a church organization that concentrates great temporal power
in the name of the gospel. We can be reasonably sure that accumulating direct
power is always a bad idea, based on Christ's example, although a vigorous
program of correct teachings could bring great wisdom and wealth to the general
populace. The trick is to avoid any direct control but only offer all needed
teachings and advice. "Building up Zion" cannot include the church
gaining great temporal power, since that would inevitably mean a new Catholic
Church would be born. I don't believe man's basic impulses ever change, so the
organizational safeguards can never change. This is the basic wisdom of the
U.S. Constitution and the scriptures on the "paid ministry" issue.
Did Christ change any of his
patterns in the new world when he visited the Nephites? Apparently not. I think it is interesting that the church
leaders, the normal apostles, and other special cases such as the Three
Nephites, behaved in a completely different way than one might see today. In several cases, when the Nephites were not
listening and were not worthy of having the disciples among them, the disciples
simply left. Mormon 1:13; Mormon 3:1; Moroni
8:10-11. If we think a moment, we might realize that they would not want to do
that when the right time came if they were feeling very prosperous in a paid
ministry situation. The very fact that
they had succumbed to that temptation to receive a nice salary would probably
mean that they had already made the choice that they would stay with the church
members no matter what the level of righteousness of the church members might
be, because they would have become accustomed to living in a high style. And even if they were very humble about
everything, they would probably still have entangled themselves in endless
bureaucratic administrations so that it would be very disruptive, to themselves
and to the people they ruled, for them just to disappear whenever they felt
that the Nephites were unworthy of such ministrations.
Christ as Jehovah dislikes kings and their bureaucracies
In the Old Testament, Christ, as Jehovah, discouraged Israelites from
having kings and encouraged them to elect judges to govern themselves. All of
this was to encourage them to live as free men so they could better live the
gospel.
1 Samuel 8
6 But the thing displeased Samuel, when they
said, Give us a king to judge us. And Samuel prayed unto the Lord.
7 And the Lord said unto Samuel, Hearken unto
the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee: for they have not
rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.
8 According to all the works which they have
done since the day that I brought them up out of Egypt even unto this day,
wherewith they have forsaken me, and served other gods, so do they also unto
thee.
9 Now therefore hearken unto their voice:
howbeit yet protest solemnly unto them, and shew them the manner of the king
that shall reign over them.
10 And Samuel told all the words of the Lord
unto the people that asked of him a king.
11 And he said, This will be the manner of the
king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for
himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before
his chariots.
12 And he will appoint him captains over
thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and
to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his
chariots.
13 And he will take your daughters to be
confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers.
14 And he will take your fields, and your
vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his
servants.
15 And he will take the tenth of your seed,
and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants.
16 And he will take your menservants, and your
maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his
work.
17 He will take the tenth of your sheep: and
ye shall be his servants.
18 And ye shall cry out in that day because of
your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in
that day.
19 Nevertheless the people refused to obey the
voice of Samuel; and they said, Nay; but we will have a king over us;
20 That we also may be like all the nations;
and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles.
21 And Samuel heard all the words of the
people, and he rehearsed them in the ears of the Lord.
22 And the Lord said to Samuel, Hearken
unto their voice, and make them a king. And Samuel said unto the men of
Israel, Go ye every man unto his city.
If wanting a king means they have rejected Jehovah, why would Jehovah
then want to become their king? He would be false to himself and false to them.
Christ considers himself as reigning over the Israelites when they hearken to
his word which includes having representative government.
Even when the people disregarded the Lord's and prophet's counsel and
wanted a king, they were allowed to make that choice. They were given freedom
to reject freedom.
In the Book of Mormon we have King Mosiah who, as a result of
inspiration, wished to end the pattern of king's and replace them with elected
judges. Mosiah 29.
These new scriptures from our own time praise the Constitution of the
United States as inspired, and essentially incorporates its provisions of
representative government by reference. D&C 134:5; 98:4-10.
Based on this long-term pattern of discouraging kings and dictators
and promoting representative government ("teach them correct principles
and let them govern themselves"), why would we think that Christ would
want to come and actually fill the role of a traditional king in the future?
Unless his position of "king" was purely ceremonial, as an outlet for
our feelings of worship, he would be proving himself a hypocrite, and would be
destroying the lessons he had taught to humans for 6000 years. Worse than that,
he would cease to be teaching us correct principles and allowing us to govern
ourselves. He told Pilate that his kingdom was not of this world, and I think
he meant it for the entire time of earth's existence. It does seem a little bit
silly for him to be the God of this earth, which would allow him to do anything
he wanted to, theoretically, and then be inconsistent in his application of
those teachings. He has no need whatsoever of any human adulation as king and
direct lawgiver, and I don't know why he would seek it now.
It is really quite hard to imagine Christ as a typically functioning
king, with crowds of courtiers and palace intrigue and lobbying, etc., all the
mundane aspects of a typical kingly government, complete with guards and
soldiers and generals and royal ranks and ceremonies and decrees and regulations
and taxes, all focused on creating and maintaining a class society, where the
king is served by the masses, rather than the king serving the masses.
