so when did TSCC start w/the "every member a Janitor" bit ???!!!! The Mormon Church is one of the richest churches in the US (from what I've heard), so WHY do they have to get members to volunteer on a weekly basis, instead of paying a member to do this; and thus, creating a job for said Janitor, as well ??
WTF ????!!!!!

In our ward, there would be weekly assignments to clean the church, even when the janitors would come in and do it.

So, they eliminated the full time janitors. We were fed the line that we would be blessed for cleaning the church. People bought it hook line and sinker. though you can make easy bets on who and who doesn't clean it

In our Stake, we had a group of people, the church hired, to travel around and clean all the units. They were all members, most were severely mentally disabled, and only a couple would have had good job prospects after the church fired them.

But the church got it's new mall, so what matters if it failed to look after the poorest and most meek of its members. I mean, it's not like they are into following the teachings of Christ or anything.

Let me get you up to speed. The "volunteer" option is relatively old news. While still practiced in some jurisdictions of the church, the increasingly common practice is to "assign" families to clean the church. In my church jurisdiction, this comes in the form of your name printed in the sacrament bulletin. For example, despite the fact TBM wife and I have never helped with cleaning in the past year and told others we will not do it, our name appeared as one of the families commanded to clean the toilets thus very week.

Let me provide a brief history. Please note this is a general overview, and practices worldwide are not necessarily uniform in form, implementation, or style:

The church at one time had full-time janitors. About twenty years ago, they began to phase them out, giving some early retirement options to some,not renewing contracts to others. In some jurisdictions, members receiving church welfare were asked to perform cleaning services. For a time professional cleaning services, some affiliated with remaining church maintenance employees, did deep cleaning and the bathrooms, leaving volunteer members to perform light cleaning such as vacuuming and emptying the trash.

As time wore on the church realized how much money they could save by members doing all the cleaning. More church maintenance employees were let go, leaving only a skeleton staff to take care of multiple buildings. In one of my recent jurisdictions, a ward member with church facilities management went from overseeing only our chapel to overseeing all chapels within the stake with the same wage and responsibilities. He now coordinates with members to get the job done, and uses some pretty demeaning and manipilative rhetoric to get them to assist. Kinda hard not to blame him. He is concerned for his job, is stretched thin, and needs member help to get it all done.

If you look closely at the chapels, you will notice that whatever benefit the church is getting financially by outsourcing the majority of the cleaning to members, mosly consisting of the faithful tithe payers, is offset by the poor cleaning done and deteriorating conditions. There are some ugly, gross carpets, smelly bathrooms, dirty nursery floors. The system is a failure from that standpoint. But to the perspective of church leaders, it is another way of controlling via guilt. "Members need to step up and take their. Leaning responsibilities seriously. This is the Lord's house."

This policy angers me and contributed greatly. You pay tithing, in part, you would think, to take care of the facilities, but end up caring for them yourself. Having members clean toilets is yet another sign of the disdain the hierarchy has for the membership. Yet the majority of members tow the party line. "The Lord in his wisdom has provided a way by which members can take more ownership in the church."

Frankly, I don't understand. Make them pay for missions, make hem pay 10 percent of their income plus additional offerings, gig back about two percent of donated funds to the ward for its annual budget, build temples primarily with donations of wealthy members, ocassional new chapels, volunteer labor for nearly everything. Where is all the money going?

Yeah, SHAME those assigned members into being obedient little cleaning-drones! Unbelievably manipulative!

If I hadn't already been out at the time the church fired the janitors—those lowest on the pay scale who needed their jobs the MOST when the economy went bad—that would have done it for me!

Stake conference is coming up--guess what we're doing Wednesday night for YM/YW? We're cleaning up the building to show respect to the Stake Presidency and get ourselves "physically ready" to hear the Lord's words.


Ugh.

