General Handbook.

[Anonymous]

I had a quick read of a part of the handbook, and there is one change that I think is very positive — hometeaching program. This section appears to have been improved significantly. If my cursory read is accurate, there is a section on how to adapt home teaching to local needs — like when you can’t visit the home. There are provisions that you don’t have to go necessarily be in the home to reach out to the family (and I assume, count the family as home taught) . You can use a letter or a phone call as hometeaching if the family in question warrants it. Also, you can consider RS visits when trying to visit the home of every member. They do say such adaptations should be temporary, however, presumably to provide units with something to aspire to — the gold standard of in-house visits. However, there appears to be recognition that changes are necessary to how we administer/record home teaching — something I felt was urgently needed to save the home teaching program.

I think this part is a huge improvement — and practical too — as it recognizes that sometimes, the best thing for the progress of a family is to just provide minimal contact, if that’s what they want. I think if this had’ve been the policy when I was a leader, I would have been far less frustrated. At one point in my stint as a priesthood leader, I counted home teaching effort on the basis described in the new CHI, and it came out to 95%. The remaining 5% were families we hadn’t yet contacted that had shown up new on our records, or families I felt we could have assigned home teachers, but didn’t get to it fast enough.

Now, there is a tightening of the role of missionaries. There was a “balanced effort” program a while ago where you could take missionaries hometeaching with you and call it a split. This only occurs with Mission President approval, I believe.

But overall, I think these are positive and realistic changes that would make me much more agreeable to being a leader in the future.

They have implications for the MLS system though — the need to integrate RS and Priesthood home/visiting, and potentially, the need to distinguish between phone/letter contacts and and home visits in the priesthood reports.

Hopefully I’m not reading too much into this, but it strikes me as very positive steps toward a kinder, gentler, more motivating approach to home teaching. Almost makes me want to slide back into leadershp again now that they’ve stopped with harping on an impossible goal that holds priesthood leaders accountable for the choices of the people in their flock.

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