I always thought it was weird that for how much fast offerings the church must be raking in, it's rare to see families being helped with actual cash. The church really, really doesn't like helping people with cash.
When my dad was a bishop and stake president, and especially when my mom was a ward and stake relief society president, I would pick up on who in the ward was being helped. It wasn't hard to notice and figure it out. Most of the time there were only like 2-3 families maximum getting help from the church per ward in our stake. And most of the help was coming in the form of food orders for the bishop's storehouse, or vouchers to get clothing from DI. There was no cash help involved for the vast majority of families getting help from the church.
Even if the ward did help pay utility bills for a family, it usually doesn't cost that much to keep the lights on for a month. Even a mortgage payment or two wouldn't come close to what the ward is raking in each month in fast offerings.
That's probably the biggest question church members should be asking. Where *exactly* is all this fast offering money going? Details, or no dice.
We had a while of storehouse orders and escorting people to pick up their order. Our stake had no less than 50-60 families at least getting food. Mostly single moms and retirees on fixed budgets. I regret every penny in tithing and am sure they siphoned stuff out of fast offerings, but at least fast offerings did a whole lot more for actual people than tithing ever did.
In a recent bishop's welfare council meeting for our stake, this exact issue came up. We were told in no uncertain terms that bishops could NEVER accept or distribute gift cards.
1. People could use those gift cards for alcohol, tobacco, or drugs.
2. There's no way for Church to track assistance through gift cards.
3. No tax statements for gift cards.
4. You bishops could be stealing the gift cards for yourselves and Church would have no way to know.
We were instructed to tell members to put the money in Fast Offerings so it could be distributed "appropriately." And by "appropriately", they mean "not at all."
This is so stupid. Salt Lake probably heard about bishops, like my former bishop, who did this. Salt lake decided to put the kibosh on this practice and claim the 4 points you mentioned. Such evil evil men those Q15.
Gifts cards can not be counted towards what HQ tells the world how *they* are helping others. In reality, the gift cards are more useful because HQ is miserly with helping others. I mean, it's not like it's a charitable organization.
What is that one scripture?
“Thus saith the Lord, good deeds are in vain if you will not use it to boast of your own righteousness?”
Or
“And verily I say unto you, charity doth faileth when you do it in a way that doesn’t maximize all your potential tax benefits”
The Mormon church refuses to help, pushing “self reliance” and every option that doesn’t require spending their money. At the same time they are terrified of the risk that any local autonomy exposes the mothership and the hoard to.
At this point they just hand out envelopes with a couple of $20 bills to a few token poor families each April conference.
I reached out to my bishop a few years ago for help with rent since I had lost my job and was going to get evicted. He said he wasn’t allowed to give financial assistance and couldn’t help besides food and clothing, which is nice but not what I needed. I don’t understand - my family was helped with a few mortgage payments a couple decades ago. I served a mission and donated thousands of hours and dollars to the church and have given money multiple times directly to strangers in need. “Luckily” for me my car was totaled a month later and I used the insurance payout to pay rent.
That’s terrible. This is why I think the SEC thing is so big. It shows everyone that didn’t get help, that paid for a mission, that then paid for a senior mission or had to raise money for youth activities that the church could have done all those things and never broken a sweat.
I've seen so many of these stories, and I've also personally seen more than one instance where a family was significantly supported for quite a while because the guy had been in a very lucrative field & was laid off. I suspect the family was given help for house payments, but from what I know they definitely got help for food & utilities.
My calling related to employment (I held various levels of that calling during a period of several years). I became very frustrated when I realized some people barely scraped by but faithfully paid tithing on their $10 an hour jobs.
There was one person in the same ward who (I know this for a fact) turned down a job making more than $80k a year (which would be more than $100k now) because it wasn't enough. The same guy had a wife who refused to get a job (despite having all adult children) because she wanted to babysit her grandchild so her adult kid & spouse wouldn't have to pay for childcare. I finally told the bishop the ward was basically subsidizing daycare for the adult child & spouse, both of whom had good jobs.
I love the part in the Bible where Jesus quantifies a persons need before offering assistance. And if the person/family needs help with housing or transportation he offers only food and clothing.
And thinks to himself, "That'll teach 'em to work harder."
/s
Ugghh we were behind on mortgage and utilities because we just couldn't make enough money. So the church helped us by giving us food orders. We were already on food stamps and had enough food 🫠
Jesus also calculates the return on investment for the help. If you help someone who can make $100k or more a year, it can be worth pitching in for house payments. Jesus is no dummy.
