Chapter 15

 The terrible church performance statistics a paid ministry creates

It was the question of church performance statistics that got me started on this entire line of research which resulted in this book about a forbidden paid ministry supported by forbidden tithing, both items condemned by the scriptures, which items are also the cause of all current church problems, including extremely slow church growth. As I saw the church reporting very bad statistics year after year, with the trend going downward, instead of upward as one might hope, I was alarmed that this could be going on without my understanding the process in any way. Certainly, the church leaders were not openly giving us any data and related commentary on this important general question. I was told on one occasion by a very senior church leader that it was none of my business to worry about such things -- they were the only ones who needed to know about such things.  Nonetheless, I couldn't see why every member on the planet would not want to know about how well or how badly the church was doing and what the factors might be that were involved.

During the 1980s I was researching two interrelated books concerning Joseph Smith's United Order and Brigham Young's United Order mostly to explore the unusual doctrinal issues that arose during that early time period. Both of those books on history had much to do with the growth and progress of the church in the 1800s, so I naturally became curious also about more current church growth, and began to locate and collate statistics on that topic.

The Church Almanac was a book that was published each year for many years which gave all the statistical data available about the church and its growth around the world, beginning in 1830. It also included other news items such as information about the temples which were added, etc. Unfortunately, that publication is now out of print, possibly because that series of books documented what has gradually become mostly bad news.

I got copies of the Church Almanac as they came out each year, and selected and compiled and graphed that data as a major portion of my third book entitled Creating the Millennium: Social Forces and Church Growth in the 21st Century.  I consider this, my third book, to be full of interesting information, but I still had not come to understand what the basic problems were that were keeping the church from being as successful and as influential as I thought it should be. It was only later that I finally "got to the bottom of it," at least as I see it, which is why I am finally writing this current book. In my Creating the Millennium book I suggested ways that social forces could be harnessed to increase church growth rates. Unfortunately, the most powerful social force of all was something I completely missed. Everyone wants to have the "benefits" of being part of a comprehensive social insurance system. That is the description of the original charity-based social insurance system which the early members of the church invented and experienced at the time of Christ and at the time of Joseph Smith.

As I mentioned, I spent years researching the growth levels of the church to see why we were growing so slowly, with that growth rate continually going down, and wrote a book about it.  In the process, I noticed a downward inflection point in the time range of about 1960 and could find no obvious reason for that change in direction.  Growth rates had generally been going up before that, and then turned downward until we have reached a zero-growth rate today.

It took me many years to discover the reason, but I believe I have it now.  It was about 1960 when the church began to refuse to issue temple recommends unless a person had paid a full tithe to the central church.  Before that, paying a full tithe, in one of many possible ways, was seen as aspirational, something everyone should be striving to do. Members could still do a great deal of good around them with their personal resources, and not be penalized by the central church for doing so, which is the essence of the current requirement of sending all church contributions -- "tithing" -- to the central offices, where it is largely wasted on unnecessary and prideful things instead of being put to good charitable uses to benefit the members and the world.

After those original church performance studies, I then began another course of study on what I thought was a totally unrelated matter, the systems for doing genealogy research.  At the time, I was a computer professional, specializing in computer information system design, and also had an interest in genealogy research. It was in about 1989 that I decided to do some genealogy research for my family, and, in the process, found that the old library/paper-based systems were far too random and disorganized and subject to massive duplication of research effort by the millions of people involved. I decided to design a system to be much more efficient, up to 1000 times more efficient if the practitioners of the art were willing to accept some new concepts and greater cooperation and discipline.

I found that the mathematics of efficiency were so overwhelming if cooperation could be fostered, that I thought no one who understood the concepts could resist the possible gains.  I even went so far as to obtain a federal patent for the process.  When I triumphantly but naïvely presented these ideas to the fledgling Ancestry.com company and later to the church itself, in about 1998 and 2004 respectively, expecting to be well-received, I was stunned to learn that there was no interest whatsoever in implementing these new cooperation concepts even though they promised an easy 30 times improvement in efficiency. Gains of 200 times were only a little bit harder, and gains of up to 1000 times were perfectly possible but naturally were harder to reach.

