A recent Mormon Stories podcast had John Dehlin interviewing Hans Mattsson, a former Area Authority 70 in Northern Europe, who has now left the church. John asked him what surprised him when he became a 70, and he talked about a training meeting in SLC where Pres Hinkley was the speaker. The Prophet told them that “We need more missionaries in North America because that’s where the money is. The ones we baptized in Africa don’t give us money” The Area President sitting next to him leaned over and whispered “You’ve seen Hinkley the Prophet, Now you get to see Hinckey the CEO”. Further, this was during the 2002 SLC Winter Olympics, and the church had spend many millions of dollars to support them, and Hinkley said that “we can’t see any return on our investment in the Olympics, now go home and make it happen!”

Does this surprise Wheat & Tares readers that the CEO of the Corporation of the First President would be thinking about money when assigning missionaries? Do you think that money, and potential tithing revenue is discussed when selecting temple locations? Is it wrong for money to be a factor in where to build a temple?

There are other examples of money being the driving factor for what appears as “inspired programs” Back in 1981, a new and improved edition of the BofM came out. But what was the church to do with the millions of copies of the previous edition? They came up with the “Family to Family” program. For you youngsters out there, this program had members buy several copies of the BofM, and write their testimony in the front cover, along with a photo of yourself, or family. Then you gave these copies to the local missionaries to hand out to investigators, or they were boxed up and sent to overseas missions. And guess which edition of the BofM they sold you for this program? That is correct, the old edition that they couldn’t get rid of. The Lord works in mysterious ways!

What are your thoughts? What do you thing the average church member would think if he/she heard these things? Would they be just more “anti-Mormon” lies, or could could they understand the complexity of running a multi-billion dollar corporation?