Christ would be the sort of King who was never in the palace because
he was out serving the people. So why would he even need a palace and all the
accoutrements, something he completely avoided during his life? Having some grand architecture in Salt Lake City, besides the temple,
may give many people a sense of pride, but the more that Salt Lake City begins
to look like the Vatican or like the palace complex of some king, the more
worried I get that we have absorbed a touch of paganism.
The very problem in the past is that the people wanted a king,
apparently as a way to show that they could have great public works and
pageantry and battles and celebrations like all the pagan cultures. And, of
course, that very behavior caused them to become and stay pagan to some extent,
making temporal appearances become everything. The concept of individual freedom
and maximum individual development and responsibility was the very thing they
were trying to avoid with their pagan leanings. After all this time and
experience, does it really make sense for Christ, at the end, to adopt some of
the techniques of Satan in gathering to himself glory and power just because he
can? He might not be as cruel and ruthless a ruler as Satan might be, but he
would certainly be passing up the "and let the glory be thine"
attitude of an earlier time.
If his church on the Earth were set
up like an earthly kingdom, as it is now, complete with a grand bureaucracy or
king's court, how likely would it be for him to approve of it?
Anti-paid ministry instructions from the first two prophets
in our own era
Joseph Smith and Brigham Young both
spoke often and emphatically against the ideologies of Marxism, communalism,
collectivism, socialism, statism, etc., which promote the exact same arguments
as are used to promote a paid ministry, because they all have the same goals,
and introduce the same costs and dangers to a religion and a society. Those
arguments are always with us, they are always anti-freedom, and they are always
wrong. Like the constant and ubiquitous force of gravity, this ideological
force is always present, and is always strong, and is Satan's constant thumb on
the scale to try to make things go his way.
If someone wishes to follow this
topic further, the detailed history of the statements of the first two prophets
and related circumstances have been published in two books.5
Although the two prophets' messages were clear and identical, it may be that at
times, Brigham Young spoke most forcefully on this point. Here is one good
example from 1856 (emphasis added):
In the days of the Apostles, the brethren
sold their possessions and laid them at the Apostles’ feet. And where did
many of those brethren go to? To naught, to confusion and destruction. Could
those Apostles keep the Church together, on those principles? No. Could they
build up the kingdom on those principles? No, they never could. Many of
those persons were good men, but they were filled with enthusiasm, insomuch
that if they owned a little possession they would place it at the feet of the
Apostles.
Will such a course sustain the kingdom? No.
Did it, in the days of the Apostles? No. Such a policy would be the ruin of
this people, and scatter them to the four winds. We are to be guided by
superior knowledge, by a higher influence and power. JD 4:29 BY Aug. 17, 1856
SLC. Quoted at BYUO p. 128-9.
I quote this specifically because
his prophecy has come true. The church has been completely neutralized in our
time, at least as compared to its prophetic mission, very largely because of
its adoption of a paid ministry and related concepts. Luckily, we have not been
scattered to the four winds, but our effect on the society around us is very
minimal, producing the same result. The church and its leaders have accepted
the spurious charges of its enemies concerning communalism being a required
doctrine as though those charges were the truth. For some reason which I have
yet to understand, almost every church historian (and almost every other kind
of historian) has accepted some or all of the many possible Marxist ideologies
and have worked very hard to impose them on their societies, including the
church organization itself. Any long-term organization must take specific
action to counteract that constant negative force, or suffer the consequences,
as we have.
Joseph Smith and Brigham Young both
went to great lengths to combat the idea that church doctrine dictated some
kind of required socialism or communalism and its inevitable centralized paid
bureaucracy. In spite of their strenuous efforts to end this myth, one would
probably find the majority of today's church leaders and members firmly
believing that some form of socialism or communalism is, or will be, a church
requirement, at least sometime in the future. This indicates that the church's
enemies and detractors have won their ideological argument for church-sponsored
socialism, literally over the dead bodies of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. As
noted above, Brigham Young believed that this false teaching could destroy the
church, and he may yet be proved correct. It certainly has helped neutralize
the church.
It seems clear that this kind of
theological wandering around and deviation has given the church's detractors
plenty of material to work with today to try to show that the Gospel is
inconsistent throughout various time periods and often makes no sense to us
today, and that the church leaders within the last 200 years, and at other
times in the recorded history of the world, have been all over the map on their
interpretations of certain aspects of the Gospel and its administration.
It seems to be high time that we did
the hard work of exploring and clarifying this mass of confusion, this Gordian
knot of Mormon theology. If this current confusion prompts us to straighten out
this series of questions and clarify the Lord's word and intent on every topic
of importance, then the church's detractors now and for the last 200 years will
have performed a service, to goad us to clear up what should be cleared up. No church planting or restoration has previously lasted more than 200
years, and it appears that ours will not exceed that limit either, if this
large accumulation of errors and deviations is not recognized and corrected,
and the proper interpretation modeled for all to see.