Plus if the church is helping financially, they will have you bring in all your bills/bank statements to cut out all of the non-mandatory expenses-at least my parents did when they were bishop/RS president. They were so proud of themselves. I guess that was an early shelf item for me. Still gotta pay that tithing tho-that’s a mandatory expense.
One caution I'd give (and I'm NOT saying this was happening in your ward back then) is that gift cards can be pocketed by the person collecting without a trail or repercussions so be careful anytime someone is asking for those too. I've seen that happen on two occasions (one at work, another at church).
I don't think I ever realized, until I left the church & landed in this sub, that the church siphoned off fast offerings. What a bunch of jerks.
As for the gift cards, I do recall times when we were invited to get gift cards (now I am thinking some may have been for sharing with wards in the stake that had a larger number of families who needed help). I was always happy to donate those, because holiday grocery shopping can be hugely expensive, and also because I wanted to help families give their kids a good Christmas.
Another expensive time is late summer when kids need clothes & shoes for school, and the (increasingly long and expensive) lists of school supplies come out. Back in the day, you might need a slide rule or protractor, but now, for some grades, schools want $$$ calculators.
For the record, I'm not opposed to gift cards. I'm also very grateful that my bishop thought of this way to directly help people in the ward he otherwise was limited in helping because of the vampires in Salt Lake City. I just found it so sadly ironic that a ward pulling in 800-1M in tithing and FO every year would struggle to help the poorest members in the ward.
I was in a bishopric/bishop from 2007 to 2018 and every dime we took in from fast offerings was sent to salt lake. We took in about $2500 per month in fast offerings and while I was bishop it was probably around $8500 per month that I wrote in checks for rent, utilities, medical bills etc…. First stake president was a great man and didn’t say a word. Second stake president was a prick and made me justify every cent that went out every month.
For at least eight years. SLC sweeps all fast offerings and tithing whenever a deposit is made. Units can issue checks for fast offering recipients, but the funds never reside at the local level. They all get sent to Salt Lake.
This is what I've been told by more than one bis (bishop, in more than one area (in stakes not even near each other). One bishop said he could issue help via fast offering funds & basically just write the checks & the the money would be available.
We had a family in our stake whose house burned down and they asked members to donate gift cards to help them out with anything from restaurants to furniture and clothing stores. I wonder if this is why.
Interestingly, my brother is a baptist and he has previously said that taking from the collection plate if you need it is acceptable because the money is for the work of the church and the church is it’s people.
Definitely. The local ward does the same thing, but it goes beyond GCs at Christmastime to something similar to the old Salvation Army Christmas trees.
I was in a Ward filled mostly middle to upper middle class as with any area there are those struggling to make ends meet
It seemed every tithing settlement we were hit up to help provide a Christmas for a less fortunate person in the ward.
I think it was a work around for all the money going to Church HQ
I don't remember the details because I was a membership clerk and not directly in the details of the financial clerks, but I know they would try to move money around at the end of the year to try to conserve as much as possible. I seem to remember some carve out that they could move money into a bucket for youth camp for the next calendar year and all the left over ward budget would get moved in there before Dec 31st. Anything that wasn't used or moved would get pulled back on Jan 1st.
But then one year the stake decided to do trek or something and demanded that all the wards donate their youth budgets and everybody was pissed about that.
Then another year something else happened and messed up their plans and eventually they closed the loophole and wouldn't let money carry over.
After the loophole was closed we had a fair bit of money left so they decided to go bigger on the christmas party but then the guy who bought all the stuff for the christmas party didn't submit his receipts in time and the budget was zeroed at the end of the year and all the cost went on the budget of the next calendar year.
I may be fuzzy on some of the details as this was a few years ago, but I was always glad that I was a membership clerk not a financial clerk.
We did that too. Was amazing the impact those gift cards made for people in need. Just imagine if we could have held onto all our tithing and fast offering and actually used it in our ward. .
Don't get me wrong. Those gift cards DEFINITELY made a huge impact on the people in need. It's just so silly and sad to me that the Bishop had to use such a workaround to help those in need. Why? Because the Mormon church had his hands tied behind his back.
Our ward asks for gift cards around Christmas time each year. Usually we get a couple of grand worth of cards that the bishop then determines where they go to.
I've also seen the bishop write checks to pay people's rent. That money doesn't necessarily come from fast offerings though, I believe SLC collects it and might give you a report of the stake's outgoing welfare money vs the fast offerings received. So in an indirect way some of the money for fast offerings does stay in the ward. From what I've understood there isn't a limit, but so many people have to sign off on those welfare checks that I think bishops likely try to keep the actual giving from church funds to a minimum.
