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For example, that 29% of donations stat regarding the Methodist Church. What does that mean? 1) That 29% of all funds contributed to the United Methodist Church’s headquarters were distributed in humanitarian aid? That’s what it sounds like.
a) How much, in total dollars, was contributed to the UMC, and how much, in total dollars, was distributed to humanitarian aid?
b) How much, in total dollars per Methodist member, was distributed to humanitarian aid?
a&b1) There are 11,000,000 members on the UMC rolls right now – less than the LDS Church, but there are 8,000,000 members on the United States rolls – more than the LDS Church. The overall sizes of the two churches are close; how close are the dollars of humanitarian aid?
c) How much money was contributed locally to the salaries of the ministers and the building and upkeep of the meetinghouses? (Since tithing is being used in the case of the LDS Church data, similar contributions ought to be used when talking about the Methodist data – and, knowing how the Methodist Church is structured, that data is not being used in their numbers.)
I could go on and on and on about the bad statistical comparison this article represents, but my point is quite simple:
This is not as black-and-white as the article makes it seem, even as there are issues about which we can talk and negatives that we ought to consider.
Everyone, I said NOTHING about the financial issues of this post and article in my “admin comment”. I hope everyone realizes that. My comment was NOT about financial topics and discussing them. I said nothing about anyone else’s concerns about Church finances – and others expressed concerns. I addressed ONLY the actual words used to call Mormonism in its entirety a fraud and the LDS Church an ugly oligarchy.
We’ve never let those types of comments stand, and we aren’t starting now.
We can discuss this topic – and even disagree strongly about it, but those two blanket characterizations of the Church (especially from someone who resigned membership and someone whom I love but who is a fundamentalist Mormon) aren’t welcome. They never have been.
/back to the actual discussion of the post – please
Oh. I do have a one thought I will share. I have decided that I will not be transparent locally about my tithing donations ( I pay directly to HQ now),
or participate in tithing settlementuntil the church decides to be transparent how it spends my money. Sure, this is a small thing, and the church in SLC knows how much tithing I pay, and will only affects myself, my BP and the SP…but it does make me feel better. And it makes me feel like I am doing SOMETHING, however small, to educate the leadership about the concern many folks have, and perhaps bring about reformation from the ground up.
last December, I had to tell the BP three times “no” I was not coming to church or meeting with anyone just to do tithing settlement, nor was I declaring to be “full, part or non” tithe payer.
Of course, I have the added benefit of not only not wanting a TR…but couldn’t get one right now even if I did.
Truly, just out of curiosity and to make sure I haven’t been typing out of my butt (which I’m told is painful, so I thought I wasn’t), I did some simple fact checking. The following link it to a financial report from the United Methodist Church from May of this year: http://www.gcfa.org/sites/default/files/u3/Financial%20Commitment%20Report%20May%202012.pdf Sure, it is a report, and you’d like a similar report from the LDS Church. I get that. However, look at the actual figures.
The comparison doesn’t look bad at all when you look at the overall size of the two churches (similar membership, with more Methodists in the United States than Mormons) and the actual amount of true humanitarian aid each one appears to have distributed. (about 3.5 x as much from the LDS Church in total dollars) If we are going to criticize one group for under-helping the poor, maybe we ought to be criticizing the Methodist system that apparently keeps it from giving even 1/3 of the amount given by another denomination that basically is its equal in size.
Dealing with stats from other sources can be tricky. I try to remember that and not take ANY stats at face value – even from the Church.
Fair enough Ray. I do try to be careful not to cross the line of what I understand the purpose of the site to be. I apologize that I crossed it or that I even got close to it. Honestly I’m probably not a good fit for the purpose of the site. However I absolutely love the open mindedness and careful thinking of those who contribute here.
I allowed the personal frustration and anger with my reading the article to cloud my judgement here. I am somewhat concerned about your comment of allowing others to have their beliefs. I am that way already, but I have tried to be super careful not to come across that way on here. If I have done that I doubly apologize.
