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It was a Ward in Ontario Canada, which no longer exists as it was structured back then. The other Bishop that had these more liberal ideas was a former Stake and Regional Respresentative, if that title exists anymore. One was an educator, the other a supervisor in a manufacturing facility. The educator trained the supervisor, so that may have been the reason for such continuity of creativity from Bishop to Bishop. Further, the SP was very hands-off, so these people had a pretty free hand; the focus seemed to be on fellowship, caring for each other, and doing good — not on Church programs and metrics. Perhaps it was bad management and great inspired leaders; I don’t know. Funny, at the time, I thought these guys were out in left field, although I welcomed the lack of “uptightness” they brought to the Mormon experience, and participated wholeheartedly in it. Now, I think they were bang-on in putting the people out in the forefront.
It’s taken me 20 years to catch up to them.
If you’re from Milton, Ontario, you probably have learned that the closer you get to Toronto, the looser the administration became back in the 90’s; don’t know what the status is now.
By the way, Thomas S. Monson came as an apostle and rebuked the whole Stake priesthood body for taking their wives home teaching. He talked about how we had had a “divergence from Church governance” here, and that we should not “leave those prospective elders at home”. So, while it was a bit of a haven for some of us, I think our SP got a bit beaten up over that one. Being rebuked by an apostle is never much fun. We also had the same problem with Boyd K. Packer. At a regional meeting, he stopped his talk and said “You’re NOT REVERENT!!!!”.
Now, the meeting was held in a huge football standium — absolutely gigantic, and it was actually hard to hear everyone, so I don’t blame the membership, with their babies and kids who were probably bored out of their skulls and confined to a small area….and that led to a month of talks on reverence in our meetings and people commenting how ashamed they were to have been rebuked by an Apostle of the Lord. Funny, the noise didn’t subside for long after his rebuke.
The good news is that they discontinued regional conferences shortly after that. I think they realized they involved a lot of travel, a lot of trouble in parking, and the experience wasn’t uber-spiritual either.
Back in the olden days, when I did home teaching, there were a couple of families where I took my Golden Retriever as my companion. I wonder what the leadership would say if they knew that. There is one family that stills remembers those visits & liked it because they had small children. They would listen better when the lesson involved Molly. Plus, our dog was very friendly.
SD, My Milton is in the US. If you want to know where send me a PM.
Mike from Milton.
ps. Sometimes it’s better to ask forgiveness then it is to ask permission.
red1988 wrote:…I am wondering what you all think of the one step in repentance that says, “(depending on the sin) you need to confess to a priesthood leader.”
…I am not even sure I understand why the church tells people they should confess to priesthood leaders.My husband says that we do it for spiritual guidance and healing, but I really do not see it that way. It just seems like a shame and humiliation step…Personally, I think confessing supposed sins to priesthood leaders is usually a bad idea. It looks like the general idea behind confession and exaggerated guilt-trips like “The Miracle of Forgiveness” is basically that feeling terrible about “sins” is supposedly an important part of real repentance and theoretically the worse you feel about it the less likely you will be to repeat the same “sin” again so then you will hopefully be permanently cured and the painful repentance process will supposedly end up being worth it.
The problem is that it doesn’t always work that way especially with something as common as pre-marital sex. In this case, trying to pile on the guilt and shame will not necessarily prevent or even reduce the non-approved behavior that much overall. My guess is that this harsh and judgmental approach is just as likely to result in many members either feeling discouraged and worried that they can never be fully forgiven or losing confidence in the Church because they already don’t believe this is half as serious as the Church continues to act like it is.
Quote:Personally, I think confessing supposed sins to priesthood leaders is usually a bad idea. It looks like the general idea behind confession and exaggerated guilt-trips like “The Miracle of Forgiveness” is basically that feeling terrible about “sins” is supposedly an important part of real repentance and theoretically the worse you feel about it the less likely you will be to repeat the same “sin” again so then you will hopefully be permanently cured and the painful repentance process will supposedly end up being worth it.
I may be wrong, but from what I understand about current research is the more negative we feel about mistakes me make the more likelihood we have of repeating those mistakes over and over again. When I stopped caring so much about the “protocol” for repentance and just did the best I could I realized I was struggling less and less with things and was happier. I really believe in this therapy called Acceptance Commitment Therapy which has a lot of research backing it up. The more we focus on a problem the more we will probably dig ourselves in a hole. When we live what we value and focus on living life our problems tend to disappear.
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