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There are two broad issues with this topic: The “what” (slide content) and the “how” (info gathering AND response). I have dealt only with the “what” in my comments, since there is no way to know the gathering method and since I agree the response was ham-handed. Honestly, I don’t think the “how” is a productive discussion – but we are free to discuss it here. As to the “what”, based on Nibbler’s description of the slide, I think it would be good to examine and discuss that.
How would we identify and rank the core issues that are listed on the slide?
What would we add or delete from the slide list(s) – especially of we had to identify only the same number of issues?
In other words, if we were the ones giving the presentation, what would we include?
Etc.
Finally, I think it is fascinating and instructive that there is a “far left” AND a “far right” category – and that they appear to be given equal weight and attention. It shows they are just as concerned about the fundamentalists in the Church as they are about the progressive discontent.
Hey, I know it’s my corporate background here, but why not do exit surveys? If they really want to know why people are leaving, why not do the actual R&D with people who left? Pull them in for focus groups even. Now, the downside is that you only get the chatty ones, not the ones who leave quietly, and you also get some self-reporting issues. But if you had a non-LDS research group conducting the exit research you might get some real answers. Honestly, I think the church could solve a lot of its “how” problems with external non-LDS consultants. There’s way too much expectation to kiss the ring inside the church for those who work for the church to be open and honest about things if their views (or the data) contradict the perceived party line. External consultants are able to be more truthful without fear of reprisal. About two of the circles: Pornography – I think most men in the church and many women in the church struggle with this on and off, but I don’t know that it drives people away. I suspect more that people just accept it and hide it. I’ve stopped worrying about it so much and have given up – I watch rated R movies (and Game of Thrones
:thumbup: ) when the topic interests me. The church is good about talking about this frequently, but bad at addressing it effectively.Sabbath – this is the commandment that I suspect many members feel they can break without seriously jeopardizing their eternal salvation? Chastity – you might as well kill someone and the wife and kids will hate you and leave you. Word of Wisdom – even coffee / tea is off limits, let alone getting a little buzz. Taking the boat out on Sunday or going to an amusement park? Not a big deal.
Breaking the Sabbath is my Achilles Heal. If I go inactive that will be the first commandment I break without feeling guilty. I look around me at people with actual 2 day weekends and I feel alternately angry / smothered by my church.
hawkgrrrl wrote:why not do exit surveys?
I’m guessing they do some of that…but I’m also guessing there is an interesting dynamic with church, different from corporate. Church isn’t trying to just meet demand of consumers. Church is biased to an idea they know more (enlightened, revelation, etc) and those that leave are darkened (loss of clear thought), and so…there is a bit of an idea that the church leaders, especially those with keys, know more about why they are leaving then the people who are actually leaving.
Just a guess.
mom3 wrote:Quote:not wanting to strictly observe the Sabbath day
I’d laugh at this one if it wasn’t so true….[snip]
So for any of you wondering what happened to me, it all began with bike riding. Case closed.
The powerpoint was shown in my stake conference a few weeks ago.
The story was that the Q15 spent many meetings discussing the fact people were leaving the church, and after much prayer and study got all the GA’s together to present the material that should be spread to the stakes of zion…with the main message being…”Keep the sabbath day holy”. The GA presenting this to us admitted that he was nodding, saying “ok, ok, got that…but what is the BIG REVELATION after all these meetings from those who get revelation?” He then said…
Quote:That
wasthe big revelation. That is how important the sabbath day is for all of us! I think the leaders’ view is that people need to be more committed.
I guess that was it.
:think: They are just losing brand loyalty, and they see the solution is to ask for more commitment to the brand, to go with HG’s corporate take.I’m sure there is more coming. But so far…that was the big revelation.
My family stopped at the KFC drive-thru on the way home. We probably shouldn’t have, but clearly, it didn’t inspire me.
Quote:“Keep the sabbath day holy”. The GA presenting this to us admitted that he was nodding, saying “ok, ok, got that…but what is the BIG REVELATION after all these meetings from those who get revelation?” He then said…
Poor Middle Leadership. They get pummeled from above and below.
Our Stake Leadership must have had the same presentation because last week at Ward Conference “Keep the Sabbath” was a big topic. Our Stake President stated how he grew up in the South and everyone kept the Sabbath when he was a kid. Now they don’t. They go to church, then out to brunch.
I’m sitting in my seat thinking, “When I was a kid my parents had one car, my dad walked to work. Now he doesn’t. They have two cars (or more).” You can do that with just about anything. We used to drive horse and buggies. Now we don’t. Crime still existed, poor people, rape, porn, gambling. Even moonshine.
Now for me personally – I love a Sabbath Day. The old quiet time around the house, but that’s me. My husband, even when he was active, would go stir crazy just sitting in the house wearing his Sunday best, and watching the clock tick away.
Heber13 wrote:I think the leaders’ view is that people need to be more committed.
How do you solve the problem of insomnia. Sleep more. Duh.
But I think the quoted portion reveals a potential issue. More committed to what? Attending meetings? Participating in programs? The leaders/authority? The body of Christ?
