Posted by:
elderolddog
(
)
Date: April 08, 2020 04:52PM
> Did they read the Lame-0
> 'financial report at
> conference? I'm betting
> it wasn't one of the GAs,
> that would be far too much
> fantasy for one of God's
> chosen, don't ya think?
I didn't do an in-depth review, but I looked at a couple of the Conference Reports for the years just before the late 1950s change, which is when they stopped giving exact numbers for how much they spent, in a number of categories, and simply gave the very generic statement, "The church's financials have been reviewed by qualified people and a statement has been signed to the effect that the church's financial dealings are on the up and up, so help us Moroni!"
From what I saw, they never mentioned a word regarding how much money had flowed in from members' tithing. But they did do so regarding Fast Offerings...
Here is the April Conference Financial Report for 1950:
https://archive.org/details/conferencereport1951a/page/n11/mode/2up you can page forward & back and enlarge the pages.
It is pages of material!
There is mention that the "Full Report" would be published in the Deseret News, but when I tried to search for it, it appeared to me that I could not search the DesNews archive earlier than 1988.
The above report contains details that updated to the present day would probably be a bit scary! It actually gives you the number of people that the Welfare Program helped out and the amounts involved!
But yeah, if they wanted to, they could easily produce a report like the I referrenced, for 2019. But it ain't gonna happen!
One gets the impression that the old-timey leaders thought that they owed it to the members to give them some kind of an accounting. And probably the current leaders believe they are honoring that sentiment when they glibly announce that the finances are perfectly fine in Zion; "...trust us, in Jesus name, amen."