"Where is all the money going?"

tithing is just throwing money into the money hole:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnX-D4kkPOQ

'my father worked two jobs so he could have money to throw into the money hole'

I'm fairly sure the change happened after 2000. I wonder how many members become inactive because they don't want to clean the chapel? It's usually the same people that get stuck doing it. Makes that 5 billion dollar mall even more appalling, especially with high unemployment.

I think my brother also got paid for splitting the job with me. Don't recall how other janitorial duties were managed, but I don't imagine it was the mostly rancher families in the congregation who were doing this back in the mid-70s.

Interesting transition. I do remember doing some floor buffing and bathrooms, but I seem to recall getting paid for that too.

The current UU church I attend pays for janitorial service, but we only pay for limited service such as floor and restroom cleaning, trash removal, etc. It keeps us going about 6 months and then we'll have a cleaning Saturday where we get the congregation to go in and really straighten up rooms, wash windows, clean the kitchen, etc. But when we do we make a Saturday morning social event of it, bring in breakfast, donuts and coffee, sometimes even mimosas, put some good music on and blast it through the building, and we get great participation and get some deep cleaning done, it builds community and makes people really feel ownership of the building.

Every time we do that I think about the difference something so simple would make in an LDS congregation. Pay a small fee to someone in the ward needing some extra help to do the basic janitorial stuff and give the overworked worker bees a break. Then have a community-building Saturday where everyone works together and have some breakfast casserole and hot chocolate and foster a little comraderie. Oops, I forgot. They'd have to have scripture-reading hour first to make it a legit "activity," and then everyone would already just want to go home. They have totally sucked all the joy out of mormonism and it is just a shell of what it was in the 60s and 70s.

Yes, same here NormaRae. My family attended a Calvary Chapel for several years until we moved away a while back. My wife and I volunteered to do the weekly cleanup, and it was a blast. I was working horrendous hours on my job, and looked forward to those several hours of just pushing a vacuum cleaner and listening to our girls run wild in the big empty building.

The church housed our local food pantry, and was always able to help any member of the community - in or out of the church - over rough spots. There was never a need to require service in return, and I think that's best.

What a difference it makes when you do something from your heart instead of from compulsion. I hate doing housework, but our entire family still fondly remembers those days we cleaned the church.

was that every member knew exactly where their offerings had gone, and most likely participated in the spirited discussions of how they were to be spent. Of course UU members are willing to clean the chapel - they have a sense of ownership, because every member has an actual say in what happens there.

My parents are the ones in charge of their cleaning committee. There are supposed to be 3 or 4 families that come to clean on their Saturday. My parents and one other family (parents and two teen kids) clean the church. The other families have never shown up. It should take about two hours to do it right IF everyone show up. Instead, it takes their small group 3 and a half hours.

I attended a birthday party at my parents ward a week ago. The building in general didn't look too bad, but the bathrooms reeked of urine, and the fridge hadn't been cleaned in many, many weeks.

One of the lame excuses I hear about LDS Inc building a mall is that it "helps create jobs" and "spurs the economy." Well if that is the case, then why are they laying off the janitors and making it free labor?

I hope your dad got at least an early retirement.

It was the letting go of the custodians and the cleaning assignments that got me angry enough to goggle that subject, and here I am.

Our church has a deep clean day twice a year, clean the building trim shrubs, right after the missions yard sale (generally make about $40,000 to help foreign and local mission commitments). But there is a big emphasis on you finding where you need to serve, and as a result, most people feel good about what they are doing. There is a paid nursery leader and volunteers help one Sunday a month. The custodial staff take care of the weekly cleaning, and I have watched as college students struggling to stay in school, parents who have lost their jobs were offered these jobs with a flexible schedule that allowed them to focus on school or finding full time employment. There are 19 paid pastors (from music to youth to missions) and so skilled help is there for members. I remember my church jobs which usually meant 10+ hours at LDS inc, sometimes good experiences, and knowing I could be released anytime the Bishop/Stake Pres had inspiration.