You’ve probably seen the recent story about the LDS Church saving surplus tithing funds and growing a large “rainy day fund”, estimated at $100B.
The math goes like this. Let’s assume the Church takes in $1B per year surplus in tithing. For example, let’s say the Church brings in $7B in tithing and expenses are $6B. That means $1B is leftover. What do you do with the extra $1B? Options could be:
- Spend it anyway. That’s what most organizations would do.
- Give some back to members. Might be nice to get a check for about a month’s worth of tithing at the end of the year.
- Save it to use later. This appears to be what the Church has done.
Saving $1B a year and investing at an interest rate of 7% (the rate the whistleblower claims the Church is realizing on this fund) would grow to about $100B after 30 years. Dang. I wish I started saving like that 30 years ago.
So the Church is sitting on $100B reserves. What to do with all that cash? I have an idea.
Missionary Service
I served a missionary to Korea almost 30 years ago which I loved. My oldest three kids have all served missions in the last few years. I believe missionaries are currently required to donate four hours a week of their time to pure service. Activities include: English classes, visiting orphanages, picking up garbage, yardwork for the needy, etc. These activities were some of the most rewarding moments of my mission.
One of the biggest challenges of my three kids’ missions seemed to be how to fill up their time, especially the day time hours. Most of their evenings seemed to be productive: teaching appointments, visiting new investigators, proselyting during peak hours when people are home, visiting members, etc. A lot of their day time hours were very boring, very tedious, very unproductive.
I propose a radical change to the missionary schedule, shifting their total service hours to 20 hours a week. Four hours a day Tue-Sat (assuming Monday is P-Day). This would be done during the “downtime” hours between 10 am and 5 pm. With over 65,000 missionaries, this equates to 68 million service hours per year! Or the equivalent of a 32,000 full time service work force.
It’s a problem figuring out what you’re going to spend your four hours a week on in service. Bumping that to 20 would put too much pressure on the missionaries to brainstorm service ideas, and they would end up being inefficient with their time. This leads to Part 2 of my proposal.
Capital Budget
With this change, I also propose a capital budget of $1B per year. This could be done by taking $15B of the current $100B reserve fund and allocating it to a Missionary Service Endowment fund, which would produce $1B per year at the current 7% interest rate. Since the Church has surplus of $1B tithing this $15B could quickly be replaced.
That’s 1,000 projects per year around the world with a one million dollar budget. Every year. Or you could give each of the 399 missions around the world a $2.5M per year budget. What could a mission create in terms of infrastructure to facilitate service opportunities with that kind of annual budget? Each stake or ward in the church would call service specialists and leaders to help coordinate missionary time in these various initiatives. Senior missionaries would be called to coordinate service activities and help manage the budget. Maybe a small, salaried support staff per mission.
Orphanages, homeless shelters, soup kitchens, low cost dental services, low cost basic medical services, low cost housing construction, clean water initiatives, farms and ranches, battered wife shelters, more structured English teaching classes, small public schools in rural areas, marketing to leverage what’s being done and get more people involved.
You combine that capital with the 32,000 FTE service hours and wow, you have a huge positive force for good in the world. Think Lighttheworld on a larger scale, 52 weeks a year. Something the LDS Church could be very proud of. Something that would transform missionaries’ lives as well as the people they’re serving.
Richard Bushman wrote an opinion piece for the Deseret News where he talked about how LDS are known as the people of good will. We’re known as people that are good and honest and willing to serve and help any good cause. He called this Radiant Mormonism. We do this through our commitment and our competency.
Say you are living in the Ukraine in a time of disaster and a Mormon comes by and offers you help. Will you trust her? You will if you know two things about Mormons. The first is their intentions. They have your best interests at heart. They are not maneuvering for their own gain. They only want to help. The second is that they are competent. They know what they are doing. They have skill.
During Hurricane Sandy, a Mormon developed an electronic system for matching up families with needs for help with the hundreds of helpers who were flowing into the area with their tools and willing hands. A family could register at this center, specifying the nature of the work needed, and the helpers could check in to find the people who needed their aid. It was a Mormon who devised the system and made it work. It is not enough to be good-hearted. We have to know what we are doing.
