I'd Pay for a Better Bishop

Seriously. I'd love to pay for a good man or woman to lead my local ward. I'd pay a good salary, too. $75k if she showed up every week with an insightful sermon. $100k if she worked well with children, the youth, and the elderly. Shoot, I'd even spring for $125k if she were a humble, compassionate, charitable minister, in addition to the above.

Instead, my fellow ward members and I get what we pay for: an incompetent bozo whose only demonstrated professional skill seems to be that he manages the schedule for a local construction company. Seriously, the guy only shows up for church on average three out of four weeks a month, and in the five years we've put up with him, I've never once heard anything resembling an intelligent or inspiring or marginally coherent sermon from the pulpit.

The majority of Mormon congregations get stuck with as much.

That's because we have an "unpaid clergy" in the Mormon church. That's at least according to the Newsroom Blog and more than a few General Authorities.

Never mind that the Doctrine and Covenants specifically provides for a paid clergy, or that Joseph Smith and every President and the vast majority of General Authorities since has drawn a salary from the church, or that there are thousands of paid Church Education System teachers and professors who draw a salary for providing religious services, or that there are easily over a hundred thousand curriculum, charitable, missionary, and temple workers and support staff who draw salaries, or that the vast majority of local bishops and stake presidents drew a salary for their clerical duties well into the 1900s.

Somehow, for some reason, the church in the last seventy five years or so has developed a fixation with the idea of its gloriously divine lay clergy.

Of course, a paid clergy is certainly not immune to temptation or sin, and perhaps, if you could ever find reliable statistics, you might find that Mormon bishops and stake presidents fondle, molest and otherwise sexually abuse fewer children, per capita, than paid Catholic priests. Of course, then again, you might not.

Still, I kind of get irked when I hear nonsense about the great Mormon lay clergy. Because in addition to the marketing snippet being very disingenuous and misleading, and, as to the full-time paid General Authorities, patently false, it reminds of just how much Mormons pay to receive so pitifully little.

Consider, that in my community, median household income is just a little over $70k. Assuming that just over fifty of the 110 households listed in my ward directory actually pay something by way of tithing, and assuming that that "something" amounts to, on average, 6% of their annual income...that means my ward would be contributing $210,000 a year to the church.

Now, we share our building with a "singles ward," which almost certainly overutilizes the building in proportion to their financial contribution, but they do contribute something. My ward certainly utilizes other services, including the local temple, and gets a few thousand dollars back in the form of our unit "budget" allotment from the folks in the giant phallus on North Temple and State Street. Of course, the church has suspended all but most critical local physical facilities expenditures for the foreseeable future (combination of a downturn in the economy coupled with the multi-billion dollar church-financed "City Creek" development in downtown Salt Lake).

But we could easily consolidate ministerial duties for both my ward and the singles ward for a single paid minister. Shoot, I bet a single full-time paid minister could even take on a third "family" ward in this area. And if we all met in the same church....

Man, I'm sure we could pay a good minister a salary of at least $75,000/year. Shoot, a good minister would effectively bring in more tithe-payers, maybe meriting a raise.

And if we didn't like her, we'd fire her ass and get a good one.

Instead of getting stuck with whatever our wonderfully unpaid stake president sees fit to inflict on us for however long he warrants good and proper and sadistic. And no, I don't buy the argument that the lay clergy gives the membership an opportunity to prepare to "kings and queens, priests and priestesses." Because: 1) The vast majority of members never get called to be the bishop , and certainly ZERO of our future (female) queens ever have; 2) In my experience, the good bishops didn't need the experience to help them be better men while the bad bishops just took advantage of the opportunity to exercise unrighteous dominion; and 3) How in the world do you expect an unpaid bishop to handle the divine inheritance of everything God has, if you can't trust him to handle a salary from the church?

So, sure, my current bishop, who works full-time weekdays screaming obscenities at subcontractors, also has, ostensibly, the keys to revelation. But I'm quite sure I'd take a well-educated graduate from a good theological seminary, lacking in priesthood keys but full of intelligence, compassion and a humble desire to serve, over the dummy I've got now. I'd even start paying tithing again for someone like that.

At least I could then feel good about where my money was going. Somehow, paying to defeat Prop 8 and to build shopping malls and corporate offices in downtown Salt Lake, and to provide a lifetime salary for my favorite inciter to homophobic violence isn't exactly what I'd like to pay for from my church.