Introduction

In 2009 a decision was taken to produce a book to celebrate Professor J.R. Hinnells’ 70th birthday: a Festschrift, a collection of writings in honor of this renowned Zoroastrian scholar. In the event the book was never published although many scholars from all over the world, sent writings to be included in the Festschrift. The scholars included Jamsheed J Choksy, George Chryssides, Lance Cousins, Ron Geaves, Richard Gombrich, Richard Gordon, Marcia Hermansen, Almut Hintze, Firoze Kotwal, G.M. T. Mehta, Jesse Palsetia, Ken Parry, Shaul Shaked, Sarah Stewart, and Alan Williams. The papers were published elsewhere but not as a collection. The writing given below is one of the contributions.

The Mission Statements of the WZO and ZTFE organizations and their members’ attitudes’ to their religious practices and beliefs.

The brief for this Festschrift according to the invitation issued by Dr. A. Hintze and Dr. A. Williams, is to look at ‘Holy Wealth: accounting for This World and The Next in Religious Belief and Practice’ and that Zoroastrianism ‘having begun with an ethos of protection of ‘the poor’ and a definition of divinity as ‘incremental’ (spenta), and which developed an elaborate eschatological system of accountancy of spiritual and moral debit and credit’.1 Thus, I am interpreting the brief to look at the two main Zoroastrian organizations in the UK, the World Zoroastrian Organization, WZO, and Zoroastrian Trust Funds of Europe, ZTFE, their mission statements, especially with regard to charity, and the attitudes of the members, as a group, of the two organizations to their Zoroastrian religious beliefs and practice.