How much salary do apostles receive?

[MikeWaters]

Subject was brought up on cougarboard. Apparently a few will lose their testimonies if it approaches 500k.

Don't most of the apostles have second vacation homes on the other side of the Wasatch mountains?

This would be more than most Americans have, but it is not a clear indication of salary.

Whatever it is, I am betting it is less than Joel Osteen.

[YOhio]

I'm pretty sure that each apostle has a geographical assignment and they collect 1.5% of all tithing revenue generated by their area.

[MikeWaters]

What do Stake Presidents get? 0.5%?

[creekster]

Originally Posted by MikeWaters

What do Stake Presidents get? 0.5%?

Only if they recruited all their own bishops.

[All-American]

General Authorities living expenses are not paid by tithing dollars. They receive some income from investments and businesses managed by the church-- I don't know the numbers, but I'd be willing to bet it is signicantly less than 500k, and likely not even 6 digits. Most general authorities were well established businessmen before receiving their calls.

[MikeWaters]

Originally Posted by All-American

General Authorities living expenses are not paid by tithing dollars. They receive some income from investments and businesses managed by the church-- I don't know the numbers, but I'd be willing to bet it is signicantly less than 500k, and likely not even 6 digits. Most general authorities were well established businessmen before receiving their calls.

And where did all those investments and businesses come from? Tithing.

I think you are parsing.

To whom does it matter that their salaries don't come from tithing, but from the investment of tithing? People that want to claim we dont' have a paid clergy?

[MikeWaters]

Thankfully I think apostles are now off corporate boards (at least companies not owned by the church).

[All-American]

Originally Posted by MikeWaters

And where did all those investments and businesses come from? Tithing.

I think you are parsing.

To whom does it matter that their salaries don't come from tithing, but from the investment of tithing? People that want to claim we dont' have a paid clergy?

Likewise, not from tithing, as it has been explained to me.

[MikeWaters]

Originally Posted by All-American

Likewise, not from tithing, as it has been explained to me.

I don't understand. How does the church gain any money, other than tithing (i.e. donations to the church) and investment on tithing. Is their something else I am not thinking of?

[All-American]

Here's a good article:

From the 1830s to the 1990s, LDS church finances have experienced many significant transitions.1 This is an overview of highlights during 160 years of tithing, salaried ministry and voluntary service, business activity, revenues, personal use of church funds, church indebtedness, and public disclosure. This chapter shows that LDS finances have not always functioned as they do today and that the financial sacrifices of Mormons have been great, indeed.


To begin, by divine injunction since ancient times, God's disciples have seen themselves as "not of the world" (John 17:14). This has resulted in various religious communities regarding themselves as outside the ordinary definitions and expectations of society and of the world's leaders.2


Theologically, Mormonism has never accepted the "worldly" distinctions between secular versus religious, civil versus theocratic, mundane versus divine.3 An 1830 revelation declared: "Wherefore, verily I say unto you that all things unto me are spiritual, and not at any time have I given unto you a law which was temporal; neither [unto] any man, nor the children of men . . ."4


In reaction to hostile critics, the First Presidency issued this formal statement in 1907: "The charge that the Church is a commercial rather than a religious institution; that its aims are temporal rather than religious; that it dictates its members in their industrial activities and relations, and aims at absolute domination in temporal affairs,—all this we emphatically deny."5 The difficulty with such a denial is that LDS leaders were stating criticisms of their church in the categories and assumptions of non-Mormons, but answering them in the categories and assumptions of Mormonism. In Mormon terms the LDS church is not "a commercial rather than a religious institution," but the LDS church is commercial because it is religious. Likewise, Mormonism's aims are not "temporal rather than spiritual," but its aims are temporal because they are spiritual. And all questions of dictation and absolute dominion—economic or political—are based on the Mormon view of the supremacy of free will. In other words, whether it is the political dictates of Mormon leaders or the prosperity of an economic institution of the LDS church, Mormonism has dominion only insofar as Mormons choose to allow it (see chaps. 7-10).


