FACEBOOK COMMENTS SPUR MASSIVE CHANGES IN LDS CHURCH

After this is sold, it will be 
the Central Building in New Disney DC Theme Park

Salt Lake City, UT—Recent Facebook comments about stipends paid to church leaders have led to massive structural changes in the Mormon church.

“The Church is happy to announce,” said spokesperson Andrew Kanell, “that in response to comments on social media highlighting how the current church differs from the one in the Book of Mormon or the Jesus movement in the New Testament, the church is making massive changes to make it fit those distant cultural contexts.”

The most damning social media comments highlight how Jesus’ original disciples traveled and taught “without purse or scrip.” Even though those teachers worked in a culture that placed a very high priority on hospitality norms and the proper treatment of strangers, norms that are non-existent if not nonsensical now, the church has decided that every member must travel and teach without purse or script.

“The scriptures say it, and we know that God doesn’t change or add or modify His commands ever, ever, ever, so we are getting rid of the entire missionary program as it stands,” explained Kanell. “From now on, if a young person wishes to go on a mission, that person should find a wise patriarch, ask for a blessing and anointing, and then go wherever the Spirit leads.”

Kanell followed up with, “you know, how could that go wrong?”

Church leaders who were previously getting stipends to cover living expenses and travel will no longer receive them. Most will now travel by foot, when and where they can, preaching spontaneously and, one would expect, in a rather limited geographical range.

“The church is also divesting itself of all resources and infrastructure, all of which will be sold and the proceeds given to the poor,” continued Kanell. “As the church will dismantle its humanitarian program, there is no plan for how to give it to the poor, so we’ll just pass the money around to whatever poor people we happen to come across instead of the large-scale and systematic program we used previously.”

Kanell announced that with the selling of churches, bishop storehouses, temples, schools, universities, and all other “infrastructure that does not match what a traveling preacher encountered two thousand years ago,” the church will shift from a world-wide organization with manuals, meetings, books, translations, choirs, and congregations “to an individual-, home-, family-, or tribe-based, lose organization of believers who will quickly develop widely divergent practices, norms, standards, and eventually beliefs.”

“We thank the many Facebook commenters,” concluded Kanell, “for showing us the error of having a twentieth or twenty-first-century organization to meet modern needs and demands. God bless you for shaming us into the truth of our wicked ways and God bless us as we become a pre-industrial belief group!”

With those words, Kanell lost his job and asked reporters from Zion’s finest news source if he could eat with them tonight.