When I outsource something, it’s usually for a good reason. Usually.
Most of the time, it’s because someone else can do a much
better job than me. One time I re-did
the PVC plumbing under my kitchen sink.
It took me all night, and when I was done, boy was I proud of
myself. A few months later our washing
machine started flooding our house every time we ran a load of laundry. When the plumber came to fix it, he looked at
my handiwork under the kitchen sink and seemed personally offended, “Who did
this? This is a nightmare!” I just shook my head and played dumb.
Apparently this is a
nightmare
Other times I outsource because I want to avoid something
that I detest. Thank goodness there are
people who will do my taxes for me. I
would rather stare at a blank wall for five hours than do my own taxes. No, I’ll go farther. I would rather watch the Disney Dinosaur movie
again. The first time was when my
mission president allowed companionships to have a one-time special P-Day movie
rental, as long as it was rated G.
Worst. Movie. Ever. And
the salt in my wound was knowing that I had blown my only chance in two years
to rent a movie of my own choosing.
I dunno, maybe it
would have been better in English. Nah.
So there are a few good reasons to outsource a job to
someone else, but outsourcing can also be just plain stupid. If I outsource something that would be
personally rewarding to do for myself to someone who does a shoddy job, that’s dumb. Dinosaur movie dumb.
Enter the Church
Now, what happens when we outsource our acts of
charity? I’ve talked previously about how
I came to recognize the perils of outsourcing
my moral compass to the Church. It
took me a bit longer to realize that I was also outsourcing my charitable deeds
to the same institution, and as a consequence, I wasn’t becoming a very
charitable person. I found myself auto-deducting
tithing from the top of my paycheck at the beginning of every month, while at
the same time I was averting my gaze from beggars holding signs up by my car at
stop lights. Just like anything else, it
turned out that I wasn’t getting very good at charity by wanting someone else
to always do it for me.
Tithing
The biggest problem with tithing is that we think it’s a
charitable donation when it’s really not.
Tithing is meant to cover the costs of running the church – something
that is for our own benefit and self-interest (i.e., not charity). The second big problem with tithing is that
we don’t understand how much we are supposed to pay, and so we often pay too
much, with little or no money left over for actual charitable giving. I could go into a lot more detail on these
topics, but instead, you should just read what Rock Waterman has already
said about it.
Unfortunately (as it turns out), the Church does use a very
small portion of tithing for charitable efforts. Best estimates
are that this represents about 1% of total tithing revenue, but because there
is no transparency with how tithing is used (more on that later), church
members generally assume that the percentage is much higher. Even if this estimate is low (as some have
claimed), the charitable portion of tithing is certainly a very small
percentage. It would be better if the
Church would just stop spending that 1% on humanitarian causes because then
members would see more clearly that tithing is not charity. By blurring the lines, and filling up the
gaps between conference sessions with story after story of Church humanitarian
awesomeness, members understandably feel that they are being charitable when
they pay their tithing. If anyone in
charge is listening, please just sever the two so we can stop deluding
ourselves!
Blurring the lines can get messy
Fast Offerings and Church Welfare
If you are going to overspend on any of your church
donations, go with fast offerings. This
money is 100% charity, and is used entirely for real people who need help (edit: except if there is a surplus at the stake level, in which case the money goes back to Church headquarters and could be used on who knows what). Another benefit is that the money which isn't remitted to SLC stays local with your ward or stake, and so there is less bureaucracy between
giver and receiver. More specifically,
the bishop is the only gatekeeper for how these funds are disbursed, though his
hands are tied to some extent by the guidelines in the Church Handbook of
Instructions. The good news is that most
bishops do a fantastic job of using fast offerings to help as many people as
they are aware of who are in need.
Now for the bad news.
All too often, fast offering funds are not freely given and they come
with strings attached. Need alone is an
insufficient qualification; instead, the Church gets its money’s worth by exacting
a price of obedience in return. For
instance, a member may be told that they need to attend all church meetings or quit
smoking if they are to receive fast offering funds. Many people will say that this is a good
thing. After all, the money won’t be
able to help these people nearly as much as a decision to re-commit themselves to
living gospel principles. The problem is
that when people are leveraged into making a choice (even a good choice) it
leaves a bad taste in their mouths. It’s
difficult to take ownership of any choice made in such circumstances, and the
feeling of being manipulated can breed resentment (Satan’s plan, anyone?). In fact, if someone is asking the bishop for
help, they are already in a vulnerable position, and later on, they may view
the interaction as abusive on some level.