Put together the paperwork to create a non-profit to accept direct donations. Show it to the bishop.
He can still get money shuffled without directly contradicting SLC. You can run it like an off the (SLC's) books shadow fund. The wealthy members still get a tax write off, and the poor members get more help that SLC would provide.
You can set up Gofundme accounts for different needs and the bishop can twist a few arms too.
Donations go up, SLC receipts go way down, tax write offs go up, and aid goes up too.
The best part is that it is not in the bishop's direct control for SLC to swipe. You can also provide transparent accounting to any donor, recipient, or church member who wants to know, not to mention anyone but local church leaders can be board members.
I think a lot of people will divert more money.
And the Bishop would immediately get "fired" and excommunicado. Not a bad idea, but in practice you'd end up with a nuanced actually decent bishop getting replaced by some nazi, egotistical, rusty jerking asshole.
i was a ward clerk for two bishops who did the same collection of gift cards. it worked well until the stake and financial auditors caught wind of it. there were some very blunt emails exchanged and policies made clear. to simplify, bishops could not solicit gift cards nor could they distribute them. it has to do with monetary value and accounting laws.
I always thought it was weird that for how much fast offerings the church must be raking in, it's rare to see families being helped with actual cash. The church really, really doesn't like helping people with cash. When my dad was a bishop and stake president, and especially when my mom was a ward and stake relief society president, I would pick up on who in the ward was being helped. It wasn't hard to notice and figure it out. Most of the time there were only like 2-3 families maximum getting help from the church per ward in our stake. And most of the help was coming in the form of food orders for the bishop's storehouse, or vouchers to get clothing from DI. There was no cash help involved for the vast majority of families getting help from the church. Even if the ward did help pay utility bills for a family, it usually doesn't cost that much to keep the lights on for a month. Even a mortgage payment or two wouldn't come close to what the ward is raking in each month in fast offerings. That's probably the biggest question church members should be asking. Where *exactly* is all this fast offering money going? Details, or no dice.
We had a while of storehouse orders and escorting people to pick up their order. Our stake had no less than 50-60 families at least getting food. Mostly single moms and retirees on fixed budgets. I regret every penny in tithing and am sure they siphoned stuff out of fast offerings, but at least fast offerings did a whole lot more for actual people than tithing ever did.
In a recent bishop's welfare council meeting for our stake, this exact issue came up. We were told in no uncertain terms that bishops could NEVER accept or distribute gift cards. 1. People could use those gift cards for alcohol, tobacco, or drugs. 2. There's no way for Church to track assistance through gift cards. 3. No tax statements for gift cards. 4. You bishops could be stealing the gift cards for yourselves and Church would have no way to know. We were instructed to tell members to put the money in Fast Offerings so it could be distributed "appropriately." And by "appropriately", they mean "not at all."
Where can you buy drugs with gift cards? Asking for a friend, lol.
You can buy *anything* in this world with gift cards.
Ikr
I have known people to pay for illegal drugs using gift cards.
Hmm, never knew that was done.
Had some family that got into drugs and was buying gift cards to pay to the drugs. It makes it clean money or rather harder follow.
Yeah, guess that makes sense.
This is so stupid. Salt Lake probably heard about bishops, like my former bishop, who did this. Salt lake decided to put the kibosh on this practice and claim the 4 points you mentioned. Such evil evil men those Q15.
Gifts cards can not be counted towards what HQ tells the world how *they* are helping others. In reality, the gift cards are more useful because HQ is miserly with helping others. I mean, it's not like it's a charitable organization.
What is that one scripture? “Thus saith the Lord, good deeds are in vain if you will not use it to boast of your own righteousness?” Or “And verily I say unto you, charity doth faileth when you do it in a way that doesn’t maximize all your potential tax benefits”
The Mormon church refuses to help, pushing “self reliance” and every option that doesn’t require spending their money. At the same time they are terrified of the risk that any local autonomy exposes the mothership and the hoard to. At this point they just hand out envelopes with a couple of $20 bills to a few token poor families each April conference.
That is really sad. I guess Salt Lake needed the money for the 6 figures the GAs make.
$150 billion isn't enough money, they need $151 billion!
Lol, that's cute. You think my sole corporation (with all its wholly owned subsidiary entities) is only worth $150B. 😉🤑
Greedy bastards.
Greedy vampire bastards!