For those who are concerned about my censure, I would not be too worried. Where as Ray has said, I am not trying to stayLDS other than to get along with them socially I am for good reason under a little tighter watch I think – as it should be.
Thank you, bc_pg, for understanding. As I’ve thought a little about this, frankly, I think it would have been more appropriate for you to handle this privately instead of publicly for a number of reasons. The article focuses on the corporate armof the church. Remember that it is not a representation of the whole church. Volumes and volumes could be written about charitable works that have been done. Look at the big picture! Quote:bc_pg … that last comment crossed the line for this site.
Well, I’m a relative newcomer here, and perhaps not entirely invested in or sure what the
realintent of this site it, but FWIW I didn’t think the comments in question were out of line, though they were understandably strident. But what do I know? I guess I will leave it at that. Peace. Nephite wrote:The article focuses on the
corporate armof the church. Remember that it is not a representation of the whole church. Volumes and volumes could be written about charitable works that have been done. Look at the big picture! The church is, technically, a corporation. Not sure what good it does to try to make that kind of distinction.
doug wrote:Nephite wrote:The article focuses on the
corporate armof the church. Remember that it is not a representation of the whole church. Volumes and volumes could be written about charitable works that have been done. Look at the big picture! The church is, technically, a corporation. Not sure what good it does to try to make that kind of distinction.
Please help me figure that one out if any of you have some insight.
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Bruce in Montana wrote:
What haunts me, and maybe some of you, is the question “What do we do now when we realize that things are so wrong?”Several years back I had to ask the local BP for some help with rent….Since I enjoy an mild barley drink from time-to-time and hadn’t paid 10% in a while, I was denied. I told him that he was throwing King Benjamin’s admonitions under the bus but he pointed to the pictures on his wall of the 1st Presidency. Apparently, the handbood of instructions is more important than the word of God.
Please tell me that the “prophet of God” did not say “one, two, three…Let’s go shopping”….
How many single parents are out there that could use a hundred bucks, or so, to make ends meet this month?
This is getting past pathetic.
I think it is a problem Bruce.
I am glad I am no longer asked to contribute to the Ward building fund…but…still discouraged.
For all I know, the church is frugal And spends every cent on a worthy cause. But we will never know because they wont open the books to the people who are fronting the money.
The perceived cover-up is worse than the crime. Get a clue baby boomers…this is not going to work for us. Gen x is walking…stop the bleeding before it is too late.
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I am going to self-moderate here, repent, and make amends for my previous post in this thread. Maybe it’s feeling a little bit bad about posting such a snarky reaction to this article, maybe it’s also that the mission and purpose of StayLDS is to help us remain in the faith (should we choose to do so), so I’m going to flip-flop a bit here.
In the 1880s and 1890s, the church was effectively disenfranchised by the Edmunds-Tucker act, which made the church a criminal organization because of polygamy. All church assets, except the temple, were confiscated, and any polygamous leaders were incarcerated. This was the time of my great-grandfather, who eventually had seven wives.
While I may think that Polygamy wasn’t an inspired principle, they did, and they had the right to exercise their religion freely, or at least they should have had that right.
It was during this period that the “Corporation of the President” was established to prevent confiscation of assets, since the church was disenfranchised. (This is in Arrington’s history, I’m not sure where, but can look it up if you’d like). It didn’t really work, but the few remaining assets were firmly in the “Corporation of the President”.
Once the accommodation was established as a result of the Manifesto, it wasn’t like all of a sudden, the church assets were back — they were all gone, except a few key properties, temple square being one of them. The church, and the LDS people in the 1890s were extremely poor. In that extreme poverty, they managed to complete the crowning architectural and symbol of the faith, the LDS temple in Salt Lake. A few years later, Lorenzo Snow would have his vision of tithing as a means for rescuing the church from financial oblivion.
