On Mormon tithing and a $100 billion funding fund

(RNS) — There’s a narrative within the Gospel of Luke a few farmer who unexpectedly discovered himself with the nice fortune of getting harvested extra grain than he had room to retailer. What to do?

He had a solution, one which strikes me as shrewd and forward-thinking in these first-century days of subsistence farming and hand-to-mouth dwelling: He would construct larger storage sheds! So smart. Then he may get pleasure from a future free from nervousness, it doesn’t matter what in poor health winds would possibly blow.

Besides that God was having none of it. Reasonably than applauding the man’s capacity to avoid wasting or upholding him for example of what Mormons would name “provident dwelling,” the story has God rebuking him as a idiot. That very night time, God mentioned, the person’s life can be required of him, so it was unsuitable to be storing up treasures for himself.

It’s a narrative that makes me acutely uncomfortable. And perhaps it did the opposite Gospel writers too, since Luke is the one one of many 4 to recount it.

I imply, my husband and I contribute each month to a retirement plan. We’ve life insurance coverage insurance policies. And one superb day just a few years from now we could have paid off our mortgage. Heck, even our contingency plans have contingency plans.

I wished to open this column with that admission: that I’m not dwelling as much as what Jesus taught me to do with my cash. I’m not planning to promote all the things I’ve and provides all the cash to the poor. I’m penning this whereas sitting in a snug lounge, surrounded by beloved books and an ornament-laden Christmas tree. I just like the comforts of my life.

I do know this makes me a hypocrite. The phrase hypocrite means I’m performing under (hupo) the half I needs to be taking part in (krinesthai). We’re hypocrites after we imagine one factor whereas doing one other.

However my church has acted hypocritically too in the case of cash, by which I imply it’s not dwelling as much as its requirements.

It’s been practically three years since I made the choice to cease tithing to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and two years since I first wrote about it. As I defined on the time, I used to be shaken, even devastated, by the information that my church was hoarding greater than $100 billion in an funding fund with no speedy plans to make use of the cash to assist folks. That conflict chest is along with the church’s in depth actual property holdings and different property. In accordance with the unique report about it in The Washington Put up, the one occasions any property had been withdrawn from the $100 billion funding fund have been to shore up two of the church’s for-profit ventures, together with a life insurance coverage firm and an upscale shopping center in Salt Lake Metropolis.

It was a polarizing act to write down about my resolution to cease tithing. And despite the fact that I adopted up with a column about the place I’ve redirected the cash — I’ve continued tithing, however primarily to organizations just like the Bountiful Youngsters’s Basis and Compassion Worldwide that straight feed hungry kids — a great deal of the pushback from readers accused me of “robbing the Lord of tithes and choices.”

That reference to the Outdated Testomony prophet Malachi is an fascinating one. It cherry-picks one ingredient of tithing — the concept of robbing the Lord — and ignores the bigger context of Malachi 3, which is about what God expects of us. A few of that’s wrapped up in issues about financial justice. In accordance with verse 5, for instance, a part of “robbing” the Lord isn’t paying staff a full wage, not caring for widows and orphans and never opening our hearts to strangers.

Tithing, in different phrases, can’t be diminished to checking a field that claims you help an insanely rich establishment with but extra wealth and are abruptly proper with the Lord due to it. It’s not simply the act of economic sacrifice that makes tithing holy, though sacrifice is a part of it. It’s how that cash helps God’s kids, a lot of whom are in nice want.

I’m not saying the church doesn’t have interaction in any charitable actions. It completely does. Simply final week I acquired an e mail press launch concerning the church giving $10 million to battle polio all over the world.

Such efforts are stunning and necessary — and never practically sufficient. $10 million is a good sum of money, however not compared to the billions that the church takes in every year (estimated to be round $7 billion, which greater than covers its annual bills with sufficient left over to proceed investing).

The “parable of the wealthy idiot,” which is what Luke 12 is known as, at all times involves thoughts after I take into consideration the church sitting on $100 billion in investments (after which some). I do know that many members have defended its huge reserves as merely smart planning for the longer term. Maybe that stockpile will turn out to be useful within the apocalypse, they are saying, when the entire world can be in a state of chaos. Or, nearer at hand, maybe it would assist to gasoline the church when the composition of its membership sometime shifts from rich nations in North America and Europe to the World South.

Besides that Jesus didn’t discuss saving for the longer term. You could find that within the E-book of Proverbs, so it’s not like saving isn’t current anyplace within the Bible as a constructive worth. However it wasn’t of worth to Jesus, apparently, and he’s the one we’re speculated to emulate. Repeatedly within the Gospels, we see him assembly folks’s speedy wants on an speedy foundation. He doesn’t educate that we have to save our cash now in order that we might be beneficiant in some unspecified manner in a far-distant, nebulous future.

I really like The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It has taught me morality in so many foundational methods: the significance of honesty, for instance, and of not shielding anybody side of my life from the instance of Christ. It has taught me to look the Scriptures to seek out Christ in all issues, and to sample my life after him primarily based on what I learn there.

So it’s significantly demoralizing to be taught that the church doesn’t look like following that sample. Is cash the exception to the rule about following Jesus — we’re to take action besides when it threatens wealth and acquisition?

It’s an annual custom within the church to have a “tithing settlement,” despite the fact that the language has not too long ago modified to “tithing declaration.” (It’s maybe an indication of the depth of the church’s swollen forms that the wording change from “settlement” to “declaration” merited a press launch.)

So right here is my decidedly unsettled declaration: I’m a full-tithe payer. And I really feel unsettled not as a result of I’m now not tithing to the church, however as a result of 10% merely isn’t sufficient in the case of serving to the poor.

Associated content material:

Why I finished tithing to the LDS Church

LDS Church is beneath hearth in Australia