Building A Local Church Annual Budget: Fill & Download for Free

We don’t have a professional clergy. We don’t have a seminary in the traditional sense. Our leaders don’t have divinity degrees. They all support themselves with their own careers separate from the Church. They serve typically for three to seven years before somebody else is rotated into leadership. Here are some of my local leaders. They are not paid by the Church. A lot of them seem to be lawyers or dentists.The tithes with which they are entrusted go straight into a central account in the Church offices in Salt Lake City, where it is managed professionally as well as according to principles written out by inspiration from God. All tithing money is only spent or invested for building and sustaining His kingdom on earth, present and future. The examples below will show you that God has given the Church an extensive — and expensive — mandate.You can go to Salt Lake City and see the offices. You can also go to museums, libraries, and visitors’ centers, all welcoming the public for free.There is no admission fee or donation box.Most of the Church’s funds go toward building meetinghouses in more than 100 countries, at the rate of more than one per day. All projects are paid in full before groundbreaking, so you won’t ever see any sign at a constuction site painted look like a big thermometer. You also won’t see a meetinghouse with a leaky roof or unkempt lawn.You’re welcome to drop in anytime you see one and visit our meetings and inspect the grounds and buildings, which are built to exceed the commercial standard. One thing you will never see inside is a collection plate.You’re probably familiar with some of our 70,000 young missionaries. Although they are largely supported by their families and whatever money they could save from jobs during high school, the Church pays their airfare. There are also a dozen missionary training centers on five continents.This adds up to a lot of airline tickets. There is also the expense or running over 300 mission offices and motor pools worldwide.The Church’s senior leaders also rack up quite a few frequent flyer miles. These 12 here have a calling to testify of Christ to the whole world, and by the looks of their schedules, they are serious about it.Beyond travel expenses, they and about 100 other General Authorities are offered a parsonage that is more than I earn, but less than my supervisor makes - the point being that these men are way underpaid, given their role as being part of a council responsible for leading millions of people and overseeing billions of dollars. And even then, not all of them accept the money. Money simply can’t be said to be their motivation. It’s important to consider that the 12 apostles you see here work six days a week, 11 months a year for the rest of their lives. They never retire.So this is about 100 paid men leading a 16 million-member growing global organization. Among these hundred-or-so, there is a council of 18 who are responsible for the management of several billion dollars worth of annual donations. The money the General Authorities receive is not paid out of tithes, but rather from church-owned business interests. Given their general level of success as professionals prior to assuming these leadership responsibilities (surgeons, judges, CEOs, university presidents) I’m sure most of them took a serious pay cut to serve.These inspired female leaders are also jetting around the world at Church expense almost as much, teaching, providing guidance, and sharing the gospel.There is a headquarters staff that includes clerical, IT, financial management, media, engineering, custodial, groundskeeping, travel, security, and cafeteria personnel. They are paid market-rate salaries out of Church funds. Their salaries and benefits do come from tithes.The single most expensive item the Church owns is Brigham Young University, with its flagship campus in Provo, Utah, and others in Idaho and Hawaii, as well as the Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies and a superbly-directed London Centre. If you’re not one of the 28,000 students at BYU, you can still take the same religion classes weekdays at one of the LDS Institutes of Religion next to college campuses all over. Free. There’s also a high school version to increase scriptural literacy. Again, free.With the Church subsidizing BYU by 70%, it is an excellent value in education, a private school with tuition comparable to a state school’s. In addition to over 100 major fields of study, every student must take four semesters of religion classes to graduate. There is no undergraduate theology major. (Where would they find jobs?)The Church is working to maximize digital resources, posting its whole curriculum and news releases on the official Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints web site, providing uplifting programming on YouTube as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and outreach at ComeUntoChrist.org, including live chat with these guys. (Knocking on doors is so 20th century.)Nevertheless, printing costs still exist. Like many other organizations, we are sharing the The Holy Bible. We also want to flood the earth with the Book of Mormon. This is what I saw last week when I opened the nightstand at a hotel in Minneapolis.The bling-iest expense for tithing is the temples. These are special buildings, distinct from the ordinary meetinghouses in form and purpose. They are not open to the public, but are reserved as sacred, quiet spaces for spiritual instruction, rituals, and covenant making. Here is the one just outside Washington, DC. You’re welcome to visit the grounds and the adjacent visitors’ center, which hosts free lectures and concerts.There are 155 of these temples, with several more under construction or recently dedicated in the Philippines, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Brazil, and the United States. More are in planning stages. They are paid for before ground is broken.If you get a chance to go on one of the public tours (free, of course) before a new temple is dedicated, you will see where a lot of this money goes. Take a look at this video from the new one in Rome. Temples are so ornate because building them is an act of high worship. Solomon spared no expense. The modern temples are no less sacred.The Church also sponsors the world’s most extensive archive of