It’s official, so long Scouts

My hope is that the replacement program is appropriate for our young people wherever they are and that it’s not just more indoctrination.

My hope is that this isn’t used as an excuse to slash funding for youth. As I understand it, scouting cost the church money and inflated the budgets for the YM program. There are several directions they could take. Bank the savings or reinvest in the youth.

In the past we’ve talked about the imbalance in funding between the YM and YW programs. I think scouting had a lot to do with that. I sincerely hope that they fund both programs equally, or just combine the programs, fund it as one entity, and make all the activities that cost money open to all youth. Rather than send the funds that would have gone towards scouting to the coffers, reinvest that money in the youth.

The indoctrination meetings are cheap. They are also boring. Please, please, please don’t make the church as anemic for the youth as it is for the adults.

I agree Nibbler, and that’s part of my concern. Scouting is expensive and as you note YM budgets were always way more than YW budgets because of Scouting. I’m actually fine with the church as a whole keeping all the money spent on Scout registration in the vault because that doesn’t affect local units directly anyway and it was money we never saw. On the other hand, if they also gave that money to local units we would be spending much more on youth as a whole than we had in the past. It would be grossly unfair now (in 2020) if the spending on YM was any different than the spending on YW at the local level.

I’d also hope to see many more “joint” activities, perhaps even a merging of YM/YW into one program. There were some major changes to YW camp this year (such as elimination of the camping certification stuff). I really hope YW camp doesn’t go away (even though it is indoctrinating), but will there now (2020) also be YM camp? It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out.

Dande, I think they’ll build on what’s already there and still being implemented (rather poorly from my point of view).

Ugh, I hated the “Duty to God” award. It felt like a “poor-man’s” Eagle.

Other churches have had Scout like programs for years. And it comes back to Scouting not working everywhere or for every boy, which has always been a problem in the church.

I belonged to a Methodist BS troop. There was zero expectation that every boy of age in the Methodist church participate in the troop they sponsored. In fact the association was pretty loose. The Methodist church was just in a sponsor role. I’m pretty sure the troop leaders weren’t even members of the Methodist church.

But that’s our church for you. Programs aren’t really seen as there for people that are interested, there’s a cultural expectation that everyone participate in our programs. As such it probably is best that the church not sponsor a troop, since we tend to create those sorts of expectations.

I’ll also say that it’s funny to see the celebrations of the news on social media. I can’t help but wonder – if that’s the way many felt about the scouting program in the church, why did they need HQ’s permission to stop participating? That obligation we feel to participate in all programs.

The responses from members that really bother me in this regard is 1) RMN had a revelation to make this change and that 2) the church is taking a moral stand.

This says more about the narratives of the individuals making those statements that it does about the change itself but it still bothers me.

I will miss many parts of Boy Scouts, others not so much. I do think camping, hiking, being away from mom and dad, and learning outdoorsy stuff is important for youth. I hope physical activity and outdoors plays a non-trivial role in the new programs – both for boys and girls. Heaven knows we need less screen time. The boys were almost forced to do monthly campouts and frankly I think it would be helpful for girls to do the same.

I must get this off my chest – I’m annoyed by the many proclamations of loyalty to the BSA over the last few years. We had the General YM president visit our stake last year and he said our relationship with BSA is strong and we’re not going anywhere. I very much felt church HQ wasn’t being transparent or consistent regarding boy scouts.

That being said, I’m thrilled that there may be more equality between YM and YW. Two thumbs up for that.

But isn’t it a moral stand?

For one, the gentleman that told me that the church needed to take a moral stand on the issue also told me that things started to go downhill for him as a scoutmaster when the church hierarchy told him to start accepting non-members into his scout troop. I found it ironic that this man had very strong convictions about morals but apparently had no compunctions about excluding non-church members.

However, I do not think that any “moral stand” factored vey heavily into the church’s decision.

The boy scouts allows the chartering organization to make determinations on Gay leaders and gender inclusion. Therefore, if the church continued with BSA then it could continue to run things business as usual. There would be no co-ed campouts in LDS troops.

I do believe that the reasons for the parting of ways are business reasons. This is actually basically what has been said by the church in the official statement – that the church needs a program that will adapt to member needs in other countries & that will be less expensive.

It is my opinion that most of the decisions made in the church are business decisions.