In Reply to: Here it is, first part posted by A Real Reposter :) on November 20, 2003 at 11:33:53:
WS seems to be under the impression that everyone out in “the system” is a slave for their money. What they don’t seem to realize is that people who are extremely wealthy do not work for their money. They are wealthy because they have learned how to make their money work for them. This takes financial literacy and an understanding of the way the world works. Obviously, for a group that has “declared war on the system”, believes that “the big boys are controlling the world’s economies” and refuses to allow an education that would help them in this regard, this concept is a lost cause. The image that WS presents to the Family in the publications about the system portrays the life of the poor slave-wage and lower income earners. Could it be that nobody there actually understands a life beyond that?
8. It’s all those evil ex-members’ fault (again!): (Maria: There seems to be quite a hubbub going on these days about tithing. Apparently some of you have tapped into the ex-member sites and read various questions about whether there is a scriptural basis for tithing. Some of these ex-members support their ideas with Bible verses. The main thrust of their arguments is that tithing is an Old Testament practice, one that is not required in the New Testament. While this might seem like a simple doctrinal debate, the underlying spirit of the questions implies that Peter and I are taking advantage of you, we’re ripping you off, we shouldn’t ask you to tithe, we should have a better way of supporting WS, we should just receive free-will love offerings, etc… -- Par 58 & 59)
Ever since the tithe was first instituted in the Family, the members have been writing in to leadership requesting modifications, asking for clarifications, and, yes, complaining about it & asking to have to pay less. This issue is nothing new to the Family, but this GN is the first time in Family history where Family leadership has claimed that these complaints about the tithe are a direct attack on their leadership & an attempt to destroy the Family’s faith.
9. Maria and Peter insist they are NOT bad money managers: (Maria: ….Some feel that if we just “used a little business sense” we could have plenty of support for WS, and still have enough to give away. The points being made are that Peter and I aren’t handling the Family’s money wisely, our requirements for Family membership are not right, we’re using the Bible to back up unscriptural demands, etc. Of course, I don’t know how much actual business experience or even practical experience the people who write these things have. It’s possible that they’ve been directing a worldwide missionary movement for years and years and have found a better way to do it than Dad, Peter, and me, but I think that’s rather unlikely. Still, since some people in the Family have asked about these ex-members’ arguments and wonder if there’s merit to them, we prayed about them.” – Pars 60 & 61)
I don’t know how “directing a missionary movement for years and years” suddenly becomes the criteria for whether or not someone knows how to manage money. In this case even Warren Buffet & Peter Lynch do not pass muster. Every single young person who has left the Family with nothing, gone out into the world, built a life for themselves and is now investing in their future has enough actual business and practical experience to tell Family leadership that the leadership does not have a good grasp of financial management.
During my time in the Family, I’ve seen so many bad business decisions come about from hearing from the Lord in prophecy, that, in good humor, I’ve come to believe that “the Lord” is a very bad businessman. When the Bible says that he “owns the cattle on a thousand hills and the wealth in every mine,” that might have been before the Lord was actually running the heavenly family business, because if he handles his heavenly business the same way he instructs his Family “fold” to handle their earthly business, I’m afraid there aren’t going to be many mansions left in heaven – by now he might have had to mortgage the place to Mammon.
Managing money does not mean sitting at the top of a multi-level money making apex and deciding how to spend the money. Managing money means finding a way to make that money grow, to be responsible for its safekeeping & to the people that gave it.
After 30 years, the Family is no better off financially than it was at the beginning. I’ve gone back through the publications and found dozens upon dozens of Letters and quotes first from Berg, then from Maria, trying to teach the Family how to become financially successful. The problem is that it has always been spiritual, “do this so God can bless you, do that so God can bless you”, & of course, in the old days, Berg promoted various money making ideas that almost invariably had to do with begging (or prostituting). Since then, the “how to get wealthy” letters have contained 20 point lists with maybe 2 practical real life things on them: Budget and be austere. And then, as if to prove that WS & Family leadership are convinced that this is the best way to become financially secure, they repeated (and condensed) that list in a recent GN series titled “Show Me the Money” & included all the old money making mags in a reading list. In this series, Family leadership is once again attempting to tell the Family how to become financially stable. Perhaps (and for the sake of the Family members, I HOPE) some of their points will work, but for the most part, it is a repetition of the same spiritual factors that have been harped on since the Family’s inception.
