Regarding the church assets, at what point should the church stop investing surplus tithing receipts into income generating assets and reroute tithing to humanitarian needs? It seems that that asset allocation decision should be considered. After all, if the church was able to recently plunk down $1 billion of non-tithing income to buy a mall, perhaps its financial footing is sufficiently sound to invest the surplus into some of the causes we have mentioned here.

Are you familiar with the Nestle/Carnation infant formula controversy in Latin America in the early 1970s? My mother worked as a nurse in Nicaragua at that time so I was raised hearing how she and her co-workers spent countless hours attempting to convince impoverished women that their babies would NOT look like the healthy Nestle babies on all the billboards if they watered down the formula to make it last longer…

I tried to find a good article on the topic…but it’s late and I’m a little blurry-eyed. Here are a couple links that give you the gist of what occurred:

http://www.babymilk.nestle.com/History/
http://www.breastfeedingbasics.org/cgi-bin/deliver.cgi/content/International/his_substitutes.html

it’ll take time . . . but in time i bet that fund will spawn initiatives that will create self-sustaining springs capable of generating enormous wealth . . .

I have no particular answer here. At some level it’s probably good not to have that full privacy, to know that someone in my community knows the forbidden secret of my salary, while at some level it has negative effects.

By way of full disclosure, I ended up donating directly to SLC, but not for the reasons above (though they occurred to me as I was making the change): my wonderful but absentminded bishop kept misplacing my BillPay automatic checks, and I had no interest in writing paper checks.

I would argue that the Church is getting financially stronger each year as measured by its Balance Sheet (net assets ie land, buildings, other assets) and by its “Income Statement” ie annual revenue stream as measured by tithing contributions and growing membership. If it were a publicly traded company the stock would be appreciating based on it’s annual membership growth and associated increasing “revenue stream.” The correlation of higher annual contributions with higher membership growth annually is a pretty safe directional bet.

What is the earnings power of the Church? A few years back in Newsweek or Time, a writer based on research or other analytical estimates indicated / quessed that the Church’s annual donations (tithing or other receipts) to be around $5 billion per annum.

If you assume the following: 12.2 million members, 26,773 congregations, with 46% in the US and 54% non-US, and 50% of members active, and 25% of all members temple recommend holders, and the average faithful member is contributing 3.6K annually or earning between 36K and 72K for each family household (depending if both parents work). And assume that US income is 4 times that of non-US income, that would translate to about $6.4 billion in annual tithing receipts. I

That is a significant annual revenue stream by any estimation to keep the work moving forward in terms of 1) building new temples, 2) new meeting houses, 3) annual budgets for the ~27,000 wards around the world, 3) 300+ mission fields, and other operating budgets for the Church.

As impressive as $6.4 billion in annual revenues is (by the assumptions taken above), the earnings potential is maybe ~$25 billion annually if all members were active and faithful tithe payers (based on the hypothethical assumptions made above). The reality is that most of the tithing from a typical ward comes from the 80 – 20 rule. Most of the tithing comes from the stalwart 100 core members in each ward, and from them, most is concentrated in the wealthy 30 or so. That’s not to say that the contribution of the “widow’s mite” is not important or significant (from a testimony or principle of tithing perspective), but rather that the lion’s share of contributions are coming from a concentrated group of faithful (and wealthy) LDS people.

Obviously, nobody has any idea what the earnings power of the Church is, except a select few within Church headquarters, but analytically one can surmise (based on the assumptions above) what potential earnings power is possible from a set of assumptions made above.

Bottom line is, if the estimate above is reasonable, I don’t think you could argue the Church has ever been bringing in greater tithing receipts than the present, and therefore, has never been financially stronger than the present.