Quinn’s Research on LDS Church Finances

My heart sank when I saw the figure $120,000 for GA salary. That’s more than the vast majority of Americans will make at the peak of their career. Yes, it’s still an order of magnitude less than bigwigs in other institutions and less than a large portion of ministers of other faiths, but when you compare it to the $0 made at the local levels, including mission and temple presidents (AFAIK), that sort of irks me. I can understand covering all necessary living expenses (plus a little fun money since they have stressful lives), housing, and giving them perks like unlimited travel and nice cars, but that’s about it. Even being paid with investments is no excuse for their pay IMHO. I would be far more comfortable with these things if GAs were financially treated like mission presidents.

Positives – no one is getting rich off the church. The church manages its finances wisely and got out of debt, dips, and valleys consistently after they brought in the Canadian GA.

Negatives — lack of transparency, how they hid the financials from the membership when they were in deficit mode in the mid-nineteenth century (a consistent practice, also applied to objectionable doctrine until the internet made it impossible). The fact that they started funding buildings from central funds and not local members, and that they are subsidizing certain missions (if memory serves).

For me, the fact that they don’t distinguish between the temporal and the spiritual bothers me. In my experience, when there is a conflict between the temporal and the spiritual, the temporal seems to win. You could look at the “sameness” of the temporal and spiritual as simply an excuse not to go after the highest spiritual road when the spiritual and temporal are in conflict. For me, truly inspiring organizations prove their spirituality by forgoing temporal blessings in favor of spiritual ones. And isn’t that what we are taught?

Net result — happy that individual members aren’t getting rich off the church, but feel somewhat justified in looking out for number 1 (me and my family) given the huge reserves and resources of the church. The consistent use of the “B” word (“Billion”) seemed to drive the latter home to me.

A stipend is sometimes given to students or research assistants so that they can be unencumbered with making a living and wholly invested in study or research.

I do believe that the church sees the GA’s wages as a stipend or living allowance. They are not tied to seniority or productivity or performance. They are high enough so that most of these men are quite comfortable financially and would be less tempted to act unethically for financial gain. They are low enough to not be in the same ballpark as CEO’s and captains of industry (it was mentioned elsewhere that the CEO of the Non-Profit BSA earns 1.6 million). The article itself mentions “Today, that is sometimes barely half as much as some of the church’s skilled bureaucrats.” This means that there are people employed by the church as lawyers, university presidents, IT administrators, etc. that can bring home a higher take home pay than TSM. I feel that to be significant towards the distinction of a “stipend” or living allowance.

I would be interested to see how this stipend has changed over time. It certainly appears that BY was making a fortune. I certainly doubt that his brethren in the Q15 were getting an equal share. I wonder how this has evolved through history and when it took the form that it now has. Maybe Brother Quinn’s book will answer those questions.

I personally love the story of poverty to success. I think it’s a good example of why we as individuals should look at diversifying our personal portfolios such as looking into Roth IRAs, 401k, stocks, bonds, precious metals, currency exchange, and more. I have always wondered, after reading Rough Stone Rolling, how the church pulled it off since in Smith’s days, the church’s finances were a complete disaster at best. The church, in my opinion, has always subtly taught its members to prepare for the storms (e.g. food storage, staying out of debt). My testimony would be hurt if the church wasn’t financially sound and if they were like the lazy grasshopper instead of the hard working ant who prepared for winter.

I get what your saying, but to me it feels like they have gone way beyond a grasshopper and it feels more like an frog that just can’t get enough to eat. Especially when they stand up in conference and say, “If you don’t have money to pay the rent or feed the kids, pay your tithing first.”

I think our leaders honestly just believe that much in the blessings of paying tithing. Never mind that they struggle to articulate what those blessings are, and when they try they often end up preaching the prosperity gospel. They just feel very strongly that those blessings exist.

(FWIW, my feeling is that the blessing that comes from paying tithing is no more than stronger belief. There’s good science to back this up. It’s also a minor theme in authoritative discourse, though most members would mystify the mechanism that strengthens belief.)

Here’s the thing, though. Jesus strongly condemned the scribes for devouring widows’ houses before he pointed out the widow contributing her two mites. And I’ll bet many of those scribes felt they were helping the widow by asking her to sacrifice much more than they did.

The one thing that jumped out at me is that the stipend is less than lots of church employees make, as has been mentioned. I know the Q12 & FP have other sources of income, but lots of other GAs don’t. It is cool to me that the President of BYU, for example, makes more than the top leadership – and that the lower-level fundraisers / account managers at LDS Philantrphropies make over half of what the Qs70 GAs make.

I also love that the stipend is not adjusted for geographic location of residence. I understand that it widens the gap between GAs and regular members in poor countries, but I Ike the egalitarian nature of it – a lot.