Mormons have always been irritated by complaints and hand-wringing about "Mormon power" (whether financial, political, or social). In 1984, for possibly the first time, two non-Mormon writers declared the LDS perspective of the hierarchy's financial power: "These are money managers, but unlike any other kind of money managers. . . . The wealth and power, in the end, come down to the essentials: The church is in the business of expanding the church. . . . a temporal structure whose major goal is spiritual—the building of the Kingdom of God on earth in preparation for the millennial reign of Jesus Christ."6


There are both continuities and discontinuities in Mormon financial history since Joseph Smith, Jr., organized a new church on 6 April 1830. The most significant difference involves the definition of tithing.


Tithing


Since 1831 LDS bishop Edward Partridge and his counselors had presided over all Mormons in Missouri, which had equal status with church headquarters in Ohio.7 In December 1837 they defined tithing as 2 percent of one's net worth, after deducting debts. "Believing that voluntary tithing is better than Forced taxes," the Missouri bishopric defined it as "two cents on the dollar or one fiftieth of what we are worth after deducting what we owe."8 Until 1908 Mormons were allowed to pay tithing in labor, personal property, livestock, and produce in addition to cash.9


In July 1838 Joseph Smith dictated a revelation which required a more stringent financial sacrifice from Latter-day Saints. It defined the law of tithing as a donation of all the individual's "surplus property" at first, and then a tenth of annual income thereafter (D&C 119:1, 4). In November 1841 the Quorum of the Twelve made the first liberalization of the 1838 tithing revelation: the initial donation was reduced to only "one-tenth of all a man [possesses, and] 1/10 of increas[e]" afterwards.10


In August 1844 the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles issued an epistle which required all Mormons to immediately pay "a tenth of all their property and money . . . and then let them continue to pay in a tenth of their income from that time forth." There was no exemption for Mormons who had already paid one-tenth of their property upon conversion.11 In January 1845 a Quorum of Twelve's epistle reemphasized "the duty of all saints to tithe themselves one-tenth of all they possess when they enter into the new and everlasting covenant: and then one-tenth of their interest, or income, yearly afterwards."12 However, two weeks later the Twelve voted to exempt themselves, the two general bishops Newel K. Whitney and George Miller, and the Nauvoo Temple Committee from any obligation to pay tithing. This was due to their services to the church.13


Apostle John E. Page's enforcement of the full-tithing requirement for the rank-and-file led to his disaffection from his own quorum. Exempted from tithing himself, Page felt guilty about collecting tithing from others such as one Mormon who gave $4 which was "the tenth of all" the man and his impoverished family possessed. Upon abandoning the Quorum of the Twelve in 1846, Page complained that he "believes that many paid tithing & in consequence of [this, were in] want of money enough to procure misc. necessaries of life."14


Five years later Brigham Young provided a penalty for those Mormons who did not comply with the published definitions of the law of tithing. In September 1851 a special conference at Salt Lake City voted to accept excommunication as punishment for non-payment of tithing and non-observance of the Word of Wisdom's prohibition of tobacco and spirituous alcohol. Neither requirement was enforced consistently or often.15 Nevertheless, in 1854 the Deseret News printed a notice by the bishop of the Salt Lake City Nineteenth Ward that Enoch M. King was disfellowshipped "for repeatedly refusing to conform to the rules of said Church, in the law of Tithing." In October 1858 a bishop's meeting asked Presiding Bishop Edward Hunter: "Are all to be cut off who do not pay their Tithing? Answer, deal according to circumstances, and the wisdom God gives."16


On this matter Apostle Erastus Snow was more zealous than most. In 1868 he gave orders to southern Utah bishops to excommunicate everyone "who will not keep the word of wisdom, Pay their Tithing & donate of their substance to help bring the Poor Saints from the old country." A local Mormon estimated that enforcement of Snow's instruction "would cause 3/4 of this community to be cut off from this church."17


For the church as a whole, Brigham Young publicly estimated that Latter-day Saints had paid less than 10 percent of their 10 percent tithing obligations from 1847 to 1870.18 In other words, adult Mormons were contributing, on average, less than 1 percent of their net worth at conversion, less than 1 percent of their net worth upon arrival in Utah, and less than 1 percent of their annual income. However, pioneer definitions of tithing delinquency varied radically. In Cache Valley during the same period, local bishops concluded that 90 percent of people who could pay tithing were full-tithe payers. The difference in perspective was due to the fact that these Cache Valley bishops "excused" a large portion of the population from tithing due to poverty. The church president's report made no such distinctions.19