This paid
ministry issue is one of the most major and obvious deviations of today's
church from scriptural teachings, and presumably this issue has had to be
carefully centrally managed to reach this point without there being a
membership uprising concerning the excesses. One might wonder if some version
of this heretofore-delayed potential member uprising has anything to do with
the sense of a crisis of belief touched on by Elder Holland in a fireside talk
addressed to young single adults in Arizona in the spring of 2016.6
One might also
reasonably wonder whether what is going on in the Western world these days has
some relationship to what is going on within the church today. We have Britain
which recently voted to leave the European Union. We have some of the citizens
in Germany voting against the almost uncontrolled immigration promoted by that
country's leaders as part of more a general European Union policy. We have
Donald Trump apparently leading a movement in the United States to overthrow
the entrenched political establishments of both main political parties. Perhaps
the voters and members are saying that what they are seeing is a relentless
concentration and centralization of money and power and control into certain
organizations. And large numbers of them, perhaps a majority, have decided this
has all gone much too far, and something has to change. Perhaps all of these
groups of citizens are no longer willing to support these overgrown
organizations which, apparently, commonly use manipulative tactics to continue
their relentless growth in power to the detriment of the normal citizen or
member.
Priestcraft
does seem to always contain some necessary propaganda about the desirability of
centralizing all power in one place, which benefits religious leaders trying to
consolidate their power and income, and that ideology quickly and easily and
naturally supports the generally statist/Marxist teachings of Satan as he tries
to set up his centers of earthly power and control which also usually
degenerate into some form of slavery or near-slavery. There is thus an
inevitable connection and cooperation between church and state to control
people. Following that path leads to the horrors of the Catholic Church as seen
during the Dark Ages. This relentless pressure toward an anti-freedom position
in organizations is described in the O'Sullivan's Law concept:
"O’Sullivan’s Law states that any organization or enterprise that is not
expressly right wing will become left wing over time."7 The LDS
church appears to be a long way down that leftist political slippery slope
already.
Paid ministry today
As one might have sensed already, this general topic seems to deserve
at least one book length treatment, if not several such treatments. Perhaps the
main question to be posed about the church organization today is this: The
critical startup and wide expansion of the church at the time of Christ in
Jerusalem, and thereafter, all happened without any central organization and no
money flows. In other words, we could say that the cash cost per convert was about
zero. It could not have cost anything because no one had any money to put into
the process. All they had was their individual commitment and efforts. The
exact same thing happened in the time of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.
If we look at the church today it is not too difficult to notice that
we have a huge bureaucracy which absorbs most of the money contributions of the
members with little output to show for it. This means that in total resource
terms, it costs about $400,000 for each new long-term member which is added to
the church. That is about $200,000 in cash and perhaps $200,000 in volunteer
member labor. The church was exploding at about an 8% rate, and had great
social effect, when it was not centrally coordinated and had no money. Now that
we have a huge bureaucracy, lots of money, and very extensive central
coordination, the growth of the church is barely measurable, at about 0.2%. I
am guessing that if the members doubled their contributions and their volunteer
labors, that would simply mean that the cost for a new long-term member would
then be $800,000, as the central bureaucracy quickly absorbed all that extra
money and effort like a black hole. This situation makes it seem that any flair
of enthusiasm like the "Hasten the Work" initiative is doomed to fail
before it even begins because many other changes have to be made in preparation
for that burst of enthusiasm to make any difference.
Convert cost
calculation: Although the church typically reports about 300,000 new converts
each year, if we look at the number of new organizations and new meeting spaces
that are provided to the members, it appears that only about 30,000 people
become long-term members each year, requiring new branch or ward organizations
and appropriate new meeting spaces. Since we don't have access to accurate data
on these points, we might guess that the LDS church has a cash budget of about
$6 billion a year, plus about $6 billion in volunteer member labor. If we
divide that $12 billion by the 30,000 new members, we get an overall resource
cost of $400,000 for each such new member.
Can those known
as prophets today say that their kingdom is not of this world, in the same
sense as Christ made that claim? With a $6-$12 billion resource budget, and
with other tens of billions in property and asset holdings of many kinds, I
don't believe they can make that same claim. Their lives have only the
slightest similarity to the life of Christ, and to all the prophets in the
history of the world. I know of none of those ancient prophets who had vast
financial holdings and controlled huge bureaucracies. Anywhere but in the
United States, such a separate religious effort to gain political and financial
power and to control people would have been crushed out long ago. Dictators do
not like any kind of competitors for the hearts and minds of the citizens. But
building a church empire was not necessary for great religious success in the
Roman world, for example.
Would someone like to explain to me how we got here, and why, if it
was not caused by adopting the paid ministry concepts forbidden in the Book of
Mormon? On the surface, it appears that when the church has a large and
expensive central bureaucracy, it becomes almost completely ineffective in
carrying out its main mission of spreading the gospel on the earth. Is it just
possible that Christ, and such men as Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, actually
understood something about church administration that has been completely lost?
This deserves a great deal more treatment, but perhaps I have sufficiently
raised the question. It would be interesting to see a central church response
explaining why all past eras of church administration were wrong and the new
way is the right way.
Today's advances in communications technology should mean that the
church, like every other practical organization on the earth, could operate
very effectively with a high degree of decentralization and dispersion to
minimize costs to members and maximize overall church effectiveness. This makes
it seem like the church is determined to maintain maximum centralization for
policy reasons which do not include minimizing costs and maximizing
effectiveness.