So the combination of tithing, plus the “Corporation of the President” were born out of the Church’s extreme poverty and in a setting where the enemies of the church had effectively disenfranchised it. I’m sure that in the process of setting up these structures, church leaders of the time, and thereafter, made a fast and hard determination never to be in a position again of being eliminated because of a lack of reserves and financial strength.
Through the Great Depression, the Church’s prudence and welfare system paid off for a lot of members, and going into any number of disasters since then, the Church’s position and strength has materially aided challenges. Both my wife’s grandparents lived in the flood basin beneath the Teton dam in the 1970s. When Dam burst in 1976 and FEMA finally mobilized, they found that all the residents of that flood basin were already being supported by the immense support structure already provided by the Church and it’s incredible sense of community amongst the members.
Such logistical strength comes from having infrastructure, buildings, organizational constructs that seem completely separate from the idea of church of christ focused only on charitable service and teaching. Yet, that is precisely the work and structural effort that JS and BY established as what they thought was literally a “Kingdom of God on the Earth”. Curiously, the idea of this mandated set of donations, plus the idea of a community of the saints living together, supporting each other, and eventually establishing “Zion” was one of the overlooked parts of the initial Church of Jesus Christ, or as they were called, “Followers of the Way”.
The church leaders in the first century were not good at this, and they were continually having to break from their spiritual activities to ‘wait tables’, literally. So they established organizational constructs: deacons, seventy, bishops (overseers), who would oversee the physical administration of the church, while the apostles and priests would focus on ecclesiastical duties. It only makes senes that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would systematize this physical administration to a standardized infrastructure someone independent of eccliastical duties as well.
Is it greed to set up a great and spacious building or mall in the middle of salt lake? Or, is it a way to increase the overall standard of living of central salt lake, providing more stimulus and attraction to locate businesses into the town, so that there are more jobs, more opportunities for people to work and have a higher standard of living? While it seems like a church shouldn’t be involved in business, technically, it is. and it was, in the earliest form in the original Followers of the Way.
It’s easy to point and criticize. I do it a lot. I also know, right now, that I have a lot of critics in my job, where I travel around the world apparently in luxury while many of my teams grunt it through on projects. But when one sits in the seat of having to make good things happen, one makes choices in the process of decision-making that do not always appear the same way from the outside as from the inside. Yes, I know appearances are important, but I would say that judging is best left to the big guy in the sky than in my limited perspective here.
I know that large size and financial strength lead to abuses of power. That’s human nature, and the church is as humanly inspired as the rest of us. The Church leaders take seriously the idea that they are stewards of the Kingdom of God on Earth. they require of the most faithful to covenant that we consecrate our time, talents, and everything we have or will have to the Church for the building up of this Kingdom….and for the establishment of Zion. As difficult as this is, as a member, I need to figure out how to trust (have faith) that they are faithfully and effectively building up the Kingdom en route to establishing Zion. And to be effective, they need to be smart business people. I got it. I just wish that Zion were more part of the equation…
wayfarer wrote:In the 1880s and 1890s, the church was effectively disenfranchised by the Edmunds-Tucker act, which made the church a criminal organization because of polygamy. All church assets, except the temple, were confiscated, and any polygamous leaders were incarcerated. This was the time of my great-grandfather, who eventually had seven wives.
While I may think that Polygamy wasn’t an inspired principle, they did, and they had the right to exercise their religion freely, or at least they should have had that right.
It was during this period that the “Corporation of the President” was established to prevent confiscation of assets, since the church was disenfranchised. (This is in Arrington’s history, I’m not sure where, but can look it up if you’d like).
That was a great history lesson. In this day and age, I guess even churches have to be set up as some kind of legal entity.bc_pg, I seriously considered a private message, but I wanted to make sure everyone (including those who read but never comment) understood the lines here are that are uncompromisable – that there are other sites where such black-and-white dismissals are acceptable, but that they aren’t appropriate here. Also, we had called a much more traditional believer on his dismissive comments recently, and I couldn’t let it seem like we support thsoe from one side of the spectrum while challenging those from the other side. It was a difficult decision, frankly, and I hope you understand.
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