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Not an introductory post as my first post, I hope you’ll forgive. I’ve been doing some reading of previous topics and have seen an item that needs clarification. Since I’ve seen it referenced more than once and therefore I think it is a topic that needs to be set straight.
The church has never had janitors only “custodians.” Please respect that there is a difference and it is important. When referring to to such please use “custodian.”
Next, the Church did not fire all of the custodians. The custodian position was eliminated and current custodians (and ALL physical facilities employees) were offered a one-time “buy out.” For every year of employment they were offered two weeks of salary up to one year of salary. So someone who had worked for 10 years would received 20 weeks of compensation. They were also offered insurance benefits (if they were previous benefitted) and help with finding other employment if they so desired.
This is a far cry from the accusation that the church fired all of the custodians. Those who chose not to leave have moved into other positions or work responsibility. No one was forced to accept the buy-out.
I hope this lays this myth to rest.
I personally think this is bad because I think members do a horrible job of caring for the meetinghouses but for the long-term it will hopefully teach the youth respect and and opportunity to have stewardship for the church buildings.
The usual complaint I see lately revolves around the SLC Mall investment by the Church vs the cost cutting measures like terminating the paid custodian system. On one hand, the Church sends a message like it is belt-tightening time. Then enormous amounts of money are invested in other directions that don’t seem very “churchy.”
I don’t recall as many discussions about the injustice of the “firings.” It was mostly people having problems with the investment nature of the corporation that owns the church.
To be clear, I don’t personally have much problem with the church investing funds. That is what “smart” stewards do with organizational assets. It might have been poor timing to go deep into commercial real estate, but heck, there were a ton of “brilliant” financial people riding that bubble into oblivion. We’ll see if it pans out with a profit someday.
My problem is that so few of the resources of the Church seem to filter back to improve the experience of the volunteer Ward members — not necessarily the letting go of the custodians. I’ve never felt it was wise to have temporal matters place themself in a position to drivie one’s investment in the Church, so I don’t think it’s wise to have members on the Church payroll for jobs that can be done by non-memberrs. One should stand independent of the Church so their testimony is based on intrinsic reasons rather than “because if I don’t do [insert X] I will lose my job”. For example, chapel cleaning is not an activity myself or my family look forward to. That is one area I would like to see funds invested, but to a non-member. Another is the fact that such a small fraction of the donations made by Ward members are actually used to help fund the Ward level programs. In a couple socialist countries, the Unit financial statements are a matter of public record. About 5-10% of the total Ward donations actually go back to the Ward budget in the country in which I viewed the unit records.
Regarding their investment in business assets — yes, that is wise for someone who is a steward of funds, however, again, I would rather see the funds used to improve the experience of the members. I could list a whole whack of things the funds could be used for at the Ward level to improve the Church experience.
I like what Ghandi said in his book “My Experiments with Truth”. He said that charitable and religious organizations should have only as much money as they need to fund their operations, otherwise they lose their accountability to the members that support it.
There is a lot more to my story however — this is the tip of the iceberg, with some of my temporal experiences with the Church reprsenting the driving cause of this philosophy.
Yeah I guess my complaint is not so much of the church investing as I think the money could be better spent enriching the life at church. I’m not one of the FLAKer types though that believes the church is a business disguised as a church though. I must also say that the church giving out “helicopter” style welfare is a good or even realisitc idea. I guess I’m giving a “stayer’s” perspective in that yes I think the church is using money in ways I don’t always like or agree with, but no I don’t think the church is in the stocks and real estate business swindling it’s members.
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