Yesterday we had a speaker who worked for the LDS Church. He said how great it was that they could have gospel conversations at work (gag ... well I do on occasion too, but it's usually not in quite the glowing light his are).

It seems to me that saying only about 150 General Authorities are receiving "living allowances" is misleading when you have thousands of other full-time employees working at Church headquarters. Then add to that seminary and institute teachers and you have another population that could legitimately be called "clergy".

Anyway, does anyone know how many people work for the Church?

paulk Wrote:
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> Anyway, does anyone know how many people work for
> the Church?

The problem I see with this question is that the LDS organization has an evidently long history of thoroughly conflating paid employees with "volunteers" (often: "volunteers" who pay their own way).

The spectrum of possibilities on any individual church worker is extremely broad: from those living in luxurious circumstances who are extremely well compensated and given gratuities such as (as I understand) free university education for their children and grandchildren (as I remember)...

...to people in "senior missions" who are working hard at various jobs that they are not being paid for (and at least often have to pay the church for)...

...to the uncountable hours that individual members donate at no cost to the church to act as janitors, teachers, etc. (but still have to personally pay for teaching supplies, groceries to make cakes (etc.), cards to send to the people they have been assigned to), etc.

I understand from reading the posts here that a given "employee" position could be a paid position (such as in the COB, where the person is being paid a fixed salary, with generally-recognized employee benefits), OR could be a so-called "volunteer" position---with no difference in the actual job responsibilities, but one person gets paid for their work and the other person does NOT get paid for their work (or may be, in fact, PAYING the church in some way for the "privilege" of doing that work???).

How can the number of employees be calculated when that term could mean so many different (and opposing) things???



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/16/2017 12:37PM by Tevai.

When I was on my mission in Latin America, about half of the missionaries were citizens of the country where I was serving. I don't think any of them were financing their own mission. They were receiving "living allowances" just like GA's (lol, probably about 1% of what the GA's get) and living at a standard several times higher than what they were accustomed to. I would definitely classify them as "paid clergy." And even missionaries that do pay for their own missions could technically be termed "paid clergy," because the money is donated to the church first then paid out to the missionaries as needed.

when I was a missionary in Latin America, my companions who were from the country I was serving in often sent some of their living allowance home to share with family. That's how poor they were.

We use to say the church was the largest employer in the State. That was back in the 80s. I don't know that this is still true though. It's got to be at least 10,000 though?

takes a lot of manpower to run a university

http://jobs.utah.gov/wi/pubs/em/annual/current/lrgstemp.pdf

Oddly the LDS Corp doesn't seem to be in the list other than BYU

interesting list. if we add byu with Zions bank then the number is just shy of 25,000, which is more than any other on the list. Then LD$ inc. is the largest employer, and we haven't even looked at Deseret management, the COB, and CES which also have high numbers.