I discovered that neither Ancestry.com nor the Church had an interest in efficiently and quickly finishing this huge data processing project, but instead had the seemingly mostly cynical goal of stretching a very large revenue stream out forever. To put this into better context, the church was spending about $2 billion a year, with about $0.5 billion a year in cash and about $1.5 billion a year in volunteer labor, and hoped to maintain that activity level forever.

The various commercial genealogy companies altogether were bringing in about $3 billion a year and also hoped to keep that revenue stream flowing forever.  Only by maintaining the maximum levels of inefficiency and research duplication could they keep up these revenue levels forever.

My general project computations were that $1 billion would be more than enough to complete all the genealogy research for the entire United States, and it would require about $20 billion to complete the entire world, to the extent it could be completed, based on the availability of records.

If we only consider the genealogy research done since about 1998 using the Family Search Church-sponsored computer system, the Church alone has spent about $40 billion in church resources, enough to do the United States about 40 times over, or to have completed the entire world at least twice.  If we add in the resources absorbed by all the other commercial genealogy systems, totaling about $3 billion a year, amounting to about $60 billion in all since 1998, you can see that the entire world could have been completed about 5 times over. The rates of spending on this activity have not decreased at all, and no major blocks of research have been completed, such as the United States, meaning that the next major logical question to be understood and answered is why the Church would tolerate such massive inefficiency, faced with a supposedly critical need to provide salvation for all our known ancestors.

The cynical answer is that this is all part of a system that keeps the church central bureaucracy supplied with perhaps $15 billion a year, and possibly up to three times that much, forever.  As things stand, one must pay tithing to do temple work, thus keeping this process going on forever as a way to ensure the church's income does not diminish. The last thing the church wants to do is to complete all research and temple work for the dead. The only goal is to bring in large amounts of money and keep people perpetually very busy and distracted on a giant makework project, a kind of socialist government-style project reminiscent of the Great Depression projects – like the old WPA or Works Progress Administration projects -- where building up a force of political activist supporters was a large part of the project goals, far more important than any valuable projects actually completed.

The work of the 300,000 LDS genealogy volunteers (and perhaps 2 million other US genealogy hobbyists), is almost completely unnecessary, but it does seem to make some people happy to do church work without ever having to interact very much with the rest of the world as would be required in proselytizing the living. It makes it appear that "saving" a soul who is dead is much easier and cheaper than helping or saving any living person (especially since current costs for saving the living are unnecessarily astronomical), even though the value to the receiving person is infinitely higher for those who are living than for those who are dead. Living people often have extreme and critical time constraints, but the dead have almost no time constraints at all.

The church has essentially monetized the sale of ordinances for both the living and the dead. If the church's and the nation's genealogists were ever to finish the basic genealogy for the entire United States, that would be viewed as a catastrophe for all the involved religious and commercial bureaucracies.  Obviously, these many bureaucracies must work together to maintain the same inefficient goals and practices, lest one of them accidentally solve the general problem of genealogy research for a tiny fraction of the current costs and thereby completely undermine and make obsolete all the others.

Of course, the church is also spending a few billion dollars a year on building temples, but that is also a benefit to the church, not a cost, since all that money must first come in as tithing which can then be spent very liberally on supporting a massive construction bureaucracy made up of naturally very loyal supporters of the church which pays their generous salaries and expenses and provides prideful results. The building of temples and chapels and the research work for the dead are all basically unnecessary, nothing more than cover stories to justify members supporting a lavish bureaucracy. Our concern for the dead is probably no more effective than that of the Russian Orthodox Church where people simply buy and burn a few candles to get people out of purgatory, but our solution is certainly a great deal more elaborate and expensive, which is the point of it all.