A person can budget and be austere until they are blue in the face – that alone is not going to help them get forward financially – especially if their current income is not sufficient to meet basic living expenses. In the Family, the solutions from leadership have thus far always been “work harder”, “be more spiritual”, “follow these spiritual guidelines”, “budget and be austere” & “give, give, give”.
This is all that the Family leadership knows. Most first generation Family members are either high school dropouts or at best, have a few college credits to their name, the only experience most of them have gleaned in their lives is the work they’ve done in the Family. Unless WS has been snatching up the only college grads the Family has, it’s fair to assume that the people running WS &/or running the Family are on par with the rest of the bunch academically and experientially speaking. They’ve never invested, they’ve never actually gone out and made money & what’s more, WS & Family leadership doesn’t even have the same experience the average Family member has in figuring out how to support his/her own Home. WS is supported by the Family’s tithes.
With the exception of Maria’s job experience before she joined the Family she has never worked for money a day in her life (unless you count FFing). I’m not sure what kind of experience Peter has, but I doubt it was a whole lot more than that. They haven’t even gone out and beat the pavements selling the Activated or “Family tools” that they’ve spent reams of pages telling the Family they must do in order to please God. How are they supposed to teach the Family how to become financially secure?
All Family leadership really knows how to do is preach spiritual things. I am not knocking spiritual principles. They have their time and place – especially for those who place importance on them. This is not about trying to destroy people’s faith in God or a higher power & replace it with the worship of money. This is not about telling those who place an importance on being a missionary that there is no point in being a missionary. This is just plain common sense for anyone that is interested in getting beyond the living hand to mouth stage. – It is possible to be a missionary and still be financially literate.
Family leadership chose NOT to invest their money in anything that had to do with the world or “the system”. It was a conscious decision.
(Maria: Once when there were some extra funds, Peter wrote Dad a report asking him about the possibility of investing in certain moneymaking possibilities. Dad's response was, "Why give it to the Devil's people to invest and make money on? Let's invest it in the Family!" At Dad's request, Peter then proposed several possible plans to give the funds to the Family, and Dad and I chose one that would give a $1,000 Christmas tool gift to the Homes .Par 91#3049, MAMA'S NEWS AND VIEWS!--Part Two, 3/96)
I am absolutely not against giving the money to the Family. What I am against is the comment in the GN that followed the above example:
(Maria: The interesting thing about this is that Peter calculated that if WS had invested those funds in the System, WS would have gotten about a 10% return after one year. But when we gave the funds to the Homes, the Lord returned the full amount we'd given away through an inheritance within one month. So the Lord gave a 100% return in only one month, as compared to the System's 10% in one year! – Par 91)
I don’t have actual statistics for the year this event took place, so I’m working with the next best thing: (Maria: For the last five years we've had an average of 230 DO Homes worldwide. Par. 4, State Of The Nation '95! #3017, 10/95)
This means that not only did WS have an excess of roughly $230,000 (not counting whatever operating reserves they kept on hand), they also received an inheritance of roughly $230,000 the following month. This is over half a million dollars in surplus cash.
I ask: Where is all of that money today? Considering the current financial state of the Family as reported by Maria, obviously, the money is long gone.
There is a financial word that Family leadership seems to be painfully unaware of. It’s called “principle”. You never, ever, ever, touch your principle. But the Family policy with money for 30 years has been to eat the principle and pray for more to come in. Not only has WS devoured the principle that has come into its own coffers, it has taught the Family to do likewise.
If action has anything to do with thought, it would appear that WS’ idea of being a financial power has everything to do with bumming off of people who have money, and nothing to do with becoming financially literate themselves or understanding the fundamental concepts behind allowing money to work for them.
