Posted by:
Pompous Windbag
(
)
Date: March 13, 2019 02:45PM
My thoughts:
People, or institutions created by people, who want to increase their fortunes generally find some way to track their investments. A means needs to exist to 'judge' the quality of the investment, usually by measuring the growth of the value over set periods of time. One obvious judgment point is, "Is the investment earning more than it would have had that money been parked in a bank account?"
I don't see any way to take the total sum invested in the Rome temple and then measure the impact of this investment. Does the church have an average daily or weekly income figure? If so, can it be reliably stated that in the days, weeks and months following the opening of the temple, that any increase in the daily or weekly income is the result of the new temple?
And I think to be fair, the comparisons would have to involve the same year to year time periods. Meaning that next December, if the monthly gross increases over 2018's December, a claim could be made that the Rome Temple is responsible.
One amusing fact to look at would be the number of tithe payors, 2018 v. 2019, but I doubt that that number would be made public. Will there be a spike in daily or weekly income for this March v. March, 2018? If so, that would be one 'proof' that the Rome temple has had a positive effect on the church's income.
But there's a fly in the ointment!!
To my knowledge, the church does not and has not ever published any accounting of tithing income. They used to try to give some accounting of their expenditures, but most of us know that they stopped doing that in the mid-1950s, with the major reason given by critics being that Henry D. Moyle was bankrupting their blessed behinds with all his meeting house constructions.
So from a practical standpoint, this discussion is moot. We have no practical, efficient, provable way to determine the church's income, nor to track its expenditures. We can all have our opinions but without facts, we can't know who came closest to being correct.
Below are links to various April Conference Reports that you may peruse at your leisure, which I apparently have too much of. I believe each link opens to the appropriate financial report, or what they construe to be a financial report. I apologize if the links are not 'live'.
https://archive.org/details/conferencereport1908a/page/n121https://archive.org/details/conferencereport1928a/page/n5https://archive.org/details/conferencereport1952a/page/n11https://archive.org/details/conferencereport1956a/page/n27https://archive.org/details/conferencereport1957a/page/n41https://archive.org/details/conferencereport1958a/page/n29Added bonus: create your own link to this site, with all the church annual and semi-annual reports, so that if you find yourself unable to sleep, pick out some old report and any talk at random in it, and insomnia cured!