Pay your tithing!

The few times I helped count tithing we counted somewhere between $5,000 and $8,000 in donations on average each week. If you do some googling you can find other financial secretaries who report similar numbers in average wards and much more in rich wards.[1]

The church reports there are 30,940 wards and branches in the world, 15,276 of those are in Canada, the UK and the USA. The wards in those areas are going to typically be able to average $5,000 a week. Wards in places like central Africa or South America probably much less. If we assumed that just those richer wards were doing $5,000 per week in tithing then that's still at least 4 billion a year in tithing, just from half of all the wards in the world. This is all just to set the stage for the next paragraph so that you can see the numbers below are reasonable.

The best estimates for how much tithing the church brings in each year, since the church isn't transparent, range from $7 billion a year [2] to $30 billion a year [3]. If we run some numbers that's either an average of $225,000 per ward or $969,000 per ward. According to church officials, the church spends about $5 billion per year running the church[4], so that includes things like maintenance, utilities, salaries for church employees, salaries for the prophet, apostles and seventy [5], costs for maintaining temples, paying mission presidents, paying for missions, printing materials, broadcasting stuff. All the things. $5 billion divided by the number of wards means each ward needs to supply at least $162,000 per year to keep running the church. That still should leave $50,000-$75,000 per ward for a budget, every ward in the world could have the same budget of $50,000-$75,000. That would cover all kinds of amazing activities for adults, youth, everyone, people would want to be a part of the church just because it was fun with budgets like that. So why do most wards get more like $8,000-$12,000? [1] Why do most wards have to do fund raisers so that kids can go to camp or a group movie or something?

Maybe this is why, instead of supporting members and making the church somewhere people want to spend their free time, the church takes all that extra money and buys land, hotels, and cattle:

$174 million industrial real estate in Florida (2024) 

$192 million Kirtland temple and historical documents (2024) 

$200 million San Diego condo building (2024)

$1.3 million for land worth $100k (2023)

$1.3 million for land worth $234k (2023)

$260 million industrial park Kent Washington (2022)

$148 million beach front hotel in Maui (2021)

$210 million Washington Cattle Ranch (2021)

$50 million Texas Ranch (2020)

$76 million California industrial buildings (2019)

$129 million London Office building (2019)

$120 million Atlanta Apartments (2018)

 

Chicago apartment building (2018)

$100 million Dallas Raytheon campus (2017)

  
$120 million Apartments in Philly (2014)

$562 million Florida cattle ranch (2014)

 

Now, I wouldn't argue anything if the church was using all this land to grow crops and end world hunger, but they aren't doing that. The church already owns 2% of Florida [6], but we don't hear about how the church is solving hunger problems with that land. What are they doing?[7] Why would God want land in downtown Chicago or beach front property in Maui?

So we pay our tithing, clean the buildings, donate to fund raisers, and our wards get minimal budgets with barely enough for a few youth activities and maybe a ward party around Christmas time while the church keeps the rest to buy up land, hotels, and apartment buildings. Is this really how God is building up his kingdom on earth?

[1] https://www.exmormon.org/mormon/mormon565.htm

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/mormon-church-earns-7-billion-year-tithing-analysis-indicates-flna939844

[3] https://www.sltrib.com/religion/local/2017/10/14/historian-digs-into-the-hidden-world-of-mormon-finances-shows-how-church-went-from-losing-money-to-making-money-lots-of-it/

[4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-mormon-church-amassed-100-billion-it-was-the-best-kept-secret-in-the-investment-world-11581138011#:~:text=Clarke%20declined%20to%20disclose%20the,collectively%2C%20total%20about%20%245%20billion

[5] https://kutv.com/news/local/mormonleaks-web-page-posts-information-about-living-allowance-of-lds-general-authorities#:~:text=In%20accordance%20with%20approved%20procedures,increased%20from%20%24116%2C400%20to%20%24120%2C000

[6] https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-2014-03-06-os-mormon-florida-land-deal-sealed-20140306-story.html#:~:text=The%20Mormon%20church%20through%20its,was%20announced%20in%20November

[7] https://investigatemidwest.org/2023/11/27/whos-buying-nebraska-after-shopping-spree-mormon-church-is-top-land-purchaser/ This article talks about how a lot of the cattle is just sold for profit, they aren't using it to end world hunger. Some is used for the bishop's storehouse, which is good, and I'm glad for that.

If you really want to dive into all this take a look through this http://www.mormonthink.com/tithing.htm much more detail and much more analysis.