People with money know what money can do for them. Every dollar they have is not just a dollar; it’s the potential to earn another $700 over their lifetime. When they give that dollar away they are not giving away a dollar, they are giving away the seed to a $700 money tree, as well as the future exponential value of each of those $700 “money seeds”. People who are wealthy understand the true value of money (and, painfully, most Family members do not).
(There are others on this site, who, from reading their comments about money, it seems they have a much better grasp of this than I do, so I defer to them if the following numbers &/or reasoning is unsound):
Regarding the $230,000 in cash: Where is the money now? By Family definition, it has been invested into souls saved & each Home got $1,000 worth of tools (also now long gone). Fine. But apparently that is not putting food on the table.
If that $230,000 was placed into an investment earning 10% a year and allowed to sit without being touched, it would, today (10 years later) be worth nearly $600,000. A nice little increase for money that was extra to begin with, but not a LOT of money. If they had done the same thing with $500,000 it would under the same circumstances today be nearly $1,300,000. Again, a nice piece of change, but for an operation the size of the Family, it’s really not that much money.
As any investor knows, the power of money is in the long term. 10 years, is really not a lot of time for any investment to grow. Five years from now that 500,000 would be worth over $2,000,000 & with each year added on to that, the numbers start multiplying rapidly.
But what IF: What if, 35 years ago, the people who headed up the Family had realized that what they had on their hands was a group of pretty much uneducated drop-outs. What if they had realized that in 35 years, some of the young hippies in their group would be approaching 60 & shortly after that health issues, frailty issues & so forth were going to come into play.
What if they had sat down and said, “You know, we have a responsibility to these young people who have put their trust in us & in our connection with God. We believe that God is going to take care of us, and maybe even Jesus will be back by 1993, but just in case we don’t have all of our interpretations straight, how about we go ahead and plan for the future. Let’s invest $5,000 (five thousand dollars) & every month thereafter we are going to commit to take $5,000 (five thousand dollars) of the money our dear precious missionaries that we love so much send to us & we are going to give it back to them in the long-term by adding it to the original investment. Since they have given up everything to follow what we have told them God wants them to do, in return we’re going to look after them as best as we can as they get older.”
In such an alternate universe if such a thing had occurred & said investment had continued to grow at an average of 10% per year, that investment would now be worth over $17,000,000 (seventeen million dollars). One million & seven hundred thousand dollars a year from interest alone is not a little money when it comes to trying to help your aged, your sick & your poor.
WS could still continue to live off of the tithe that they require of the Family sends in if that’s what they want to do.
But would they even have to? WS keeps on hand, I believe, a total of 3 months working reserves. Knowing the size of the operation, and guesstimating a 3-month reserve of about $300,000, that gives them a tidy little sum to work with. (Considering that WS once used its reserves to give every person in the Family a $50 tool gift, and the average number of Homes in the 5 years preceding the Charter was 230 with an average Home size of 40 members, WS had to have at least $460,000 in reserves to work with – that’s IF they emptied the reserves completely, it could have been more.) In the 30 + years of Family history, I can only remember a few select instances where WS would have been called on to tap into this reserve (or when they did it anyway, such as when they gave each member in the Family $50 for their tool gift fund, or as they are doing again now to help lead the Family in the way of giving.) What this means is that they have had this tidy sum sitting around at their disposal. What has become of it? It’s possible that the reserve funds have been invested into at least the bare minimum – savings accounts or CDs. It could just be stuffed in mattresses or hidden holes in the wall, continuing to lose value, not even keeping up with the rate of inflation. But since this information is kept highly secret, we will never know.
The concept of long term saving & investing is not rocket science. Anyone with two working fingers and an internet search engine can find a financial calculator & punch in the same numbers and find the same answers. There have been times during the past 30 years when rates were better than 10% simply in a normal savings account. Today, with interest rates being so low, about the best you can get in a savings account is 2%, and with the kind of numbers in the above example, you might be able to pull 4% on a major Jumbo CD. But there are plenty of other growth opportunities around to provide up to 10% interest -- and rates are rock bottom. In an upswing economy, pulling in returns at 25 – 30% is totally reasonable.
