The Church and Scouting

Faith in God, in my mind, is “scouting” for girls before they get into the Church’s YW program. They don’t have Cub Scouts, or an equal. I really wish the Church would also do Girl Scouts, but the Girl Scout charters don’t allow the sponsoring organization to have complete control over appointing troop leaders. That is probably one of the biggest reasons, in my opinion, the LDS Church doesn’t have Girl Scout troops (we can’t completely control who the leaders are).

I’ve been in the Church scouting program as a leader for several years. Here’s my opinion — our Church is very good at it in some ways, and very lame in many other ways. We’re good because we have a steady supply of new boys to fill troops, and are very organized. We don’t follow a lot of the great programs and systems put in place by Scouting though (outside the Church). A big downfall IMO is that leaders are “called” to the positions, often having no interest in the program, but feeling like they must fill callings to be a good member. This leads to REALLY lame programs sometimes, with little enthusiasm, with leaders who do very little training or preparation, and who don’t really want to be there. The boys pick up on this. My boys loved scouting when we had some dedicated and enthusiastic leaders (I was also involved). My boys stopped going when those men were moved to other callings, and it all devolved to “ok, what do you boys want to do tonight for scouts? play basketball again?” My boys are not really into sports. I couldn’t argue with them and push them to go when they complained about “just playing basketball again…”

Another big problem is fund raising. Outside troops do a lot of this, and can have very fun and exciting programs when they are successful. Our Church does it all on a shoe string budget, and allows almost no outside fund raising. I have also run into a LOT of problems implementing the programs in a smaller ward like mine, when the leaders insist that everything has to work just like the Salt Lake manual describes it (which seems to assume a huge ward with dozens of active boys in every age bracket). I couldn’t get permission to have the 11 year old scout patrol meet and participate with the 12-14 year scouts (which was a larger group in the ward with maybe 7 or 8 active boys). I had only 1 or 2 boys and quite frankly, it was just plain awkward. In outside scouting, the older boys are supposed to mentor and lead the younger boys (part of leadership development). But the 11 yr old boys were still in Primary, and they couldn’t mix with “priesthood” yet.

So like I said. The Church does a great job of supporting Scouting. Our particular style or implementation sometimes breaks down at times. All-in-all, I think Scouting is a great program for young men. It can be done VERY well, and it can be adapted to keep the interest of boys, and stay relevant and be “cool.” I personally think it takes a little stepping outside the box to do that though.

In my opinion, scouting is a somewhat effective organization to provide activities (merit badges) in an organized way that the youth leaders can use to teach many values that benefit any youth growing up.

Remember, the Catholic church is a greater supporter of BSA than the LDS church, right? So other churches see the value as well.

To me, it is just a program … and since it is already there, why should the church reinvent the wheel? It does teach faith in God. However, it doesn’t go far enough into spirituality and Aaronic Priesthood purposes, so DTG was developed and the Young Women Personal Progress programs were developed to fill the gaps where Scouts couldn’t be used.

I also think the church leaders are smart, and want contingency plans, so they aren’t beholden to an outside group like BSA…so we can send a message that we’d like to participate in BSA for our young men…but if they start going in a direction we can’t tolerate…we can also pull out and be resourceful enough as a group to take DTG to the next level and replace scouting. I think BSA needs the LDS church and its support, so it becomes political at a high level to get funding.

I don’t think we’ve needed to replace scouting yet. But the contingency plan is there.

I don’t have a problem with the church using Scouts as a program. But I have not enjoyed the way some leaders try to push the Eagle Award on some boys. The purpose is to develop great young men…whether or not they become Eagle is irrelevant to me, and I think to most of society now. It isn’t really an honored achievement like it used to be, I don’t think.