I believe that radiant Mormonism has as its mission the formation of trust wherever Mormons are. We have to show that we only desire the best for the people around us, and we have to demonstrate our competence.
This missionary service proposal steps up Radiant Mormonism to a high level of visibility all around the world.
We have the labor. We have the capital. We have the business managers that can put these to use very effectively. Let’s do it.
Wheat & Tares 
The missionary program of the Church has to be reformed soon now that missionaries are so unproductive from a “new converts” metric. Back in the day, if you went to South or Central America or Mexico you could rack up a lot of baptisms. But if you went to the US or Europe or Asia that wasn’t going to happen. Now, almost all missionaries outside of Africa are pretty “unproductive”. It’s seems like a waste of time and resources.
I know that the missionary program is about the missionaries (training future LDS leaders) as much as it is for the investigators. But honestly, I think as missions become less and less productive, the Church will need to redirect missionary resources if they expect young people to continue to dedicate two years of their life for the cause. How many people really, deep down, believe a 24-month mission is worthwhile if only one baptism was secured?
So how do we re-invent the program? Service. Service. Service.
Amen to that. My nephew sent me an email not too long ago asking what he should do in the mornings on his mission in Argentina, since he has a hard time figuring out how to fill the hours with few people being home. I told him to create service projects to do. At the very least, pick up trash in a park. There are endless opportunities to serve. Missionaries should do more with it.
I loved doing service on my mission. I felt that it was where I was being the most productive in that I was helping others and truly emulating Jesus.
This would be a great start. I’ve long believed that missionaries should have their allotment of “service” hours and “proselyting” hours reversed, so that the majority of their time is spent doing real service, with any proselyting and gospel teaching being a by-product. Non-profit organizations and humanitarian projects depend on consistent, long-term invested volunteers who show up day in and day out and know what to do (as opposed to “volunteer tourism” and “poverty zoo” approaches to service). You can’t effectively run a soup kitchen or a refugee camp or dig a well when the labor force only shows up for an hour or two, a few times a week, and only when they aren’t busy with other appointments.
Every time I see missionaries outside the U.S. advertising “free English classes” I can’t help but think of the Scientologists at county fairs offering “free stress testing”. Um, no thanks.
When a corporation has extra money that they keep instead of giving back to shareholders, the corporation effectively decides on behalf of shareholders what to do with their own money.
Granted – the church is *decidedly* different than a for profit company – but my favored option is to give excess money back to the tithe payer and let them decide how to donate to charity. I mean why does the church get to decide to donate my money to missionary work? The charity next door may need the money, or maybe the neighbor dying of cancer.
I hope this doesn’t sound negative, but queue Lennon’s “Imagine”. This sounds like a wonderful proposal.
My mission (back decades ago) was limited to a single instance per month of “Christian service” and it had to be 4 hours or less. I do remember my district feeling really bad because we had to lie on our weekly report because we spent almost 6 hours painting someone’s home. They were struggling in many ways. When the father came home (not knowing we were going to do it), he broke down crying. It was one of the most memorable moments of my mission. Too bad I went over the limit that month by 50% of the allotted time being a Christian while on my mission.
YES!!!! Make them 1 year long for native speaking missions and 18 months for foreign missions.
My oldest son turns 15 this year. My wife and I have talked about calling our local mission president and asking him if he would allow us to pilot a program along these lines. My wife volunteers a lot in the community at food banks, museums, schools, 4-H, etc. She is confident that she could find meaningful service for the 4 missionaries that we have serving in our stake to occupy their time from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm during the week. Then they could go preach the gospel in the evenings and not be burnt out.
Other ideas: serve in the prisons, learn and teach finance classes and self reliance classes ( even if it’s as simple as learning how to use a financial calculator and understanding the time value of money or putting together an amortization schedule on Excel), take online classes during the day, clean the churches and learn how to do maintenance on them like basic plumbing, electrical issues etc.. with the PFR supervising them, more time for physical exercise, more outreach with other faiths, family history, mini apprenticeships with local members to be exposed to different career opportunities. They could learn skills that will have a dramatic impact on their lives and their posterity.
I could see all of this happening in the near future. There are liability issues they have to consider that might prevent some things. I don’t see them spending money, but they don’t really need to.