After President Young's announcement of tithing delinquency, LDS general authorities gave sermons to remind church members that the law of tithing was "one tenth of all we possess at the start, and then ever after one tenth . . ."20 Apostle Erastus Snow even reinvoked the 1838 revelation's original requirement to donate all surplus property at first.21 These sermons were futile efforts to reverse a nineteenth-century trend of financial non-compliance. Otherwise faithful Mormons withered before an overwhelming tithing obligation. Young told the October 1875 general conference that neither he nor anyone else "had ever paid their tithing as it was revealed and understood by him in the Doctrine and Covenants."22


John Taylor tried to increase church donations by liberalizing the law of tithing for the first time since 1841. On the fiftieth anniversary of the church's organization, he declared a biblical Jubilee Year in which he forgave half of the delinquent tithing and half of the debts owed to the Perpetual Emigrating Fund.23 After the Jubilee year of 1880 failed to bring in the unforgiven half of delinquent tithing, the church president offered a carrot-and-stick approach to tithing in 1881. On 8 January 1881 Taylor said he did not care whether Mormons paid the "one-tenth of the property of the new comers" to Utah, as required by Brigham Young. However, the Presiding Bishopric's tithing clerk recorded that, on motion of the LDS president, the assembled priesthood holders voted unanimously to sustain the requirement of "one tenth of the property on entering the Church, and one tenth of the increase afterward."24 At this stake conference in January and again at general conference in April 1881, President Taylor instructed stake presidents that church members now "must be tithe payers" in order to have recommends for temple ordinances.25


The early tithing requirements of Mormonism give added significance to the numbers of immigrants to Utah before 1881 and to the numbers of LDS converts prior to 1899. At a personal level, any Mormon who paid a full tithing by nineteenth-century definitions (like the man who gave $4 in 1845) was deserving of awe and veneration. Then in May 1899 Lorenzo Snow publicly announced a revelation which limited the law of tithing to one-tenth of annual income with no massive payment upon conversion. As an LDS church president, Snow is best known for his emphasis on observance of this new definition of tithing.26 This was the last LDS liberalization of the 1838 revelation on tithing. From then until the present, Mormons have been allowed to decide whether to pay tithing on their gross income or net income.27


Lorenzo Snow's announcement was undoubtedly the cause for a significant increase in the percentage of Mormons who paid at least some tithing (see Table). In 1890, 17.2 percent of LDS stake membership had paid some tithing, and the percentage hovered around 15 percent for seven years. In 1898 the percentage of stake members who paid some tithing was only 1 percent higher than in 1890. In 1899, the year of Lorenzo Snow's announcement, the number of tithe payers in the stakes jumped to 25.6 percent.28


In early 1900 President Snow asked the Presiding Bishop to prepare a list "of non-tithe payers and about 10,000 names were in the record."29 Snow told the apostles that non-payment of tithing "was worse than the non-observance of the Word of Wisdom" prohibitions against tobacco and alcohol. The time had long since passed when general authorities were exempt from the obligation to pay tithing, and one apostle was shocked to learn that Apostle John W. Taylor's "name is on the Non-Tithing List!"30


In April 1910 the church president announced it was necessary to comply with this greatly reduced law of tithing in order to have temple recommends.31 This 1910 announcement was a reincarnation of the poorly enforced First Presidency announcement in 1881. Since 1910 bishops and stake presidents have given greater attention to the requirement of tithing for temple recommends. Higher expectations of tithing compliance were possible because twentieth-century Mormons have had it easy regarding their tithing obligations compared with nineteenth-century Mormons.


Table 1.
LDS Stake Members Who Paid Some Tithing, 1890-1925
(per capita for total membership)


TITHE TITHE TITHE TITHE
YEARS PAYERS YEARS PAYERS YEARS PAYERS YEARS PAYERS


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1890 17.2% 1900 27.0% 1910 21.6% 1920 21.9%
1891 15.1% 1901 28.9% 1911 21.0% 1921 20.7%
1892 15.8% 1902 28.2% 1912 20.6% 1922 28.4%
1893 14.9% 1903 28.5% 1913 21.0% 1923 27.3%
1894 15.7% 1904 27.6% 1914 20.1% 1924 25.1%
1895 15.3% 1905 26.4% 1915 20.0% 1925 25.3%
1896 15.1% 1906 26.1% 1916 20.1%
1897 15.6% 1907 26.8% 1917 21.8%
1898 18.4% 1908 26.0% 1918 21.3%
1899 25.6% 1909 25.0% 1919 22.3%


Of course the figures in this Table were significantly higher than the percentage of stake members who paid a full tithing. During the pre-Depression first quarter of the twentieth century, the highest percentage of full-tithe payers was in 1910. In that year 16.5 percent of the church's total stake membership of men, women, and children paid a full 10-percent tithing.32 However, neither of the above measures adequately assesses individual compliance by Mormons concerning their church's requirement for tithing.