genealogical records in the world, Free Family History and Genealogy Records called FamilySearch. The searchable database is growing at more than a million names per week. My late uncle (not a member of the Church) used his local Family History Library to map out our pedigree.You probably have a local Family History Center you can visit to find your ancestors. (Of course it’s free.)One place you can’t visit is the Granite Mountain Records Vault, where these records are permanently safeguarded from humidity, civil disturbances, natural disasters, and even nuclear war. #extremepreppersSince it is privately owned, we don’t have to depend on the government or invite anybody in.All this microfilm is being digitized for free public use on the Internet.One of the purposes of the Church is to help the poor.This warehouse is the center of an international system of storehouses of food and emergency supplies.The government has no involvement in any of it. This funding comes from the donations we make as Church members when we skip two meals a month and contribute the cost of the meals to a local fund to feed the hungry within our local congregation. The money left over from that goes to fund this larger program to feed our own as well as disaster victims of any faith.There are over 100 smaller storehouses that help the needy. They often share space with LDS Employment Resource Services & Work Agency and with LDS Family Services. Although primarily to benefit Church members in distress, the Church also operates Humanitarian Service to help with disaster relief. Here’s a report on some recent efforts to help in Floridaand in Texas.The annual budgets for local congregations, which pay for refreshments, youth activities and camps, office supplies, party decorations, photocopies, etc., come from tithing funds. As top writer Adam Helps notes, “The congregations run a pretty lean budget but it’s still a lot of money.”So when we pay tithes and other offerings, we are supporting the Lord’s work, not a professional clergy.We live by this biblical law of the tithe, whereby members of the Church have the privilege to contribute 10% of their income voluntarily. For this reason, we don’t have rummage sales, bingo, pledges, or any other kind of fundraiser.There has not been a major financial scandal since the nationwide wave of bank failures in 1837.The Church does own some profit-making businesses and real estate, including much of Hawaii, Missouri, and Florida. These pay taxes the same as any other commercial enterprise.The Church has not incurred any debt for over 100 years, and will never borrow again. A small portion of the tithes received go into a rainy day fund for the Church’s operations in case there is an economic downturn.So come on by and meet us sometime. Find us with the Meetinghouse Locator. You’ll probably hear sermons or lessons about things like faith and repentance, service, forgiveness, Jesus Christ, His Atonement, the Restoration of the fullness of His Gospel, priesthood authority, family life, being a good neighbor, studying the scriptures, overcoming personal challenges, and living a clean life in a dirty world. There will also be a few opportunities to get out and serve your neighbors. But one thing you will never hear is an appeal for money.Ask any Church member about this. These are sacred funds that are donated by the faithful, many of whom live in very meager circumstances. Church leaders handle this money as if it were the widow’s mite in Mark 12:41–44. It is amazing to watch what happens with all this, and even more amazing to be part of it.I hope this is helpful.Related contentWhat would it be like if Jesus was active today instead of two thousand years ago?Should a jobless person tithe?Does the LDS president get paid?How do Mormons justify spending two billion dollars on a mall, instead of feeding the poor?The LDS Church has brilliantly amassed billions in their rainy day fund. What could they do with that kind of money? Could it even put a dent in US poverty or public health or is it better to keep that money out of circulation?What is a typical occupation for a Mormon?What was President Gordon B. 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Christian churches are almost entirely non-profits. That means they don’t make a profit. If you mean, “What is the annual budget for all Christian churches”, good luck finding that. I can’t imagine that anyone has assembled global data of that sort.If you want to see operating budgets, some denominations (and individual churches) are pretty open about it. My church provides members a detailed expenditure breakdown, and the parent organization, the United Methodist Church, provides public budget info (https://www.umnews.org/en/news/gc2016-passes-604-million-general-church-budget)For local churches, the bulk of operating costs probably come from staff salaries and building maintenance.

Those are two very different questions.The Catholic Church is a communion of about 1.3 billion people, with about 2–3 million ministry personnel, organized into something like 223,000 parishes, 145,00 schools, 9900 orphanages, 5400 hospitals, 2500 dioceses, 3000 religious orders, 1400 universities, a couple hundred international lay movements and associations, and countless local groups. All of which have their own budgets and assets (and liabilities). Not only would it be near impossible to calculate to total assets and liabilities of every part of the Catholic Church, most of its “wealth” is in buildings and services. Or, as the Deacon St. Lawrence of Rome said, the treasure of the Church is the poor (for whom its property and services exist).The Holy See and the Vatican City State are much more manageable, though it has about 65 entities that until recently all operated more or less independently. The entire operating budget is something like $350 million, considerably less than places like Harvard, Notre Dame, Oxford.. to say nothing of Starbucks, Google, Microsoft, Wallmart… And assets of about $3bn. again, less than an Ivy League university endowment. Most of the former is personnel (about 1300 people), most of the latter is property. Some of that property is magnificent - like the Vatican Museums and all it contains, but much of it is residential - being rented out or used by employees, communities of nuns, or as residences for refugees and otherwise homeless low-income people.