We just fed the missionaries last night. They are bored out of their minds.
This is a great idea, all it needs is leadership approval and organising skill
Yes. This. At this point I’d just as soon my kids do Peace Corps or something like that rather than a mission (which is sad because I loved my mission, but I agree there’s a real problem now with boredom). If missions were structured this way I’d be way more enthusiastic about it.
I served in Nicaragua in the mid 90s and we had service at a hospital from 9-1, which was great because they fed us lunch and then we taught at a preschool in the afternoon some days PE. This was my best area because we were so busy. People in the community knew us and we had no trouble getting people to teach and baptize. I think all missions should be service missions. This should be done. Anyone know a general authority and can convince him to push for this?
My daughter recently served a mission in a major US metropolital area. She has no success as far as convert baptisms are concerned and little success reactivating members of record. I think she would have experienced more personal growth, and meaningfully blessed the lives of others, if her volunteer service would have been humanitarian based. Maybe the Church should suspend the current missionary program as we know it and instead use its army of volunteers, along with a good amount of its cash reserves, to address basic human needs around the world.
I think this would persuade a lot more young people to serve missions and challenge people’s view of missionaries and the church. Love it. Preaching the gospel of love.
Love this, with and edit. “Maybe the Church should suspend the current missionary program (in the least productive areas) as we know it and instead use its army of volunteers, along with a good amount of its cash reserves, to address basic human needs around the world.”
My experience as a currently serving senior missionary in a less-productive area has led me to believe this is one answer to low conversion/low retention. The costs associated with our mission are only justified when you believe any baptism is justified by unlimited financial investment. I have no way of knowing, but believe our missionaries would be more successful if they were always ready to teach those who saw them busy building schools, digging wells, staffing major charitable NGOs. And then also deployed en masse to respond to natural disasters.
They love service and keep my pickup moving by asking everyone if they can clean yards and haul junk.
I fully agree that missionaries should be doing far more service. We did far too little service in my mission, and I feel that many (myself included) wish we did more to not just fill the time, but to feel more helpful to the people we were serving (members and nonmembers alike).
One aspect that hasn’t been mentioned in this thread is that too often in the church, we view service as a means to the end of conversion. I didn’t question this as a missionary, but now as an adult I see that as not service at all, but just a subtle form of marketing that, in my view, is inconsistent with the idea of actual service (which is freely offered, expecting nothing in return).
This service-as-proselyting approach played out in my mission (in Asia, 20 years ago). The only form of regular missionary service was English classes, where each companionship would lead one hour of class each week, held at the church. All other service had to be approved, and as a consequence all other types of service were very rare (typically only special events involving a full zone or similar, where we all wore our nametags to let everyone know who we were). About 3 months into my mission, a new mission rule required that we could only teach English classes if we had progressing investigators attending. Here’s the problem–once this rule was put into place, we soon realized our English classes were comprised almost entirely of either: 1) regular members who wanted to work on their English, or 2) non-members who just liked coming to develop/practice their English, but showed no interest in taking the discussions, even when we invited them. Over a period of a month or two, we tried getting investigators to come out to English class (on top of the discussions, coming to church, etc), though that wasn’t sustained. As a consequence, within 3 months of the new rule, all of the community English classes in the mission were shut down so that we could focus on finding and teaching, since the service wasn’t yielding anything for us.
One of the biggest challenges of my three kids’ missions seemed to be how to fill up their time, especially the day time hours.
This was what eventually landed me on Xanax while in Italy. (1987-89)
We had started to do some service work – volunteering at hospitals, etc., as a way to fill time with useful charitable work that was also good exposure. But we got a visit from Elder John Lasater of the Seventy, who put an end to that (“That is not what you are here for!”) and then read us the riot act in a series of zone meetings that most of us still look back on with dismay (“If you don’t give every ounce of effort you can while out here on your mission, the Lord will never trust you again.”)
It would be good to see that attitude change, and some genuine compassionate work get done. It is immensely frustrating to have your head filled with stories of past missionary glory (Woodruff, etc.) and the joy of baptizing and helping people to the truth, and then be faced with the reality of filling 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, with effort that you think the Lord would find useful. It was literally more exhausting than actually walking the streets of Sicily.