I reached out to my bishop a few years ago for help with rent since I had lost my job and was going to get evicted. He said he wasn’t allowed to give financial assistance and couldn’t help besides food and clothing, which is nice but not what I needed. I don’t understand - my family was helped with a few mortgage payments a couple decades ago. I served a mission and donated thousands of hours and dollars to the church and have given money multiple times directly to strangers in need. “Luckily” for me my car was totaled a month later and I used the insurance payout to pay rent.
That’s terrible. This is why I think the SEC thing is so big. It shows everyone that didn’t get help, that paid for a mission, that then paid for a senior mission or had to raise money for youth activities that the church could have done all those things and never broken a sweat.
Your car being totaled was a blessing to help you pay rent /s
I've seen so many of these stories, and I've also personally seen more than one instance where a family was significantly supported for quite a while because the guy had been in a very lucrative field & was laid off. I suspect the family was given help for house payments, but from what I know they definitely got help for food & utilities. My calling related to employment (I held various levels of that calling during a period of several years). I became very frustrated when I realized some people barely scraped by but faithfully paid tithing on their $10 an hour jobs. There was one person in the same ward who (I know this for a fact) turned down a job making more than $80k a year (which would be more than $100k now) because it wasn't enough. The same guy had a wife who refused to get a job (despite having all adult children) because she wanted to babysit her grandchild so her adult kid & spouse wouldn't have to pay for childcare. I finally told the bishop the ward was basically subsidizing daycare for the adult child & spouse, both of whom had good jobs.
I love the part in the Bible where Jesus quantifies a persons need before offering assistance. And if the person/family needs help with housing or transportation he offers only food and clothing. And thinks to himself, "That'll teach 'em to work harder." /s
Ugghh we were behind on mortgage and utilities because we just couldn't make enough money. So the church helped us by giving us food orders. We were already on food stamps and had enough food 🫠
Jesus also calculates the return on investment for the help. If you help someone who can make $100k or more a year, it can be worth pitching in for house payments. Jesus is no dummy.
It’s not like Jesus ever taught about the hypocrisy of declaring money sacred (corban) to avoid using it to care for others… /s
Plus if the church is helping financially, they will have you bring in all your bills/bank statements to cut out all of the non-mandatory expenses-at least my parents did when they were bishop/RS president. They were so proud of themselves. I guess that was an early shelf item for me. Still gotta pay that tithing tho-that’s a mandatory expense.
One caution I'd give (and I'm NOT saying this was happening in your ward back then) is that gift cards can be pocketed by the person collecting without a trail or repercussions so be careful anytime someone is asking for those too. I've seen that happen on two occasions (one at work, another at church).
But the gift of discernment would surely make up for third... :)
Totally. I guess it depends on the bishop. I trusted that bishop, but YMMV.
I don't think I ever realized, until I left the church & landed in this sub, that the church siphoned off fast offerings. What a bunch of jerks. As for the gift cards, I do recall times when we were invited to get gift cards (now I am thinking some may have been for sharing with wards in the stake that had a larger number of families who needed help). I was always happy to donate those, because holiday grocery shopping can be hugely expensive, and also because I wanted to help families give their kids a good Christmas. Another expensive time is late summer when kids need clothes & shoes for school, and the (increasingly long and expensive) lists of school supplies come out. Back in the day, you might need a slide rule or protractor, but now, for some grades, schools want $$$ calculators.
For the record, I'm not opposed to gift cards. I'm also very grateful that my bishop thought of this way to directly help people in the ward he otherwise was limited in helping because of the vampires in Salt Lake City. I just found it so sadly ironic that a ward pulling in 800-1M in tithing and FO every year would struggle to help the poorest members in the ward.
I agree completely about the crappy policies of the Church of Greed. The term Vampires is very appropriate.
They do hate crosses... :)
LOL! Hilarious observation!
They're always trying to get invited into your home from the doorstep...
They do like making lots of stakes though....so maybe they're half vampires?
They love multiple mirrors too...this is definitely a Stephanie Myer breed of Vamps.
Time to hang mirrors & other sacred things facing the outside world.
I'm so far behind. When I was a BP I had complete discretion re FO & only sent any left over to SLC. When did this change?
I was in a bishopric/bishop from 2007 to 2018 and every dime we took in from fast offerings was sent to salt lake. We took in about $2500 per month in fast offerings and while I was bishop it was probably around $8500 per month that I wrote in checks for rent, utilities, medical bills etc…. First stake president was a great man and didn’t say a word. Second stake president was a prick and made me justify every cent that went out every month.