I also think the general consensus among leaders is that more is more. Youth retention problem? Crack the whip on getting them to do Young Womanhood Recognition and Duty to God… so much so they get sick of hearing about it all the time and stop wanting to come to church. I hate to say it but that describes so much of my church experience in the last 15 years, harping on something so much that I get sick of hearing about it and lose interest in going to church because I know I’ll be read the riot act from the top of the script again. The top leadership didn’t heed their own council to not have gospel hobbies. Hasten the work, sabbath day observance, likely next year there will be some other point that gets drilled into everyone through ad nauseam repetition. Mix it up a little. Have a theme of the month instead of a theme of the two years. Give people a compelling reason to stay other than an appeal to authority. I’m ranting, I’ll stop.
Why do members leave? One item not on the list (if you don’t count this as needing “something more” {how dare they!}). People that leave no longer feel the church offers them something that is relevant to their lives. I think that goes for churches in general, not just the LDS church.
Quote:Give people a compelling reason to stay other than an appeal to authority.
My serious theme would be “Go Out and Do Good.”
Jesus went about doing good. Let’s spend a year doing good. As a person, a family, a ward. Anxiously engage in Good Christ like Cause. Have all Sacrament talks be reflections on Jesus Doing Good. In Sunday classes let’s share what the Good is.
Did you fix your broken fence and improve the look of the neighborhood?
Did you hold a door open for people everyday for a week?
Did you go on a walk with a lonely person?
Can you imagine what would happen? We would need to do it for the the full two years because the transition would take some time. But dang, that’s a program I can get behind.
hawkgrrrl wrote:–
Why is “pornography” not lumped in with “chastity”?Is that evidence of poor social skills among the pornography set (pornography doesn’t require you to hold a conversation)? – The utter obsession with pornography is just not good. I’m not a fan of it either, but sheesh, are we even talking about the same thing? I’ve heard folks in Utah County refer to a billboard for Victoria’s Secret as “pornography.” Is the pornography-meter so heightened that there are hyper-sensitive people out there trashing their marriages over minor human weakness?
I suspect it’s because they view pornography as a bigger and completely different type of threat and that’s why they showed it in a bigger bubble than most of the other issues including chastity. If you think about it chastity is largely only a serious threat to typical Church members as far as leading to falling away from the Church before they go on missions and/or are married after which sex is magically changed to completely acceptable overnight as long as they don’t commit adultery; but even after members have already safely cleared these hurdles porn/nudity continues to be a threat (in Church leaders’ eyes) in that many active Church members will continue to view it occasionally which means they are already technically not living “the gospel” by LDS standards even if they continue to attend church and go through the motions otherwise. On top of that, there is this whole highly questionable theory about supposedly “losing the spirit” and it’s not even just about members leaving permanently as much as the idea that anyone not completely on board with the program supposedly needs to repent and are on a dangerous slippery slope similar to the following description from the talk, “Can ye feel so now?”
Quentin L. Cook wrote:While anything that lessens commitment is of consequence, two relevant challenges are both prevalent and significant. The first is unkindness, violence, and domestic abuse.
The second is sexual immorality and impure thoughts. These often precede and are at the root of the choice to be less committed…Sexual immorality and impure thoughts violate the standard established by the Savior…We were warned at the beginning of this dispensation that sexual immorality would be perhaps the greatest challenge. Such conduct will, without repentance, cause a spiritual drought and loss of commitment.Movies, TV, and the Internet often convey degrading messages and images…there is virtually no place on earth that cannot be impacted by salacious, immoral, and titillating images. This is one reason why pornography has become such a plague in our day. mom3 wrote:Quote:not wanting to strictly observe the Sabbath day
I’d laugh at this one if it wasn’t so true.
A few years ago my daughter dated an LDS young man who told my daughter that the reason her father had left the church was that we had taken our kids on family bike rides on Sundays. This was the seed that started it all.
So for any of you wondering what happened to me, it all began with bike riding. Case closed.
Maybe it sounds silly but I think there really is something to this. I would summarize it as, “knowing the difference.” Basically if you generally go along with what the Church asks for and expects to the point that you get used to it and it becomes a familiar routine then in many cases it seems normal and not all that difficult to tolerate. But then if you deviate from this for very long and find out that it is actually much easier and more enjoyable to not do all this then it only makes it that much harder to try to live up to the Church’s expectations even if you are open to the possibility than if you are just doing what you always have.
Church leaders like to portray this kind of thing as something supposedly wrong with the members that fall away but personally I think a better explanation is simply that it shows the limitations of who the Church is typically going to appeal to or not. In fact, I think a lot of these points could be summarized as a single point, namely that the Church currently doesn’t compete with the alternatives all that well for the average person because in so many different cases once people seriously consider or actually try out the alternatives instead of dismissing them, being afraid of them, etc. then going back is not very likely in practice.
The church authorities often say it is because people are offended by someone. The exmormon board seems to think it is mostly due to historical research.
While both play a factor, but not to the extent claimed, I think there are a number of reasons.
Most people who leave, in my experience, are new or newish members – they never get to know the church well in most cases. Another group who often leave are young adults, who are no longer under the shadow of their parents and want to do their own thing.