The annual reports did not regularly list the number of wage-earners or consistently show the percentage of wage-earners who actually paid tithing. The 54,346 full-tithe payers in 1910 were a much higher percentage (though unquantifiable) of the wage-earners among Latter-day Saints in the stakes that year. For example, in the very next year 59.3 percent were full-tithe payers of the total wage-earners. Likewise, the highest percentage (28.9 percent) who paid any tithing in that quarter-century amounted to 74,625 tithe payers in 1901. That had to be an impressive record for the Mormon wage-earners in the stakes that year, for the lowest rate of tithe paying during that quarter-century was 20 percent of total stake population in 1915. In that latter year 73 percent of wage-earners paid at least some tithing.33 The praise of Mormon leaders for the financial devotion of LDS church members has never been exaggerated.


Tithing donations from the widow's mite to the rich man's abundance have always been the essential source of LDS church revenues. When Esquire magazine's August 1962 cover story claimed the church's revenues were $1 million a day,34 tithing revenues were actually about $100 million that year instead of $365 million.35 This 350+ percent error was due to careless research and a wild guess by Salt Lake City's non-Mormon mayor, J. Bracken Lee: "I do know that the net income exceeds a million dollars a day."36 With far more attention to available details, a carefully researched estimate of 1991 was probably closer to the mark in claiming that the LDS church received $4.3 billion in annual tithing revenue.37 The accuracy of this estimate is debatable, since recent tithing figures are unavailable for research.


However, annual tithing revenues for the decade prior to the Esquire estimate are helpful for estimating recent LDS church income. In 1962 tithing revenues were about $56.62 per capita for total LDS membership that year, nearly double the per capita tithing revenues of $28.65 in 1952. In real dollars (a term in economic history), the 1962 tithing equalled $253 per capita in 1990 dollars.38 Therefore, assuming similar tithing observance in 1990 (without including the observable annual growth rate), this would translate to $1.96 billion in tithing revenue during 1990. From that perspective, LDS Public Affairs in 1991 rightly dismissed the estimate of $4.3 billion of annual tithing income as "grossly overstated."39 However, by including the growth rate of the earlier reports by LDS headquarters, it is difficult to regard $4.3 billion as a "grossly overstated" estimate of annual LDS revenues in the 1990s.


A nearly 100 percent growth rate in the actual dollars of per capita tithing from 1952 to 1962 cannot simply be ignored when estimating the LDS church's present income. That decade included the explosive growth of LDS conversions outside the United States and Canada. There is no reason to discount similar growth in tithing rates during the three decades since 1962. With the 1952-62 period as a basis of comparison, the church's tithing revenues for 1990 would be far in excess of the estimate of $4.3 billion. From this perspective that estimate seems conservative.


However, it is important to recognize that tithing from Mormons outside the United States has rarely ever been transferred to church headquarters in America. Except for the early years of the British Mission (established in 1837) and of the Canadian settlements of Mormons (begun in 1887), Mormon tithing funds have remained in the countries of their origin. The first reason for this is that foreign outposts of Mormonism have been financial drains on the church's general funds, which typically supplement local tithing collected outside the United States. In the nineteenth century it was more practical to use foreign tithing for the immediate needs of the missions and branches in each country where it was collected. Physical transfer of overseas funds required months of travel to and from headquarters in the United States.


The second reason for keeping tithing in the country of its origin was that the church lost money in exchange fees for every transaction involving U.S. dollars and foreign currency. The third reason is that (particularly in the twentieth century) laws of some countries either complicated or prohibited transfers of tithing to the United States. The bottom line is that the net flow of tithing funds has been from Salt Lake City to other countries where Mormons have converted and eventually built chapels and temples.


Both the definition of tithing and the extent of its payment have evolved since 1831. The LDS church could not have become the international organization it is today without the development of regular tithe paying.