An alternate model for funding the church

I partially agree. I don’t want to be a free-loader. I am one of those guys that when I visit even a historic Catholic church that is open just for people to come and look at the stained glass, I put a few bucks in the jar. I guess the pragmatic side of me thing, “This building isn’t going to keep it self up”. My wife isn’t so hot on always doing it. If I am attending, the building and the corresponding utilities and maintenance need to be handled. If I have kids in the youth program, I think few bucks are in order to keep the general programs going (and you don’t have to tell me how many hundreds of $ you have to spend every summer for every kid for high adventure and youth conferences). So no issue there. But that is NOT 10% of my income.

How do you keep a large church like ours growing, buildings maintained, temples built and maintained, missions funded, full time staff in place, while also being fair to the members?

Part of my answer is, “Don’t get up in conference and tell people if they don’t have money for food or rent to first pay tithing.”

Teach tithing as 10% after all necessary living expenses have been paid.

That’s what I do. I actually believe it is better for the church.

You could even take “increase” to mean the money you made this year that is more than you made last year.

“Interest” could be taken to mean paying only on what you make from investments.

The scriptures are vague. If the church can move the goalposts, so can we.

OTOH, they have relaxed one aspect of the policy. It used to be that you were supposed to pay 10% of all you had upon conversion. Most people didn’t.

Tithing used to be 10% of surplus annually, meaning after all your expenses were taken care of, 10% of what you had left over. At some point they transitioned to 10% of income, but that was never a revelation, just a policy change. The wording in the D&C is still the same and could be interpreted as such even though the church currently teaches differently. You could still be a full tithe payer off surplus if you wanted. It is wrong to teach pay tithing before feeding your family.

There have been many, many different implementations of tithing over the years. E.g. I think for a time Edward Partridge set tithing at 2% of a person’s net worth, I don’t remember… but I think one other stipulation of the 10% of surplus rule was that you had to give 10% of all your possessions to the church at the time of joining, then 10% of your surplus thereafter.

If the church wishes to be futureproof – and I think it has been doing this – it will make sure not all of its money is invested in banks and the stock market. As we saw a few years ago, both of these can be precarious. And as we saw in the Great Depression, they can bankrupt people. Investing in physical infrastructure etc seems the way to go.

I would be surprised if they didn’t have a very diversified portfolio. Not thing has zero risk. Even burying it in the back yard has a risk of inflation devaluing it.

I believe they already pay for a majority of church operations with monies from a diversified portfolio – vs tithing – although nobody knows for sure. But the $$ from the mall, from other business ventures which are less well known, land, and an enormous ranch in Florida has to go somewhere. Many members with deep pockets already pay tithing with stock (big tax savings) which makes it easy for the church to either just keep or sell and buy other stock. I’d be very surprised if the church doesn’t already have vast sums in a stock portfolio.

Over very long periods of time the stock market is often considered the best investment from a return point of view, even over land. Of course, not everyone has the same risk tolerance and investment horizon, but the church’s horizon is years and years. Who knows what the church’s collective risk tolerance is – it probably reflects the Q12, Q70, and Presiding Bishopric who are often successful business owners.

President Hinckley said years ago that people over-estimate the church’s wealth. He pointed out that buildings such as churches and temples do not produce income, so we shouldn’t consider them investments. I agree with that but the church obviously wants other sources of income besides tithing otherwise they wouldn’t build malls, own cattle, and have other business interests.

Agreed, but even land can have issues even if that risk is dramatically less than investments like stocks.

What if the land you bought in Florida suddenly starts having sinkholes at a rate of one per every few acres. I don’t know the $/acre rate, but I can rest assured you are not going to make any money trying to sell that land.

I know some folks that live near some of the flooding that has occurred and they have been flooded 5 times now. Their land their house is on has dropped in half (not to mention the equity in their house is all but gone).

Or if the issues with global warming come true and the sea level rises a bit, a bunch of the land in Florida may not be considered “land” anymore.

But I would agree that land is one of the better investments (as long as the annual taxes are not too high).