I don’t have any idea if $100 billion is a good amount for the church to have in its endowment. Personally, I tend to think, given its revenue and expenditures, that the number is high. At least as long as it continues to bring in a significant amount of tithing annually, it feels to me like it doesn’t need a cushion quite that big.
But the thing is, I don’t know. Church leaders are completely opaque in how they’ve made their investment/spending decisions. And to be honest, I suspect that it has been a decision only in the loosest sense. Inertia is a powerful force and decisions made 20 years ago carry a lot of weight.
But arguably the church should communicate its financial thinking better. And I don’t mean that the church needs to tell members exactly how much it has in assets (though it certainly could). But I believe that if the church viewed members as stakeholders, it could and would communicate its thinking to us. What considerations has it made in deciding whether to spend or invest? How did it decide how much it needed for current expenditures and for future expenditures.
I think there would be a lot of power in church leaders saying, “We believe that we need to have a cushion for the next hundred years. Based on our projections, we believe that, as in Alma’s day, the church is going to grow primarily among the poor. While we have positive revenues today, we have projected that in 20 years we’ll be operating at negative cash flow. We debated tapping into our endowment now to [reduce tithing/feed the hungry/something else] but we believe that these future needs will be more compelling.”[fn1]
Ultimately, we may disagree with the church’s analysis and/or its conclusions. And there will certainly be people who use whatever reasoning the church provides as a way to attack its priorities, its truth claims, even its corporate form. But many of those people are equally ready to attack the church for its opacity. There’s no state of the world where everybody will be satisfied.
But the church laying out its reasoning does at least a couple positive things. First, this type of transparency acknowledges that members are legitimate stakeholders in the institutional church. It tells us that the church respects us and wants to give us information.
It also demonstrates that church leaders have thought through these issues. Even if I (or we or some members) believe that the church came to the wrong conclusion, by laying out their reasoning they can demonstrate that came to their conclusion in good faith.
Finally, it gives tithepayers and potential tithepayers important information as they decide how and where to contribute money.
It doesn’t turn over spending and investment choices to the membership at large. And frankly, I don’t think the church should. It would be unwieldy and, given that we all have different priorities, ultimately it would result in gridlock. But this type of transparency evinces a significant level of trust and respect, trust and respect that would be good both the institutional church and its members.
[fn1] Over on Facebook I was having a discussion with Nate Oman; he mentioned that he assumes that future members of the church will be poorer than current members on a per capita basis. And savings and investment ultimately represent a transfer of wealth from people today to people in the future. That’s not to say that future people need our charitable dollars more that current people—in fact, in general we assume that the future will actually be richer than the present. And I believe that the benefits of charitable spending today compound and provide even more benefits in the future. Still, one possible way to frame the church’s investment is that we, the wealthy of 2021, are giving money to the less-wealthy (or even the poor) of 2051.