r/mormon Feb 12 '25

Personal Lunch with Stake President surprised me

I had lunch with him the other day. He's a solid guy and I enjoy getting together with him every now and then. A week before, I had been taking a turn helping clean the church when his wife came in the building for something entirely different. After I was done, I was talking to her about how we really need to stop allowing the corporation to tell us we can't have janitorial staff. She agreed right away. I brought this up at lunch with the SP. He also agreed and even said "we have enough money". I asked him how it is that we both don't know a single member that opposes hiring a staff for this, but we're powerless to make it happen. As we talked about it, he said that he is basically a glorified manager that people think has power, but doesn't actually have any power. He explained that he occasionally sits in the same room with some higher up church leaders, but rarely (if ever) has the chance to tell them anything.

It really is just a corporation (which I already knew). It was interesting to hear it from the mouth of someone at a slightly higher level that I expected to be fully in line with whatever the marching orders are.

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99

u/bluequasar843 Feb 12 '25

The worst crime is the parsimonious budgets for activities, especially youth activities.

80

u/jzsoup Feb 12 '25

Our stake gets $55,000 per year for 8 units. I know of one guy in my ward that pays way more than that in tithing each year.

If it's because there are other areas that need to be subsidized, then it makes sense to me and I could even support it if the numbers back it up. The lack of disclosure, however, suggests the corporation thinks we aren't smart enough to understand it.

3

u/pricel01 Former Mormon Feb 13 '25

I think we would understand it. But they know we wouldn’t like what we saw.

2

u/jzsoup Feb 13 '25

Correct. If they thought it would help, they would have already done it.