Other times, the Church exacts a price of humility (the
humiliation kind) in return for fast offerings or food from the Bishop’s
storehouse. I am friends with a convert of
two years who was once homeless (as a result of a mental disorder), and who
still struggles to make ends meet. A few
months ago when he was out of food and getting desperate, he asked the Church
for help. Later on, he told me about his
experience. First, the bishop asked him
lots of questions about his financial situation that (perhaps unintentionally) sent
the message that his situation was caused by his own carelessness with
money. Because this interview also
included a slew of worthiness questions, he came away with the feeling that his
financial problems were a result of his other shortcomings and sins. Let’s get real. The primary reason this man doesn’t always
have enough money is because he is living on the small amount of money (held in
trust) that his mother left him when she died, and the reason he can’t hold
down a job is because of his mental disorder that employers aren’t able to
accommodate. He is a good, generous
person and is simply “one of the least” among us on this earth who needs our
help. And he does everything he can to
“give back” to those who help him.
Getting back to the story, after his interview, a member of the Relief
Society came to his house to fill out his food order form. The first thing she did was to perform an
inspection of his cupboards and fridge, presumably to verify that he wasn’t
hiding anything. Needless to say, he was
humiliated by the experience. In his own
words, he said, “I felt like a worm, two inches tall.” He then received strict instructions that he
couldn’t share the food he received with his roommates or anyone else. He was gracious with everyone involved and
expressed a great deal of gratitude, but he told me that in the future, he
would rather try to get help from the government before asking the Church for
help again, and asked, “Why don’t they trust me to buy food for myself?” Maybe the Church is afraid he will use the
money to buy cigarettes. I say if someone
is addicted to cigarettes, then that is a real need and we should let them use fast
offerings to buy them. We can then offer
other resources to help them if they want to quit smoking.
My last observation about fast offerings is that they are
primarily used to benefit active or semi-active church members. I am aware of occasions when Bishops have
used them to help people outside of the Church, and the fact that they have the
prerogative says a lot for the Church, but primarily, fast offerings are how “we
take care of our own.” Nothing wrong
with that. It makes sense for a church
to begin with charity among its own membership, especially because when you get
people on their own two feet, they are in a better position to go on and help
others.
The problem for me only comes up if fast offerings become
our only form of charity, as a church or as individuals. Mormons are already accused of being clannish,
and this can be viewed as just one more evidence of a people whose myopic vision
cannot see past its own pews. I know, if
everyone would just convert to the Church, then this problem would go away,
right? Right. So our charity is for everyone, they just
have to become Mormons first, and after all, someday everyone will be a Mormon (you
know, when the stone of the Church rolls forth and fills the whole earth).
Another friend in my ward is married to a non-member who was
taking the missionary discussions for a while, but stopped when they got too
overbearing about setting a baptismal date.
Later on, their marriage started to break down and they separated amid
financial trouble. The wife (also a
friend of mine) came to the Church for help.
I don’t know the details of what was said, but I do know that she felt
humiliated by the experience. When her
situation didn’t improve in the coming months, she confided that “If no one
helps me, I’ll have to go to the LDS Church for help.” So we are her last choice. I wonder if the story would be different if
she had been baptized. Apparently, the
process of helping people with Church funds produces such shame that they would
rather go almost anywhere else first. Now, I’m sure that some of the more fiscally
responsible readers out there might be pretty pleased with this outcome. After all, if you make it too easy for
everyone to get money, then they will just live off the Church forever and suck
it dry. Maybe that’s true. But in my experience, people don’t want to
live that way. In any case, I have to
wonder how Jean Valjean would have fared if he had sought help from the Mormon
Bishop of Digne.
No
silver candlesticks for you, 24601!