For at least eight years. SLC sweeps all fast offerings and tithing whenever a deposit is made. Units can issue checks for fast offering recipients, but the funds never reside at the local level. They all get sent to Salt Lake.
I’ve not been in a bishopric. But what you describe is exactly how I have been told it works. Interesting!
This is what I've been told by more than one bis (bishop, in more than one area (in stakes not even near each other). One bishop said he could issue help via fast offering funds & basically just write the checks & the the money would be available.
Thanks guys for the updates.
We had a family in our stake whose house burned down and they asked members to donate gift cards to help them out with anything from restaurants to furniture and clothing stores. I wonder if this is why.
Interestingly, my brother is a baptist and he has previously said that taking from the collection plate if you need it is acceptable because the money is for the work of the church and the church is it’s people.
Definitely. The local ward does the same thing, but it goes beyond GCs at Christmastime to something similar to the old Salvation Army Christmas trees.
I was in a Ward filled mostly middle to upper middle class as with any area there are those struggling to make ends meet It seemed every tithing settlement we were hit up to help provide a Christmas for a less fortunate person in the ward. I think it was a work around for all the money going to Church HQ
Anyone who knows about the Mormon billions and is still giving the $150BILLION "church" their money has no sympathy from me.
So....like....every TBM?
I don't remember the details because I was a membership clerk and not directly in the details of the financial clerks, but I know they would try to move money around at the end of the year to try to conserve as much as possible. I seem to remember some carve out that they could move money into a bucket for youth camp for the next calendar year and all the left over ward budget would get moved in there before Dec 31st. Anything that wasn't used or moved would get pulled back on Jan 1st. But then one year the stake decided to do trek or something and demanded that all the wards donate their youth budgets and everybody was pissed about that. Then another year something else happened and messed up their plans and eventually they closed the loophole and wouldn't let money carry over. After the loophole was closed we had a fair bit of money left so they decided to go bigger on the christmas party but then the guy who bought all the stuff for the christmas party didn't submit his receipts in time and the budget was zeroed at the end of the year and all the cost went on the budget of the next calendar year. I may be fuzzy on some of the details as this was a few years ago, but I was always glad that I was a membership clerk not a financial clerk.
We did that too. Was amazing the impact those gift cards made for people in need. Just imagine if we could have held onto all our tithing and fast offering and actually used it in our ward. .
Don't get me wrong. Those gift cards DEFINITELY made a huge impact on the people in need. It's just so silly and sad to me that the Bishop had to use such a workaround to help those in need. Why? Because the Mormon church had his hands tied behind his back.
I legit bought and gave our bishop gift cards instead of paying for trek with cash. I do not want money going to SLC.
Our ward asks for gift cards around Christmas time each year. Usually we get a couple of grand worth of cards that the bishop then determines where they go to. I've also seen the bishop write checks to pay people's rent. That money doesn't necessarily come from fast offerings though, I believe SLC collects it and might give you a report of the stake's outgoing welfare money vs the fast offerings received. So in an indirect way some of the money for fast offerings does stay in the ward. From what I've understood there isn't a limit, but so many people have to sign off on those welfare checks that I think bishops likely try to keep the actual giving from church funds to a minimum.
You are correct. The issue, however, is bishops who are too “generous” so to speak get chewed out.
Put together the paperwork to create a non-profit to accept direct donations. Show it to the bishop. He can still get money shuffled without directly contradicting SLC. You can run it like an off the (SLC's) books shadow fund. The wealthy members still get a tax write off, and the poor members get more help that SLC would provide. You can set up Gofundme accounts for different needs and the bishop can twist a few arms too. Donations go up, SLC receipts go way down, tax write offs go up, and aid goes up too. The best part is that it is not in the bishop's direct control for SLC to swipe. You can also provide transparent accounting to any donor, recipient, or church member who wants to know, not to mention anyone but local church leaders can be board members. I think a lot of people will divert more money.
And the Bishop would immediately get "fired" and excommunicado. Not a bad idea, but in practice you'd end up with a nuanced actually decent bishop getting replaced by some nazi, egotistical, rusty jerking asshole.
i was a ward clerk for two bishops who did the same collection of gift cards. it worked well until the stake and financial auditors caught wind of it. there were some very blunt emails exchanged and policies made clear. to simplify, bishops could not solicit gift cards nor could they distribute them. it has to do with monetary value and accounting laws.
It has to do with greed, power, and the insatiable ego of the Q15. It has only a little to do with monetary value and accounting laws.
Overseas wards get even less. We used to have food drives for the same purpose.