Luckily for a greedy and deceptive church (who may themselves be deceived in some cases), most members are still unacquainted with today's astounding information technology possibilities, and so are willing and even happy to assume that "doing genealogy" is an infinitely large task that can never be finished, even though it can be easily demonstrated that six months work at any time in the last 20 years could have finished the entire United States, and every new 6-12 month period could finish the genealogy for another mass of humanity as large as the United States – about 300 million people and all their documented ancestors. The United States is about 1/20 of the world, so finishing the world within 10-20 years is easily possible. In other words, the church leaders and their technical assistants must maintain a huge fraud indefinitely on many levels to keep the money pouring in, spending it all on themselves with almost nothing going to actual real-world charity.

Twenty years from now we will have spent $80 billion by the church and $120 billion by all other groups, and no measurable progress will have been made (by conscious design) on genealogical research and temple work.  We will simply have another generation of people who will have devoted that much more to the effort, most of it wasted.

In the process, the church has created its own multilevel feudal social class system, including a "Kings Court" of tens of thousands of loyal paid retainers who would naturally resist any threat to their paychecks. As pointed out in detail elsewhere, there is actually no doctrinal need for either temples or chapels, but the construction of these buildings is a very generous source of income to the church and its associated bureaucracy. This all sounds very medieval, like the masons who spent their lives building massive cathedrals for the corrupt Catholic popes.

In summary, almost none of the central church spending is necessary for successful church operation, and in fact is the exact reason it is now so unsuccessful.  If nearly all of that money were devoted to the charitable needs of its members or other needy aspects of society, as it should be, instead of wasting it on prideful and unnecessary and often extravagant buildings, then the church would be meeting all the needs both spiritual and temporal of its members and potential members, and so would be growing at an explosive rate as it did when it was new and focused on charity as the ruling principle as it was at the time of Christ and at the time of Joseph Smith.

Today the church is in the exact situation that the Roman Catholic Church found itself in that prompted the criticism of Martin Luther in his "95 Theses" which inadvertently started the Protestant Reformation.  It was all about ignoring the needs of the poor and taking that money to provide a sumptuous globe-circling living to the current paid ministry and to construct expensive and prideful buildings for their control and use.

In other words, what we have today is a giant scam in long-term operation by the Central church.  The existence of that officially supported scam, and the naïveté and corruption it engenders, may partly explain why so many people in Utah have been scammed out of their savings by unscrupulous salesmen, often having positions of religious authority over people at Utah, such as local bishops.

Only a tiny fraction of the money that goes to Salt Lake City through the tithing system actually is justified, and even that small legitimate amount should not be subject to any "religious extortion" where one must pay money to a central bureaucracy to receive some sense of feedback or confirmation that one's salvation is secure. The money that goes to Salt Lake City as tithing is nearly all wasted on frivolous matters, supporting a self-appointed class of "new Levites" who believe they should receive their living from ordinary members

"Freely have ye received, freely give" is the correct rule for holders of the priesthood.  The priesthood is to be a joyful burden, not a means of earning a living at member expense.

To bring in a few more numbers on the genealogy topic, we are spending perhaps $2000 for each new unduplicated name that enters the temple, where that cost could be as low as $2 if done correctly.

The amount spent on the proselytizing of the living is also outrageously out of bounds. We should note that there was an approximately zero cost for new members at the time of Christ and at the time of Joseph Smith, and sometimes there was a net positive gain to the group as it expanded.

Since the church has recently essentially ceased to grow, with zero new members, and the church is taking in at least $15 billion in tithing revenue, we can say that we are paying a nearly infinite price for each new long-term person added to the church's total size. A few years ago, when there were actually up to 30,000 new long-term members being added to the church each year, we could at least calculate that each new long-term member cost about ($15 billion/30,000=) or about $500,000 each.  A family of five would thus cost about $2.5 million.  That number could be up to three times that large if the church income were shown to be $45-50 billion dollars as some have estimated. These numbers do not compare well with the zero costs of earlier times. We could probably increase our growth rates today to any number we wanted by simply offering every family of five $2.5 million. They could all buy a new house and retire for the rest of their lives.