Anonymous Service
Money isn’t the only way we can be charitable. Giving of our time and of ourselves through
service can sometimes be much more meaningful and helpful to people. The Church provides lots of opportunities for
service. Unfortunately, many church
service opportunities are not very meaningful, and those that are tend to be not
very anonymous. Here are some common
church service opportunities that don’t strike me as meaningful:
- Cleaning the ward meetinghouse
- Babysitting for a Stake Relief Society Meeting
- Going through the harassment checklist to move membership records out of the ward
- Directing traffic at the temple Christmas lighting
- Serving a full-time service mission as the missionary automobile steward
The problem with this list is that the primary objective of all these activities seems to be for the Church to avoid paying someone to do a legitimate job. Why not use some of those vast tithing reserves to charitably employ some people and free up the members’ time to provide more meaningful service? What else would we do? Here are a few ideas:
- Use the ward meetinghouse to run a soup kitchen for the homeless
- Provide free babysitting for the single parents in the ward
- Give a family with a new baby a checklist of things you would like to do to help them
- Decorate a Christmas tree and direct it to a family that can't afford their own lighting ceremony
- Serve a full-time service mission as a dentist in Ghana
Don’t get me wrong. There are Mormons all over the place doing just the kind of things I have listed above. My wife’s sister is a devout church member who often travels to third world countries to provide humanitarian service. But her efforts are not officially affiliated with the Church. How do I know? She wasn’t wearing a yellow Mormon Helping Hands vest.
I am encouraged by Mormon Messages about service, and by LDS Charities, but we could do so much better with the time and resources we have been given, especially if we weren’t so busy with temple parking assignments and so financially maxed out by tithing.
Anonymous Giving Isn't Blind Giving
When Jesus said, “Do not your
alms before men, to be seen of them,” I don’t think he meant, “Do not see
those to whom you give alms.”
So who are these “men” he spoke of? First, there are the people the alms-giver might
be most concerned about impressing – third-party observers, those with the
means and influence to “give back”; but there are also the recipients of the
alms to consider. We cheapen our gift in
God’s eyes to the extent that we seek the praise and adoration even of those we
are helping. Worse, we may create a
dependency that serves our own less worthy aims. Completely anonymous giving is the Savior’s standard.
Somehow, this beautiful and unassailable teaching seems to
have been misinterpreted somewhere along the line by our church leaders when
they set up the current systems for fast offerings and tithing. Someone concluded that the ideal expression
of charity is through a double-blind interaction where neither the giver nor
the receiver ever see one another. In
fact, we can now have our donations
made by direct deposit, so we don't even have to think about it. I think
we are supposed to think about it. We
are supposed to open our eyes to the suffering around us. We are supposed to freely make the decision
to help relieve that suffering. And so I
believe that the anonymity Christ spoke of is supposed to be on one side only:
the giver sees the recipient, but the recipient does not see the giver when
possible.
Let’s explore an example. If someone donates to a very good charity that
benefits people who they will never see, is that better than putting an
envelope with money under the door of an acquaintance who they know to be
struggling financially? I think that it
depends. There are two important
questions to consider: first, is one cause more worthy than the other? And second, which donation will have the most
influence on the heart of the giver? I
can’t answer the first question, but I can say that a thoughtful donation is
more likely to influence the giver than a mechanical one. In fact, if the giver wrestles with the first
question of which cause is most worthy, she is probably going to have the kind
of experience that develops charity, regardless of the choice she makes.
Now, someone could say that perhaps the giver isn’t a very
good judge of which cause is more worthy.
In fact, I often used to think to myself that no one could be a wiser or
more efficient steward of my donations than the Church. Even if that was true (which I am afraid is
not the case, sadly), I don’t think it would outweigh the importance of the
personal struggle that takes place when choosing between competing categories
of good. But if we are to take this
decision upon ourselves, I think we need to be aware of the potential for
personal bias. I may be more inclined to
donate to someone I know or like even though there is a greater need with
someone I don’t know or don’t like as well.
We need to fight this bias as we struggle with our charitable decisions.
And we need to balance individual needs
with other causes like medical research and clean water for people in remote
villages. We can’t do it all, but we can
open our eyes to the world’s problems as much as possible. Maybe we’ll get better at it the more we try.
Another consideration is that sometimes, it is impossible to
give anonymously. One example is that
panhandler at the stop light I mentioned earlier. When someone asks you for help to your face,
it’s time to stop worrying about anonymity and just help them. If you’re a stranger, then these face-to-face
interactions are practically anonymous anyway.
If a third party is in the car though, we sometimes can silence our
conscience for charity in favor of our conscience for anonymity. Don't do that.
I’ve done it and it filled me with regret. Charity first, anonymity second.
Transparency
There is a checkbox on the tithing slip for members to make
donations for humanitarian aid through the Church. It may well be that the Church does a better
job with these funds than any other organization in the world. The problem is, no one outside of the Church
Office Building knows if that’s true or not.
