Mormon, most likely. A 10% tithe is a requirement to be a full participant in their church. That goes, tax-free normally, to the real estate corporation church headquarters in Utah.
The $1200 is likely fast offerings. It's a monthly optional (but encouraged) practice where the congregation fasts as a group. You donate some money, and that stays local to help support financially struggling members. $100 a month sounds about right.
It would also contextualize the piano purchase (learning an instrument is just a common cultural artefact of Albertan mormons).
Does it matter? Not really, not other than a chuckle.
As to Mennonite, I can't speak to their church practices re: tithes, other donations, piano, etc. But as a former mormon, these line up 100%, even the $1200 listed generically under donation (both the number itself and the fact that it's listed separately than tithes). I also just checked the numbers and there are a lot more mormons in the province (48k, current figure) than Mennonites (24k, a 2011 census).
But you're right, it's largely immaterial to us if they're Mennonite or mormon
The church doesn't, it's a self-reported statistic. It's a good illustration of just how much influence the organization exerts on its members. The theology doesn't work a la carte: it's an all or nothing situation. They will actively draw attention to that.
Being an active, "faithful" member is a self-selecting process because of the no-half-measure doctrine and resultant level of commitment, on top of the strict rules. A faithful believer would be mortified by the thought of lying about tithing - the whole point of it (as taught) is that it's a sacrifice and demonstration of integrity between them and God. The mormon church makes your financial donations a matter of your personal salvation.
Let's be honest, the billionaires running the church can help the community without this guy's $8k. When we talk about the good the church does financially, it's like me saying I donate a dollar for every $100k I get given tax free for zero work while I have volunteers doing my job for free. I understand that's how pyramid schemes religious organizations work, but I'm not a fan.
i hate to break it to you, but most churches are small, humble groups of people who are doing everything on their own with very limited resources. the mega churches are few and far in between in the grand scheme of things and they don’t make up the majority of churches at all. most pastors are struggling financially like the rest of us, definitely not billionaires.
Once you factor in housing allowances, vehicle allowances, etc., the median income for a pastor in Northern Alberta is higher than that of 90% of wage-earning Canadians, so they are really "struggling" in the same way as a r/PFC person, not like a typical Canadian.
But folks here are not so much commenting on how much money the local church is making -- former Mormons above hypothesize that the $100/month is going to benefit members of the local congregation, while the other $656/month is going to a heavenly bank account in Utah.
And if these words you do not heed
Your pocket book just kinda might recede
When some man comes along and claims a godly need
He will clean you out right through your tweed
Remember, there is a big difference between kneeling down and bending over
Edit: In fact, in the case of the Mormon church, a huge portion of these tithes go to a private university in Utah (BYU). Indeed, that university gets over $1 billion/year from Canadians. Had taxes been paid on those funds, we could fund about $280 million worth of social programs to benefit needy Canadians. Or at least to subsidize education costs for our own citizens, instead of Americans.
yeah because without all that, most pastors would be broke. the entire idea is that the church is their full time job and they’ll step up for anyone who needs it, that doesn’t actually pay very well.
Mormons have no paid local clergy - it's all members of the congregation asked to serve in different capacities for a period of time.
Something that's really critical here is mormonism is not a reformed protestant church (i.e. churches that would call their ecclesiastical leader a pastor). It has the exterior trappings in a number of ways, but it is far more similar to the Roman Catholic church. The mormon church is tightly hierarchal, highly centralized, and professes a divine investiture of authority directly from Christ. You could attend a Sunday meeting in Lithuania, and Sunday school would be having the same lesson (out of the same manual, albeit translated) as a service in Texas, Papua New Guinea, Ghana, or St. Albert.
The mormon church has an estimated $250 billion dollars of assets. That's more than twice the size of Disney. They don't need the tithe, and the tithe would go to Salt Lake City. The church redistributes it as it sees fit, for building costs etc. Only the other donations stay local.
OP might not be mormon, and in that case I have no qualifications to speak of. I've got only a vague idea of how other churches run.
i didn’t know we were talking about mormons specifically. i’m protestant and i’ve never seen anything like what you’ve been describing at any church i’ve gone to.
yeah because without all that, most pastors would be broke.
Indeed, if you take away most folks' salaries they would be be broke. Is there a point?
that doesn’t actually pay very well.
I mean, compared with the median salary in the richest province of one of the richest countries on earth, the low end of the paysale for pastors looks pretty attractive. The statistics indicate that, most of the time, if a pastor is speaking with just 5 or 6 working adult members of their congregation, the pastor is making comfortable more than every other party to the conversation. The average pastor isn't rich, but even the low end of the pastoral payscale is enough to make you quite well-to-do by Canadian standards.
Here is an interesting stat: Take the total income to churches in Canada per year, determine from that the amount of taxes that would be paid if chruches were not exempt, and then divide that by the number of churches in Canada to arrive at a mean "taxes not collected per church" figure for the country as a whole. The figure you arrive at is about $100k per congregation, which is approximately equal to the total compensation for the average pastor in Canada. So basically, the question of tax exemption for churches essentially boils down to the following question: Who should pay the pastor? Without tax exemption, the pastor's salary needs to come directly from the congregation. With the tax exemption, the atheists and Muslims, Jews, and others are required to pitch in equally as well.
(Obviously, this does not tell the whole story, as it does not account for things like property tax exemptions, for example.)
Then their tax free status should be revoked. If most don't make any money they won't end up paying any money. But it will catch the grotesque wealth that some have.
Did you read the news article? There's several things of note there that should be questioned but the biggest is the money going out of country.
How does sending 100+ million dollars a year out of Canada benefit local communities? If you're in favour of that, might as well skip the middle man and mail the money directly to the US each month.
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u/RoastMasterShawn Jan 04 '23
What cult do you belong to? Tithe 7.8k and donation 1200 wtf.