The proven path to gospel success
The path which has apparently not
been tried in the past century is to remove all public indicators of pride and
corporate power and allow the gospel to spread in the way that Christ handled
it, and required all his disciples to do likewise, which is to positively
reject all indicators of earthly power while still spreading Gospel teachings
through the membership. For example, during his life, news of Christ's latest
teachings and miracles spread like wildfire in spite of his occasional counsel
to keep silent. Perhaps that is the kind of "viral" message that a
newly decentralized church organization would generate, especially in this age
of social media.
Satan offered Jesus, the man, power
over all the earth. Christ not only
utterly rejected that, but he insisted that none of his disciples would have a
place to lay their head or know where their next meal might come from. That should make maintaining constant
humility a little bit easier. Christ most certainly had no paid bureaucracy and
received no titles or power of any kind from the institutions of men. By necessity, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young
used similar methods with similar success, but things changed after their time.
Brigham Young worried that prosperity would be a problem for the church,8
and we seem to have proved his fears to be correct, although perhaps in a
slightly different way than he expected. Jesus
was quick to squelch any flattery of himself as a leader, but that is not the
normal practice today.9 This
all seems to be another application of the great Pogo observation: "We
have met the enemy and he is us."10
In the New World, when the church
members would not follow the teachings of the disciples, the disciples simply
left them to their own devices.11
Can anyone imagine the disciples today leaving all of their indicators
of earthly power and privilege, equal to that of many earthly governments, if
the saints were not living the Gospel correctly? As professional managers and
politicians, their expected secular impulse would likely be to find out which
way the crowd was moving and try to stay ahead of it, thus keeping themselves
administratively relevant.
Christ insisted that his kingdom was
not of this world, and Pilate believed him.
Would a naturally suspicious political leader today be willing to
believe that the LDS Church was not seeking earthly power and would not accept
it if offered? I don't think so. This
kind of self-limiting discipline would represent a different kind of pacifism,
where we disarm ourselves bureaucratically to win ideologically. This might mean that members would use their
own resources very effectively to spread the gospel as they best saw fit, and
with that creativity, in contrast to the top-down command and message control
structure of today's church, should be expected to do many remarkable things.
Dismantling our extensive and
expensive central bureaucracy would certainly be painful and upsetting to those
involved, but if that is the action which stands between us and the church's
long-term success, then it would be well worth the disruption. Hopefully that
would allow us to reenact on a grand scale the spreading of the Gospel
throughout the known world12 in ways similar to its earlier growth
in the Mediterranean area, in Book of Mormon lands, and in gathering the saints
from Europe to Utah.
As an extra benefit, if there were
no massive concentration of resources and power in Salt Lake City, the LDS
Vatican, there would be no tempting target for greed-based lawsuits and hostile
governments, greatly reducing the vulnerability of the entire church. Not
incidentally, it would unloose and embolden member action, where, in contrast,
today's central staff naturally tends to be very timid as a way to make their
lives easier, and they would naturally direct others to act similarly.
If the Twelve left the Salt Lake
bureaucracy behind, that alone would mandate its dissolution, since the staff
would then plainly be leaderless and disavowed. Can you imagine the extreme
resistance the staff would put up to that kind of a change? We sometimes hear
about the inability of the US president to get control of the massive federal
bureaucracy, and that, in fact, the bureaucracy controls the president. Why
wouldn't we expect the same would be true at church headquarters?
A Strategic
Overview -- plus conclusions and consequences
So what is at stake here?
When we are talking about such things as a paid ministry, we are
potentially talking about the most basic organizational principles and goals of
the church. In order to connect all the pieces together, it seems necessary to
consider all the major possible options and how we got where we are.
1. The original
situation
As I will show in more detail below, the original, and definitely most
effective way exhibited so far to spread the gospel is to have no effective
central administrative headquarters at all, but let each individual member
administer all important aspects of the church and its growth, including using
the priesthood, doing their own missionary work, spending their own tithing,
and executing charity as they see fit. That is the situation that existed for
about 200 years after the life of Christ and for about the first 80 years after
the gospel was restored to Joseph Smith in 1820. Obviously, if there is no
central church worldwide command-and-control system, there would naturally also
be no central church cost for adding new members, no central constraints to
tell people what they cannot do to spread the gospel, and the members would be
free to use their creativity in spontaneously uniting their resources and
accomplishing great things.
2. A
theoretical alternate policy
Another possible strategy might be to collect nearly all the church's
resources into one central place and then use the latest technology and
management techniques to cause the gospel to be spread at a furious pace. But
that would require a fearless and aggressive management group at church
headquarters, something we definitely don't have, and, because of social
forces, human nature, and the nature of large bureaucracies, there appears to
be no possibility it could ever happen in the future.
3. Today's
situation -- very bad
What we have today is the worst of all possible
worlds. We have the central church collecting up all the tithing money of
all the members, and then basically doing nothing very useful with it or even
wasting it. We are spending about $400,000 in church resources on our central
bureaucracy or on ourselves for every new long-term member we add. Only a tiny
amount of those resources get to the "end of the furrow" to help
bring in new members. That should tell us that our goals and our priorities are
very confused for a church with the mission to spread the gospel worldwide.
This "centralize and waste" strategy means that members are
paralyzed to act on their own and actually get the desired results, unless they
wish to provide a second tithing which they administer themselves or direct it
to some other member-governed entity which then might actually get something
done that they desire.
