Recently attended a special assembly day.
Guest speaker was Thomas Chicky, a member of the US branch committee and the head of the US LDC (which has replaced the RBCs).
The last talk of the day is scheduled for an hour. It was the usual boring mumbo-jumbo. He appeared to have blasted through his hour-long outline in just about 45 minutes, so he "treated" us to informal comments on recent developments.
He commented on the new WT complex in Fishkill NY.
Then he dropped the bomb (well, to anyone with ears and at least 2 functioning synapses).
The following is not a word for quote, but presents the gist of his comments:
"We're not going to be building a thousand Kingdom Halls in the US. We don't need hundreds of new ones. We have about 6,200 Kingdom Halls in the US branch territory. We're going to work with what we have. Some of these buildings are 30 or 40 years old, so we'll be doing some renovation. Oh, we'll occasionally build a new Kingdom Hall, but we don't need very many of those."
[Cue sound of phonograph needle scratching across the record]
Wait a minute!
Less than 3 years ago, there was introduced the new arrangement for financing Kingdom Hall construction.
The WT sent out teams to present a dog & pony slide show to elders, all across the USA, explaining how desperately new Kingdom Halls were needed. There were maps, pinpoints, hotspots, highlighting the dozens of areas in the USA where hundreds of new Kingdom Halls were desperately needed.
This presentation was used to justify the new arrangement where KH loans were "forgiven", replaced by perpetual monthly contributions equal to or exceeding the loan's monthly payments. Plus similar amounts demanded from all other congregations not even paying off a loan.
There are about 14,000 congregations in the USA. If we make a conservative estimate that each one contributes $500 per month to this new arrangement (most congregations send in more, I'm quite sure) that would be $7 million per month, $84 million per year in funds dedicated to KH construction. Since the program was implemented, that would be nearly a quarter of a billion (with a "B") collected.
That's just the United States. And that ignores the 10's or 100's of millions additionally collected when the program was introduced, and congregations were "strongly encouraged" to drain their savings accounts and send the excess of a few thousand to Bethel to help fund this program.
So it's not hard to imagine that many 100's of millions, maybe, worldwide, over a billion dollars collected in 3 years.
And now, we get the LDC chief saying" oh, we're not going to be building many Kingdom Halls. We're going to work with what we already have"?
$Hundreds of millions collected for the putative reason of a "desperate need for new Kingdom Halls". And now "oh, we won't be building much after all."
Un-frigging-believable.
And no one, out of the 2000+ in attendance, even seemed to notice.