Can anyone explain what the Ministry Program is?

My ward treats it like home teaching without a lesson. Ministering has become one of my bishop’s projects. Every few months, he’s up at the pulpit stressing how important it is we do ministering interviews. He uses it as a way to keep tabs on the welfare of the ward.

The most interesting way I’ve seen of doing ministering was in a married student ward. Rather than being assigned people to minister to, everyone signed up to be in a “ministering group” of about 6 couples. Each month, they were supposed to all meet together to do something, with each couple hosting about twice a year. Each group also received I think $20 every month from the bishopric that was to cover the costs of activities.

So to answer your question, as far as I can tell, ministering is whatever the ward makes of it.

I agree 100% with SD.

In my ward I have quarterly interviews on the subject of my ministering visits. I don’t really do any ministering to my assigned families so there is never really anything to report but I still go to the interview because I’m trying to be helpful.

My assumption is the relaxed, get away from checklists and define it yourself program is Salt Lake’s attempt at keeping a uniform program, while having something adaptable to accommodate a wide array of needs across the world. Not everyone needs a lesson out of the Ensign every month. But someone may need their lawn mowed or to get a ride to church. Or someone just saying, “Hi, how are you?”

I’d like to see a relaxed approach taken for more things. Focusing on checklists and do’s and don’ts is a good way to miss the forest for the trees.

I my area the ministering program was initially HT/VT lite.

I’m still not 100% convinced that we’ve paired the language used to describe ministering with the practice. I think it’s meant to discover people’s actual needs and to help them meet those needs. The program is kind of the same as it was before though, at least in my experience, where we assume what people’s needs are (or project them onto them) and then minister to that instead.

Example:

I need a friend.

Ministers show up and they’re primarily concerned with how my family is doing with prayers, reading the BoM, attending the temple, etc.

Those aren’t my needs. I needed a friend.

But that’s what the ministering program is on autopilot to do. People need to be doing the reading, praying, temple thing so we’ll urge them along that path but the language we use to talk about ministering truly is discover people’s actual need, and help them meet those needs.

That’s all theory. In practice I found that with HT/VT that we’d sometimes get visits and sometimes do them. There was that monthly guilt to contend with and that drove a lot of the visiting effort. The ministering program removed some of that guilt, some of the driving force behind the visits went away, so the visits declined significantly.

Everyone is unique, I’m an 11 out of 10 on the introvert scale. For me not having to receive a visit or not having to do visits is ministering to my needs.

I read an estimate that between 25-40% of people are introverts. Introverts probably want to avoid visits and assigned relationships. When 25-40% of your group would prefer not to visit or have assigned relationships it’s going to be hard to make a program work when it has to include everyone.

Some people need visits as a part of their ministry, others do not. I guess it’s too hard to survey ward members to ask people if they prefer visits or no visits and then group all the visit people together to do visits within their group.

When real needs arise we could do what other churches do, phone networks to get the word out, but it’s not a monthly or quarterly manufactured thing.