Quote:
Originally Posted by SeattleUte
My points are: First, no, the Church doesn't have $2 billion cash lying around; it's borrowing the money, and tithing won't be tapped into only if the commercial project is successful. Second, you can't make these types of projects successful just by throwing money at them. I've seen plenty of gleaming, empty, drafty malls in places like Oklahoma, Texas and Alaska where the developers guessed wrong and got killed or came too late and got crushed at the door when the economy softened (is that other mall at Second South going to take this lying down? Seems there's a lot of competition). The Church seems to be acting like local government here. Yes, there are examples such as the Riverwalk in San Antonio, downtown Baltimore and many others where the city injected resources and helped to make a dismal area bloom. But invariably it's a delicate marrying of private enterprise and risk taking and public incentivizing that makes it work.
|
the church has a lot more money than you think. As a financial clerk of a small poorer ward I was very surprised how much money in tithing the church gets. Even when I was a financial clerk for student singles ward at the U the tithing was around 4k a week. If we say that is the average for all the wards in the world (~30,000) we get about 6.4 billion a year in tithing.