This is further complicated by the fact that the various levels of
political governments, through taxes, also collect "tithing,"
sometimes up to the level of three or four or even seven times a religious
tithe. These various governments all promise to do the charitable work that a
church ought to be doing, that is, take care of the poor, provide for
education, etc., even though they also mostly waste that money, and very little
of it gets to those who actually need it. This leaves us with the situation
that members would have to pay somewhere between three and six times a
religious tithe if they wanted to actually accomplish the simple basic social
purposes of a single tithe. Obviously, that is not ever going to happen. If the
church were engaged in teaching correct principles of government and working to
reduce the share of the nation's resources taken from its citizens and misused
by the political governments, then perhaps the church leaders could help
arrange for a single tithe to be sufficient to meet a society's needs, as has
been true before. (It might have been true during King Benjamin's time, and
King Mosiah's time, and after Christ came to the New World, and perhaps at
other times of minimal central government.)
Our church managers have found a way to collect up the most money and
spend the most money with the smallest possible effects on the world. It is
almost as though they had done some extensive scientific studies to find out
how to get the smallest possible effect from money spent for religious
purposes.
As one practical illustration, my daughter fulfilled a mission in
Bolivia, and she tells me that during a very short time there, the church built
80 chapels throughout that nation, even before they had anyone to use them.
Perhaps their idea was that "if we build them, they will come." At
the time she left her mission, many of those chapels were empty and unused. This
sounds like a good way to spend $100 million with only the vaguest idea of who
might eventually benefit from it. Doesn't that seem to get the cart before the
horse? Might not that church display of overconfidence and hubris actually
offend some locals before the proselyting process even begins? Shouldn't the
church possibly have something like an aggressive advertising or public
teaching program which could help to build up a membership, and when the
membership locations have been determined, then actually build some chapels?
In calculations that appear elsewhere in this paper, I demonstrate
that the cost in church resources, cash and volunteer labor, for a single new
long-term church member today is about $400,000. I hope that is a shocking
number which perhaps will cause a few people to study the problem a little bit
more. How can our church managers be so depressingly inefficient? What in the
world are they doing with the church's money? In contrast, the central cost of
a new church member was zero for the 200 years after Christ and for the first
80 years after the gospel was introduced to Joseph Smith. (Church membership
was about 500,000 in 100 A.D., about 70 years after Christ's death, and about
250,000 in the year 1900 A.D., about 70 years after the church was
organized.)
As one simple illustration of the current deplorable level of
inefficiency and outrageous costs, a family of five joining our church would mean
that the church spent $2 million in resources for that family. That would be
enough to buy them a new home and allow the parents to retire for life,
regardless of their age. It should be obvious that we could greatly speed up
the amount of successful missionary work we accomplish if we simply offered
that $2 million as an incentive upfront to families rather than filtering it
through the oversized and grossly inefficient church bureaucracy.
With the level of bureaucratic insensitivity we see today to current
levels of church inefficiency in spreading the gospel, if the members were to
double their contributions in money and time to the church cause, the most
likely outcome is that the cost for a new long-term member would jump to
$800,000, the equivalent of $4 million per convert family of five. The Salt
Lake City headquarters black-hole would most likely absorb all the additional
resources provided.
A policy of
timidity
Although young missionaries are often encouraged to be bold,
unfortunately the central church appears to be managed very timidly. If Joseph
Smith were in charge of the church today, we could expect that he would be
creative and aggressive. For example, Joseph Smith sent out a proclamation to
all the leaders of the world that the church had been restored, and asked for
their help in building up the restored church. It is inconceivable that our
church today would attempt any such radical thing. (Actually it was the 12
apostles who sent out the proclamation, acting on Joseph Smith's instructions
and on his behalf after his death.). See D&C
124:2–3 and the very bold and audacious Proclamation full text.13
One might wonder whether the advanced age of most of the church's
leaders today might have something to do with this policy of timidity, but
there seems to be little connection with age. That basic timidity seems to come
from a standard human trait. I believe this extreme timidity is based on
the natural desire of leaders to be loved by everyone, and to avoid all
conflict of any kind, therefore making their lives as calm, peaceful, and
uneventful as possible. But avoiding all conflict worldwide means that the
church is completely useless in changing the society of the nation and the
world for the better. Such a force for change should culminate in a
gospel-based civilization as has always been intended.
This official policy of timidity has been made into a strategic plan,
even though I believe it is a very defective one. The idea seems to be that if
the church can be as invisible and bland and innocuous and stealthy as is
possible, then the dictators of the world will allow it to operate in their
countries without objection. But that also means that the church must be
absolutely inert and even negative on the issue of freedom, a very important
aspect of the theology and practice of the gospel, and must never try through
any public media effort to fully explain what we really believe -- what the
scriptures actually teach us to believe and to do. The gospel in its fullness
is actually quite disruptive to much of today's corrupt world, so it must be
kept hidden to the extent possible under the current policy.
This policy of extreme ideological timidity might be a good worldwide
strategy to avoid political difficulties if we were McDonald's and we were only
selling hamburgers, but we are not McDonald's and we are not supposed to be
only selling hamburgers. Our assignment is to change the national and world
society to achieve a gospel-based civilization, and we are doing essentially
nothing about that, while spending more than enough money to actually
accomplish our assignment.
