Missionary programme economics. Numbers down, price up.

[_I have a question]

The cost of serving a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will rise 25 percent next year to $500 a month.

The first increase in missionary living costs since 2003 will be effective July 1, 2020, according to a First Presidency letter sent to the church's international leaders and local leaders in 18 countries in North America and Europe.

The cost increase applies only to missionaries from those 18 nations, which also include Australia and Japan.

The announcement is a response to rising costs to missionary expenses over the past 16 years, including rent, food, utilities and transportation within the mission. Some missionaries pay for their own missions. In other cases, parents help or pay all of a mission's costs. In still others, other family, friends or congregation members contribute some or all of the expense.

https://www.deseretnews.com/article/900 ... rease.html

But they are only telling half the story.

As inflationary pressures impact costs - rent, food, utilities, transport etc those same pressures impact wages. And if wages go up, so does tithing income. Fewer missionaries serving missions also means the total cost of operating the missionary programme reduces too. Which includes the decision to reduce total MTC capacity (shortly after making the decision to significantly increase total MTC capacity). And as the total net cost of the missionary programme has reduced since its peak a few years ago, the Church's stock portfolio has grown and grown. The $32 billion isn't reducing.

From the comments:

I'm confused about this. Families like mine are struggling with the cost of sending our missionaries out already, and yet I see the church purchasing property and building big multi-million dollar buildings in Salt Lake. Couldn't they redirect those millions to help the families of missionaries instead of real estate developments?

That’s a fair question. Another fair question is why isn’t tithing sufficient to cover missionary costs?

I think this is just another raindrop in the overall scheme of a financial storm raging within the Church. The Church has been cost cutting since the day paid janitors were axed. If the Church with $32 billion of liquid funds in the bank is raising prices to its reducing missionary experience customers at a time when those customer numbers are dropping, then that tells me there's something much bigger going on behind the smoke and the mirrors.

[_oliblish]

The ROI on the missionary department is clearly down and they are making adjustments. The church pageants were funded by the missionary department and those were cut because they were not bringing in converts (a.k.a. future tithe-payers). I heard from an insider in the COB that the they tried to find another department to take over the pageants but there were no takers. (I am sure the wacky Lamanite content also played a part in all of this.)

Baptisms per missionary are down quite a bit from a couple of decades ago. In the 1980's there were over 7 baptisms per missionary per year on average. Today we are seeing half that (~3.5).

Increasing the cost of missions will have multiple benefits. The most obvious is that it will increase the money coming in for each missionary they send out.

It will also reduce the number of missionaries going out. The missionaries that decide not to go because of the additional cost include:

- Less faithful missionaries that would have been more likely to come home early
- Less faithful missionaries that would have been more likely to leave the church after their missions
- Poorer missionaries that would be more likely to need church welfare in the future, or at least pay less tithing.

These are the kind of members that the church is not as enthusiastic about keeping around.

Reducing the number of missionaries won't change the number of baptisms by a large amount. We found with the surge in missionary numbers a few years ago there was no corresponding increase of convert baptisms. So reducing the number of missionaries should't make a big difference. If anything it should push the baptisms per missionary up a little.

If you want to be more cynical, this can now be used as a way to blame the members for dwindling missionary numbers in the future. The number of missionaries has been dropping for the last 4 years, and I don't see that trend changing any time soon.