There are factors which are rarely if ever mentioned, which are things like – boredom/dullness, laziness (yes!)/finding it all too much, the length of meetings, the fact someone is isolated/not talked to etc etc. Our constant movement of missionaries is a mixed blessing. How many people become attached to certain missionaries and get lost when the missionaries they first knew disappear after a few weeks or months? None of these make glamorous topics for either friends or opponents of the church.
We had one guy baptized who was clearly schizophrenic. I bumped into him months after his baptism, he didn’t recognize me but he was taking an episode at the time. He got baptized, never turned up next time for confirmation. I think in his case, he wasn’t in the right space mentally to join in the first place.
With both new members and the church as an organization, there is an interesting issue as to how much attention a new member is given. Sometimes too little and they complain and sometimes too much and they complain. (For the latter, exit polls would be too much).
For the record, dullness is a major turn off for me. It’s why I rarely do conferences especially the stake variety. I have a condition that makes it uncomfortable for me to sit around for more than an hour and I have to stretch my legs. The dullness is what can drive me to my phone or tablet or to reading something else. Heber13 wrote:The powerpoint was shown in my stake conference a few weeks ago.
Seriously? Exactly which part? I’ve been trying to figure out why the leak was forced to be taken down, and this might shed some light on it.
mom3 wrote:Quote:Give people a compelling reason to stay other than an appeal to authority.
My serious theme would be “Go Out and Do Good.”
AMEN. Once I stood back just a bit I realized that most LDS church member do try and serve others. Even out here in the mission field it is generally focused on other members (are we not a great group? Why would anybody leave the support they get here?). I do even remember that some survey was done several decades ago and if I remember the 2 things that came to mind about Mormons were “Polygamy” and “take care of their own” (which is NOT what the parable of the good Samaritan was about). Now they do every once in a while break out the yellow t-shirts and show up in large numbers and that is good (even if they feel “this is a great missionary opportunity” instead of “Christian service opportunity.”)I wish people still remembered John Dehlin’s study about why Mormons leave. I think he had a really big sample size, and it highlighted faith issues as the major reason people leave — not reasons that make the person leaving out to be an apostate sinner. Here is an overview of what he found:
Key takeaway:
Quote:
Respondents of the study cited 15 “major factors” and 13 “minor factors” as reason for losing belief in the church. Among the major issues were a loss of faith in the Book of Mormon, problems with church history, loss of faith in Joseph Smith and conflicting theological issues.Factors more significant to men who were surveyed included losing faith in God/Jesus, science, anachronisms in the Book of Mormon and problems with the Book of Abraham. Issues more significant to women were the church’s stance on women, women and the priesthood, the church’s stance on homosexuals, polygamy/polyandry and abuse.
Overall “minor factors” that scored low in the study included the desire to sin or having been offended by a fellow church member.
In my case, I guess I fall into the minor factor category — my commitment crisis started when I experienced repeated leadership problems. Egocentrism about church needs above those of the people they are leading, tight-fistedness when it came to using Church resources for good, etcetera. I never asked for church resources for my personal needs, but I saw how furthering the church’s temporal interests seemed to eclipse living our values or caring for the needs of the flock. Later behavior affected my physical and mental health and when that happened, I was done with an orthodox relationship with the church.
And then this paved the way for my own lack of commitment.
The other thing that bothered me was that none of my reasons for losing my commitment to the church would “hold water” with the leadership. With a couple hundred years of history behind it, leaders have come up with an answer for EVERYTHING a person can throw at them for not being happy in the church. And these answers put fault squarely on the backs of the members. The church rarely, if ever, takes responsibility for its own mistakes and shortcomings. It’s always the members’ fault.
To compound matters, members and leaders alike think so highly of their leaders, they will simply quote the trite phrases and move on. And if you are frank about your reasons, it travels like wildfire through the priesthood ranks. There is no leader-member confidentiality when it comes to the priesthood line.
I once heard my reasons for not having a TR chastised in Stake Conference the week after I shared/trusted them with my Bishop (after 2 years of annual meetings where I kept it close to the vest before opening up to him). My exact two reasons given over the pulpit, in the order I gave them to my Bishop, with the rejoinder that if anyone has problems with those two items then “they can’t have celestial glory”. Massive empathy there, isn’t it? Let me rush to get my wallet and put all my disposable time on the altar.
I will say this, the behavior of leaders and members, repeatedly, over a period of decades accumulated to the point I personally did not think the LDS experience and claims were worth the $X,000 per year in tithing they expected from us. And that caused me to make adjustments.
The other problem is that you can give a fairly complex explanation of what led you to be unorthodox, but the leaders them boil this down to some simplistic, inaccurate reason. “He got offended”. “He doesn’t want to pay his tithing”. They don’t seem to acknowledge the many years of white knuckling and consistent, accumulated experiences that led to unorthodoxy. The human need for a short, simplistic reason that protects their own “faith” is more powerful than empathy.
And of course, there is the conditional nature of our “belonging” in the community. They tend to ostracize or marginalize people who are not fully TR’d. Do what they want, and you’re in the “in group”. Go outside of it, and you are talked about in meetings without empathy and often, with criticism.
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