It appears to me that the church today has a near-zero advertising
budget, where it ought to be in the $billions. The only thing it seems to be
doing is to run an occasional ad to demonstrate that Mormons are not weird --
they're just like everyone else. But otherwise, those occasional ads are almost
content-free concerning our religion itself.
And even when the church gets free advertising as the result of a TV
news interview, we pretend we don't know what we believe on important points,
and then spend what little airtime we have telling the world that we are not
weird, whatever that means. We don't seem to be able to get past the
"magic underwear" level of discourse.
The basic problem seems to stem from the simple fact of concentrating
all church resources and most management and public relations responsibility in
a few hands. If all the blowback from missionary work and gospel ideological
arguments is to come back on a few men, those men are naturally going to
quickly become very timid and will tend to use most of the resources collected
together to protect themselves from any conflicts that arise. This turns the whole
centralized process into a big self-justifying but ineffective and paralyzing
waste, a pointless "self-licking ice cream cone" as the astute
military people would call such an arrangement. This is like a big computer
that spends all its compute cycles setting itself up so that it never actually
gets around to doing any real work.
If the resources and the individual responsibility were widely
dispersed, the pressures on any particular person would be infinitely less than
on today's church top leadership corps. The mere fact that billions of dollars
in resources are collected in one spot opens up that single spot to a wide
array of political pressures and greed-based lawsuits, none of which would
happen if there were no such centrally concentrated target or prize. That was
the genius of the church expansion within the Roman Empire, and the process
could work exactly the same way today. If the church's enemies have to go
door-to-door to seek their victims, they are probably not going to do it, but
if all our resources and media outlets and potential "victims" are in
a single place, that makes them easy to find and attack. Where the central
church has billions of dollars in its treasuries, offering a great temptation
to the wicked, individual members typically have too little money to make it
worth the trouble to sue those individual members or otherwise harass them.
Minimal
mindshare
During the Proposition 8 political activities in 2008 in California
concerning same-sex marriage, some surveys were done which, as I recall, seemed
to indicate that about 90% of the people knew absolutely nothing about the
Mormon church, and that for the 10% who had some information, most of that
information was completely wrong or even backwards. That sounds like a really
pitiful information situation to be in for a religious organization that has
been in existence for almost 200 years and now has a budget of at least $6
billion to devote each year to spreading its message.
The LDS church should be able to compete very effectively in the
marketplace of ideas with Hollywood (industry size $11 billion for North
America) and with TV broadcasting ($51 billion in the United States) to affect
the nation's understanding of the church and its doctrines, especially if it is
expressing a freedom-based and nationalist message as we should be, based on
our own scriptures. This is where the extreme timidity issue comes in.
Strangely enough, our public relations goal seems to be to minimize what anyone
in the world understands about our scriptural doctrinal positions, certainly
nothing about us or our teachings that would challenge their dictatorial
systems, even though that has been the main mission of Christianity for
hundreds of years, and is the only reason the church was able to be restored in
our time.
Information-spreading
calculations
In the advertising community, especially as it relates to business
startups, there are discussions about the cost to acquire new customers as it
relates to the Lifetime Value (LTV) of a customer. As one example, Domino's
Pizza can afford to spend $800 to acquire a new long-term customer since the
lifetime value of a Domino's Pizza fan is about $4000.14
The lifetime value of a new LDS church member in the United States
could easily be in the range of $200,000, assuming that person will pay $5000
in tithing each year for 40 years. Using the 1-to-5 relationship of the
Domino's pizza example, that should mean that it should be worth up to $40,000
to acquire a new long-term church member. That does not compare very favorably
with the zero central cost during the 200 years after the life of Christ or
during the 80 years after Joseph Smith's first vision. But that seemingly
exorbitant $40,000 sounds cheap compared to our current cost of $400,000. Based
on these calculations, perhaps we should offer a full four-year college degree
for free, at a cost to the church of about $40,000, if a person joined our
church, where that person could learn the gospel well and gain an occupation.
Another interesting calculation has to do with our direct missionary
costs. If we say that a missionary works 2000 hours a year and we allocate a
cost of $10 an hour to that work, that means missionary effort is worth about
$20,000 a year. A two-year mission then becomes a $40,000 cost. Currently, it
takes more than two years of missionary work to add a single long-term convert
to our church, making the direct missionary cost for a new long-term convert
about $50,000. One might reasonably ask if there is not a better way to do
missionary work.
If Domino's Pizza can afford to pay up to $800 in advertising to
acquire a new customer, I don't know why the LDS church could not do just as
well, resulting in a system which is about 50 times more effective than our
current direct missionary system ($50,000), and about 500 times more effective
than our current overall costs for operating the church to spread the gospel
($400,000).
But all these kinds of calculations are completely pointless, since
the church in its current form, with its current policies, can probably never
be reformed to become a sensible participant in modern information spreading
techniques. Based on just our experience, if we started over with a new
bureaucracy, we would probably quickly get back to the same failed situation we
are in, for all the same reasons.