These are the absurd levels of expenses found in today's church, and the church members would be fully justified in ending their support for this extremely wasteful system and demanding a return to prior practices.

There are several other ways to make interesting calculations concerning the cost of new members. The church typically reports about 300,000 new converts each year.  The Church does not report the number of deaths of members each year, but we can estimate those deaths to be about 225,000 on a base of 15 million members who have a life expectancy of age 75. That means that just to keep from shrinking in size, the church must add at least 225,000 each year.  If another 75,000 leave the church each year for other reasons, that would account for our having zero net growth in active members with 300,000 converts each year. The recent reports of up to 185,000 people resigning from the church each year, based on their alarm at reading on the Internet about alleged errors in church history, means that there is probably a huge net loss in active members each year.

With 60,000 missionaries finding 300,000 converts a year, that means about five people are added for each missionary each year.  But all of that is simply to keep the church from shrinking, and adds nothing to its operational size.

Each of those replacement members is costing church members about $15 billion/300,000 = $50,000.  Since it costs about $5,000 a year to sustain a missionary who produces about five replacement members at $1000 each, one could say that we are paying 50 times as much for each new member as is necessary.

The church members do not even begin to have enough children to solve the growth problem of the church.  The highest number imaginable is about 60,000 new children who are baptized each year, only about 1/5 of the number necessary to keep us from shrinking, let alone supplying any actual growth. That was the issue that the old polygamy program was supposed to solve, and certainly did to some extent.

In contrast, if the Church were anxiously engaged in doing effective charity work with all the money it had itself from its own sources plus what it might get from some other outside sources, the church would be growing at a furious pace as it has in times past when charity was the essence of the church.

So we find that our maximum sustainable missionary program may just barely keep us from shrinking in numbers.  This does not sound like what was intended to be happening to today's church.

These calculations have been made based on the number of new church units -- wards and branches -- that are added each year.  In 2018, a total of 30 wards and branches were added (the number of each type is not separately reported).  If we assume an average of 100 people for each new ward or branch unit, that would give us a growth of 3000 people in 2018.  For a church the size of ours -- about 16 million are reported -- that is close enough to zero to call it zero.  And the trend is downward, not upward, so we will be lucky to even do as well in 2019, unless something remarkable happens.

Naturally, some missions do well and many do poorly, so it is uncertain how much success any particular missionary can expect to have.  That may explain the high levels of anxiety and depression found among many groups of missionaries.

Perhaps if LDS missionaries sense that they are doing nothing more than keeping the church from shrinking, they are not going to be too sure that the gospel is actually as true and exciting as they are constantly told it is. They are not indeed changing the world or really gathering Zion, since they are just working hard to avoid shrinkage. We are running as hard as we can just to stay in place.  Most missionaries would probably like to feel that their extreme effort and sacrifice ought to achieve much more than that. They might reasonably wonder whether the "product" they are "selling" is really as wonderful as the scriptures and church leaders tell us it is.

Notes

An interesting historical example of other makework projects which had questionable unstated political purposes:

United States History

Written By: The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Works Progress Administration

Alternative Titles: WPA, Work Projects Administration

Works Progress Administration (WPA), also called (1939–43) Work Projects Administration, work program for the unemployed that was created in 1935 under U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Although critics called the WPA an extension of the dole or a device for creating a huge patronage army loyal to the Democratic Party, the stated purpose of the program was to provide useful work for millions of victims of the Great Depression and thus to preserve their skills and self-respect. The economy would in turn be stimulated by the increased purchasing power of the newly employed, whose wages under the program ranged from $15 to $90 per month.

See Article History

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Works-Progress-Administration