The fact is, not only does the Family leadership not have these kind of forward thinking capabilities, but, if Family history is any indication of the way they work, “long term” means 3 1/2 years from now – in case the covenant is signed in secret. The power of compound interest is in the long term, not investing for a year.
But it’s not just a lack of forward thinking that makes it impossible for WS to pull out of the total dependency state of being. In order for WS to make the kind of investments & pull in the kind of returns I’ve mentioned in the examples up above, they would have to start paying taxes – which brings up another huge issue – because WS has been laundering money since it was born & is operating its financial structure illegally under just about every country’s law on the face of this planet.
As the whole point of this tirade is money management, this wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the issue of the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars that have been spent over the past 15 years beginning projects that never got off the ground, producing “loser” witnessing tools & storing the tons of published material that never went anywhere. I wonder if any kind of feasibility or marketability study was done before producing the TIV, SOS or 20 Minutes to Go? What about the DFs? How many hundreds of thousands of DF #36 were produced, then sat in storage & were later burned. Yes, that’s great money management for you! The fact is, in the past, most Family witnessing tools were produced on the council or desires of Family leadership.
It would appear that today at least with Family productions, things are changing. Since the mid 90’s there has been more of an emphasis on mass marketing Family products & slowly but surely those involved are starting to get the idea of producing items that sell, not just items that put out group propaganda. What one person with an MBA could have saved the Family in time and money boggles the mind. And they say they are “managing the Family’s money” & wonder what kind of qualifications their critics have.
Again, speaking of “managing the money” what about the tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars that went into supporting victor homes. Not only was that a poor investment as far as results go, it actually ended up costing the Family a huge amount of time, energy & money in terms of court costs and “persecution” due to the ill effects those homes had on the individual children sent to them. (I doubt the Family has seen the last of this yet).
I find it interesting how Peter in his justification of requiring the tithe from the Family, points out that taxes are meant to provide government services such as, police, fire, and whatnot, and how that is sort of what the Family’s tithes do for Family members – while at the same time, WS and Family leadership do not actually pay taxes.
WS can say that its goal is souls and not to make money. Fine. But if that is the case, I would suggest they stop acting like snooty know-it-alls when it comes to the subject of money. If after 30 years of sitting at the top of a brilliant multilevel marketing apex where they have a free sales rep force in the thousands and money just rolls in every month, they have still not figured out how to become self-supportive & have to roll the presses with guilt inducing “you better or else” GNs, WHAT IS IT GOING TO TAKE? Maybe a little higher education might come in handy?
10. The Family officially no longer uses the Bible as a solid doctrinal base: (Dad speaking: Like I told you when I was there, way back at the beginning of the Family, we’re not looking backward at the Old Testament, or even the New Testament, other than as a possible blueprint for how we can operate now, today, in this day and age and in this Time of the End…..the giving of the tithe is simply an offering to the Lord that the Lord says belongs to Him, and that he uses to take care of His priests and Levites, His ministers, and those who serve you. I’m not about to be dictated to by the examples of the past. I refused to let anyone pour God into a mold when I was there, and I refuse to let anyone do so now! We’ll look back at the Old Testament and at the New Testament and the way they did it simply as a pattern for what worked, and we’ll take from that pattern and ask the Lord about His plan for today, using and patching it into the final church in a way that fits and works today, now, as He leads us.
(Jesus speaking: You in the Family tithe because I asked it of you today, not because I asked it of someone in the past. I have included these examples for your benefit, to show you that it has worked before. But you’re not bound to do it just because they did it – you’re being asked by Me to do it today! – Pars 62 –63, 11)
This is so smooth. I wonder if anybody in the Family actually realizes what is happening on this one. My Family relatives certainly hadn’t caught it when I asked them about it.
Since in the prophecy above, “David Berg” says that he has never allowed himself to be dictated to by how they did it in the Bible, and “Jesus” says that the Family tithes because he has asked them to do it, and not because they did it in the Bible, I wanted to see how this jived with past tithing initiatives.