And no one even knows where all of that money is being used. So until the Church becomes fully transparent
with how it spends this money, I can’t in good conscience use it as the steward
of my donations. I also need
transparency so that I can see the needs that are being addressed, which allows
me to cultivate empathy as I make the choices of where to give.
To go back to an earlier point, transparency with tithing
would be the best way for members to realize that their tithing isn’t
charity. It would also have the effect
of shining a light on any abuse
of tithing funds that may be taking place.
It’s just crazy that we all accept the secrecy. Haven’t we learned that secret money breeds
corruption? Even really good people and
organizations aren’t immune to this influence because their bias (and everyone
has bias) makes the problems invisible to their view. Enough already, just open the books!
Conclusion
Something important happens during that struggle of deciding
where to spend our charitable dollars and service hours. Something possibly more important even than
the quality of the choice we end up making.
It’s what happens within ourselves as we wrestle with deciding between
competing good causes and feel the longing to be able to support them all. It’s the awareness we acquire of the plight
of others and the empathy we exercise in actually doing something about
it. Finally, it’s the sense of ownership
and personal investment in a better society that we obtain when we freely
decide to help the disadvantaged and helpless all around us.
Equating tithing with charity deprives us of this experience
entirely. Even if all tithing and church
offerings went to charitable causes, they still remove us from the decision-making
process, and in so doing, we miss out on the important introspection that
results from that process; and because there is no transparency in the use of
tithing funds, we aren’t even able to inform ourselves about the causes that
the Church decides to be important. Thus,
we gain no empathy through exposure to the suffering of others. Most tragic of all, we often become even more
callous to the plight of others as our feelings of personal generosity to the Church
become a shield we use to deflect the guilt of our ungenerosity toward our
fellow man. This ungenerosity often results
in part from the financial pinch of erroneously feeling obligated to pay
tithing on our gross income.
Some would cite the Church News or the humanitarian report
between conference sessions as an accounting of the Church’s use of charitable
tithing funds, but I fear that these sources have an opposite effect on our
empathy. Instead of awakening us to an
awareness of the continuing suffering taking place in the world, they give the
impression that the Church is on the scene following any disaster, and that any
and all good that could have been done has already been done. The intent is not to motivate members to do
more, but rather to assure members that their payment of tithing is already the
best thing they can do. The rosy
pictures presented only tell part of the story, and while great for PR, they
leave untold the stories of those who didn’t receive help, or whose lives are
still shattered.
I’m not against tithing.
I think it is a necessary and important part of church membership. Do I wish it was more transparent? Absolutely.
Do I wish the Church would solicit input from church membership on the
disposition of those funds? Yes indeed. Do I wish the Church would clarify that
tithing is on our surplus so that members would have more funds freed up for
charity? You bet. But despite these problems, I still pay my
tithing because I want to contribute to the operation of the Church to which I
belong and from which I benefit. For me,
it’s still the right thing to do. But
outsourcing our charity to the Church robs us of personal growth, and I think
it needs to stop.
There is also much to be improved when it comes to fast
offerings and church service opportunities.
Fast offerings are good, but they can’t be our only fund for charitable
giving. We need to branch out beyond the
walls of our own congregation. The same
is true of church service. Let’s open
our minds to service that is both meaningful and less self-congratulatory. No more retired couples spending their
twilight years on a service mission that does little more than save a few bucks
for the institution. Let’s put them in
positions where their light and wisdom can uplift people in need.
A few weeks ago, the copper pipes under my sink started
leaking after a series of unfortunate events beginning with my attempt to
install a new outdoor faucet. Like an
idiot, I went to Lowes and bought a torch and a soldering kit. Twenty-four hours later, I had created a drip
sculpture with an entire roll of pipe solder and almost set my house on
fire. When my kids still couldn’t flush
the toilets and were running out of bottled water, I broke down in a heap and
sobbed like a child. When I regained my
composure, I called a professional. I
think that with this last failure, I have finally accepted that I will never be
a good plumber. It’s time for me to
outsource that part of my life for good.
But I’m not giving up on charity. I’ve still got a lot to learn before the last
day, and no one else can practice it for me.
Maybe that’s why the scriptures say we should be “possessed of
it.” Maybe when we start to really
own our need to develop charity, it ends up owning us at last.
Outsource this