A question of Tithing and Mormonism

Someone at the RFM board posed an interesting question, recently. It was: "How can Mormons afford to pay tithing?"

My answer to this question is: "Many of them cannot afford to pay tithing."

My parents could not afford to pay tithing. But they did and, as a result, the family suffered.

I well remember when an officious and overbearing Mormon Bishop demanded a meeting with my parents. Apparently he was "concerned" that my parents were not paying a full fast offering, so small was the amount that my parents donated every month.

When my mother showed him her shopping list with each item carefully costed (that was something she always did, in order to eke out my father's miserly wage, we were in a rural area were pay was ridiculously low) he was shocked that our family got by on such a small amount of money for food.

He was shocked, but not shocked enough to offer any financial help to my parents. "The Church Welfare Programme does not operate in Britain" he had told them. "And the fast offering is for poor people." He apparently failed to see the irony in the fact that as he knew what my father's income was and knew the minuscule amount of money my mother spent on food every week that my family was, in fact, poor. But that he declined to offer them any help.