What I have discovered is that in every instance I came across (granted, my search was not all encompassing and there could be plenty of information out there I didn’t get at), not once did Berg ever say, “this is a new day and this is the way the Lord has showed us to do it for ourselves”. No. In every instance, he based his decisions for enforcing a tithe upon the Family using the principles of the Old Testament.
Example:
David Berg: ALL WE CAN DO IS LAY DOWN GOD'S LAW & SAY, "HERE IT IS, HERE'S THE SCRIPTURAL MINIMUM!--If you are not willing to give your all, the New Testament minimum, then for God's sake at least give the Old Testament minimum of 10%, which is the absolute minimum to help support God's Work!
WHEREAS, IF WE JUST TELL THEM A FLAT OUT, THAT'S THAT, THAT'S GOD'S PLAN THAT'S [THE] BIBLE!….SO PART OF THE TEMPLE MINISTRY WAS TO CHANNEL ALL OF THIS GIVING of gifts & tithes to wherever it was most needed including the support of the temple & all of its ministers, priests & Levites--which in this case is us, WS, your today's spiritual leaders & Levites, the elders & deacons of our modern church.
SO IT IS TO TODAY'S TEMPLE MINISTERS, WS, THAT YOUR TITHES MUST BE GIVEN. So, the value of any such material gifts could be estimated, & if you are unable to pay the cash value of the 10% tithe, you might consider selling enough of it to do so, if WS cannot find a place to use the goods. – Pars. 84, 106, 135 & 138 TITHING & THE FN! DFO928 7/80)
Like I explained earlier, complaining about the tithe is nothing new in the Family – you can find references to that all the way back in the 70’s. But what, apparently, has never come up before, is someone challenging the Biblical principles of tithing. So what we have here is a case of Family leadership going back to research the Bible on the subject and realizing that the Biblical notion of tithing is not quite the same as what they’d had in mind.
For 30 years, the Family has been tithing because “the Bible said so” & Berg required it of them because “the Bible said so” NOT because, “this is what Jesus has asked us to do in this day and age”. Now that this Biblical principle is challenged, boom, bang, they are tithing because “Jesus said so” and they are doing what Jesus has led them to do in this new day and age and it has nothing to do with what the Bible says or does not say. There is no evolution of this change found in the publications. Until this GN was published, the principles of tithing in the Family have ALWAYS been based on Biblical references.
The above quotes from “Jesus” that originated this line of thought also set precedent to the fact that the Family is no longer basing its belief system on the Bible. For people who call themselves Christians, this is extremely dangerous and should send off a whopper of an alarm bell, as it means, quite literally, that the previous foundation upon which their belief system is based is now defunct & can be replaced at the whim of the group leaders. Although this has been obvious for years from reading the Family publications, this is the first time I have personally seen in print a case of, “who cares what the Bible says, this is the way God told us to do it today”.
There is no longer any standard to go back to. It opens a Pandora’s box of possibilities and problems. While my faith in the Bible may be less than complete, I have a lot more trust in the veracity of what is contained in the Biblical texts, which have been passed down for at least 2000 years, than I do for those coming from Maria’s household. Remove the standard and all you have left is what Maria and Peter say. If this doesn’t scream CULT, I don’t know what does.
11. A whole big spot for comic relief: (Dad speaking: Some people have been circulating questions about tithing – whether it’s scriptural, and even it if is, if it isn’t just an Old Testament practice that doesn’t carry over to the New Testament….Now when I say, “some people” have been circulating questions, I mean ex-members in this case – and not just ex-members, but enemies who would like to tear down the family by destroying your faith. So they don’t write to Mama and Peter and others of your leadership, but they go around sowing their little doubts, murmurs, critical thoughts and skepticisms wherever else they can, in any receptive ear or e-mail box, including yours! I don’t mind legitimate questions, and neither do Mama or Peter – we welcome them, including those from you who’ve asked about our financial setup. But the type of questions that are designed to sow doubt and discord and attack the work are an abomination to God and to me. If people have questions, they should ask, but they should ask the right people! – Pars 79-81)