Other very
expensive problems with centralization
The current extreme church emphasis and focus on its headquarters and
its leadership has several other bad effects. For one thing, in this
"hothouse" situation, the leaders apparently forget completely about
viewing the Mormons as a people, even though the term "peculiar
people" continues to be used occasionally. For example, the failure to
think of the Mormons as a unique people and to consider what is best for their
welfare has cost those members at least $10 trillion so far in lost pension
funds over the last 80 years. This vast amount of extra money could have been
made available by taking advantage of an alternate Social Security system as
many other citizens have done.15 To illustrate the scale of this
oversight, that $10 trillion is the equivalent of about 2000 years of today's
current church budget. If individual members simply had that money to use to
help in promoting the gospel in their senior years, they could have
accomplished almost incomprehensible amounts of good beyond what has been done
under central church leadership for the last 80 years. Improving other social
insurance administrative options could probably have saved the church members
another $10 trillion or more. There are many other possibilities as well, but
what central church leader has ever taken the time to think about such useful
things to be done for a "people?"
We should notice that these special programs, which could easily be
adopted in concept by other groups in the United States, for the benefit of
everyone, would be offering a slight amount of resistance and some reasonable
alternatives to the Marxist-inclined central government. But even the tiniest
possibility of any ideological conflict with the federal government and other
governments appears to be more than the church leaders can bear, regardless of
the consequences for the members.
4. A return to
option one?
If we wish to make any serious progress as church members who wish to
implement the teachings of the scriptures, it may be that the only option we
have is to gradually work our way back to one of the "after Christ"
versions where the central headquarters almost disappears and is shrunk down to
a few handfuls of people.
Since it is extremely unlikely that we can ever disassemble the
current bureaucracy in a straightforward way, so that members are expected to
keep their tithing money and administer it much more effectively, and can
probably never increase the tolerance for ideological conflict in the mindset
of our leaders, it appears that the only effective strategy left is to simply
stop paying money to the central church and strike out on our own, using our
resources many times more effectively than the current central church does.
This shifting of resources would gradually shrink back the central church to a
much more reasonable size and effectiveness level. Naturally, there could be
questions as to whether the new activist group would have the proper authority
to do what it wants to do, but, on the other hand, once the new methods were
shown to be effective, the central headquarters may choose to follow along.
Surely at the beginning they would try to resist any change, but, later, they
might finally come to accept Christ's suggested way of doing things.
Notes
1. "Mormonism and
church finances/No paid ministry/Scriptural teachings"
http://en.fairmormon.org/Mormonism_and_church_finances/No_paid_ministry/Scriptural_teachings,
accessed 2010?
https://www.fairmormon.org/answers/Mormonism_and_church_finances/No_paid_ministry,
accessed 12/14/2019
2. Edward L. Kimball, "The History of LDS Temple Admission
Standards," Journal of Mormon
History Vol. 24, No. 1, 1998, pp135-176, p.163.
http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1030&context=mormonhistory
It is interesting that apostle Moses Thatcher disagreed with the idea
that the Twelve could spend tithing money on their own personal matters,
although all others, including Lorenzo Snow, did agree with that more liberal
policy. This seems to be a major reason why Moses Thatcher was removed from his
position as an apostle in 1896. This seems to help identify the "beginning
of the end" on using all centrally-collected tithing money for any and
every headquarters purpose, a requirement for a robust "paid
ministry." I believe that is the precise definition of a "paid
ministry:" where the paid ministers use the contributed money for their own personal needs.
See Kenneth W. Godfrey, "Moses Thatcher In The Dock: His Trials,
The Aftermath, And His Last Days,"
Journal of
Mormon History Vol. 24, No. 1, 1998, pp54-88, p.67.
http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1030&context=mormonhistory
3. Family History and Temple work costs:
It appears that the genealogy/family history project is the
largest single church project, even larger than its budgeted missionary
program. It appears to also be plagued with phenomenal inefficiencies. From the
limited data which the church makes available, it appears that the resource
cost for each unique new name that ends up in the temple system is about $2000.
There are new concepts and methods available which could bring that cost down to
near $2 per name, potentially speeding up the process by 1000 times with no
increase in cost to the church or its members.
Calculation:
The church probably spends about $0.5 billion a year in cash outlays for the
genealogy/family history program, to which is added a volunteer labor cost of
about $1.5 billion, giving a total resource cost of $2 billion. There are no
published figures on the number of new unique names added each year to the
temple system, but it seems reasonable to estimate that the number could be as
low as 1 million because of the vast levels of unnecessary duplication that
occur in today's systems. ($2 billion in total resources / 1 million new unique
names = $2000 each.)
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)
5. Kent W.
Huff, Joseph Smith's United Order: a
non-communalistic interpretation
(Springville, Utah: Cedar Fort, 1988); Kent W. Huff, Brigham Young's United Order: a contextual interpretation (Spanish
Fork: Theological ThinkTank, 1998)
6.
Elder Holland Arizona April 2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4_LcENySzQ
starting at 31:20.
7.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_O'Sullivan_(columnist)
8. Brigham Young on church prosperity:
The
worst fear I have about this people is that they will get rich in this country,
forget God and His people, wax fat, and kick themselves out of the Church and
go to hell. This people will stand mobbing, robbing, poverty, and all manner of
persecution, and be true. But my greater fear … is that they cannot stand
wealth. (James S. Brown, Life of a
Pioneer, Salt Lake City: Geo. Q. Cannon and Sons Co., 1900, pp. 122–23.)
https://www.lds.org/ensign/1991/05/beware-lest-thou-forget-the-lord?lang=eng
Brigham Young speaks more briefly on a similar theme in the
Journal of Discourses:
JD
7:44, Brigham Young, March 28, 1858
The
Lord cannot save us in riches, because we do not yet know what to do with them.
And when we are
blessed
and favoured, like the children of Israel in olden times, we wax fat and kick.
9. Luke 18:18-19.
10. The famous quotation appeared in a 1971 Pogo daily strip presenting an
anti-pollution theme for Earth
Day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogo_(comic_strip)
11. Mormon 1:13; Mormon 3:1; Moroni
8:10-11.
12. Mark 16:15.
13. A small sampling of the Proclamation:
TO ALL THE KINGS OF THE WORLD, TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
OF AMERICA; TO THE GOVERNORS OF THE SEVERAL STATES, AND TO THE RULERS AND
PEOPLE OF ALL NATIONS. Greeting. Know ye that the kingdom of God has come, as
has been predicted by ancient prophets, and prayed for in all ages; even that
kingdom which shall fill the whole earth, and shall stand for ever….
Therefore we send unto you, with authority from on high, and command
you all to repent and humble yourselves as little children before the majesty
of the Holy One; and come unto Jesus with a broken heart and a contrite spirit,
and be baptized in his name for the remission of sins (that is, be buried in
the water, in the likeness of his burial, and rise again to newness of life in
the likeness of his resurrection), and you shall receive the gift of the Holy
Spirit, through the laying on of the hands of the apostles and elders, of this
great and last dispensation of mercy to man.
...
Again, we say, by the word of the Lord, to the people as well as to
the rulers, your aid and your assistance is required in this great work; and
you are hereby invited, in the name of Jesus, to take an active part in it from
this day forward.
http://eom.byu.edu/index.php/Proclamations_of_the_First_Presidency_and_the_Quorum_of_the_Twelve_Apostles
https://www.lds.org/manual/doctrine-and-covenants-student-manual/sections-122-131/section-124-a-solemn-proclamation-the-priesthood-order-is-established?lang=eng
14.
https://thrivehive.com/how-much-should-you-spend-on-advertising-to-get-a-new-customer
15. A further explanation
of the alternative Social Security option:
In the 1930s, federal legislation
was introduced to begin a state-sponsored pension system on a national scale,
naturally using socialist principles and the government force of taxation which
are nearly always provably inferior to free private action. It was called Social Security.
In potential contrast, if the church
had supported principles of freedom and traditional morality, including
personal responsibility, the church might have proposed that members provide
for their own pension fund needs by using an alternate route provided for
within the legislation itself, thus avoiding the damaging consequences of the
federal program. That would have been a very wise practical choice.
Those organizations who took
advantage of that alternate route have fared very well. The pensions they receive are approximately 5
times as large as the pensions received by those who accepted the misguided
federal system, as demonstrated by three counties in Texas. Those private
pension plans allow for growth of contributions at a 5% compound rate while the
federal plan provides for no growth whatsoever, not even allowing adequate
adjustments for inflation.
In such a private plan, a person (or
his heirs) who paid into it all his life should be entitled to receive about
$2.5 million in total benefits beginning at the time of his retirement. A person in the federal system can expect to
receive $0.5 million during his retirement, assuming he or she lives a normal
lifespan. If they die early for any
reason, the pension payout ends, so that a person who worked all their lives
and died at age 62 may get no payouts whatsoever. And even in the best case,
those payouts will probably be less than the actual number of dollars paid in,
with no adjustment for (always-government-caused) inflation. In other words,
the government takes 80% of any potential pension benefits from someone in its
program for its own purposes, while a person in a private program keeps 100%.
That choice between the two programs seems like a no-brainer, as they say, but
it would have required some personal initiative to take timely advantage of
that very large opportunity.
What this means is that under a
private church-encouraged system, a working person could expect to receive an
extra $2 million beyond what the federal system might allow for. This system
would encourage people to have larger families because it makes very clear the
obvious point that the people who must normally pay your pension costs are your
own children. This most basic bit of economics is indeed obvious in the rest of
the world, but a government-intermediated pension system as in the US gives the
false impression that you will magically receive a pension whether you have any
children or not. Supposedly, someone else's children will pay your pension
costs. But if everyone else also decides not to have any children because they
are too much trouble, as has been true in our country since Social Security was
invented, then the whole system collapses and implodes, as we can see today
That family economic principle writ
large means that the general economy would be more successful by staying out of
the hands of the always-covetous collectivists. Instead of tax-supported
pensioners being focused on extracting ever-larger taxes from a shrinking group
of younger people, the oldsters would naturally be focused on seeing that their
investments and their families all prospered.
If there were 5 million church
members who participated in this program, as a group they would have received
about $10 trillion in extra benefits by now.
They might choose to use those funds to directly benefit their family,
which would help meet the Church's goals, or they might use those funds to help
sponsor more general church activity by members such as funding missions. It is useful to note that $10 trillion is
about the equivalent of 2000 years of a church budget of $6 billion.
One can do a serious amount of
improving of society using $10 trillion, mostly through teaching and training
the populace and giving them experiences they lack, whether they are in or out
of the church.
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