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One thing I consider wearing about our church experience is the fact that change comes so slowly. Even in industry, when I’ve had bosses with terrible programs or initiatives, they last anywhere from a couple months to a couple years, at which point someone new comes in and cancels it, alters it, or makes it better. Or the person who conceived it realizes it wasn’t a good idea based on feedack from their stewardship or the data. But in our church, change like this is rare, So when it happens, it’s a big, big deal. Like the home teaching program change.
I think it’s due to the claim of inspiration about just about everything conceived at the top of the food chain, coupled with a gerontocracy that is fiercely loyal to our history and past prophets.
And then, it would be interesting to see over the course of modern church history, how much time the prophet spends sick and unable to function, leaving the membership without their prophet to lead them — instead an acting president.
Do you think it’s wise that we have a gerontocracy given the slowness of change, and how it can actually hurt our overall experience? How it can hurt our mission to have programs that stay in place for decades and decades when it’s clear they aren’t working as planned? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this approach? Wouldn’t it be better to have terms for all positions?
For the record, I believe progress is often slow, and never linear. I’m very suspicious of anyone who promises quick change, let alone implementing it. Gerontocracy (Oligarchy)Pros:
-Religion is founded upon consistency and certainty in an ever-changing universe.
-Most of the active membership absolutely loves and adores Church leadership.
-A life-long calling leads to greater camaraderie between the board.
-Allows the leader time to implement change and see his goals and vision to fruition.
-Most change a leader enacts will take 10+ years to come to fruition.
Cons:
-A leader with unfavorable policies will have longer to enact them, and will be harder to undo.
-Health failings can inhibit leadership from their ability to act.
-Old age often impairs mental faculties, and is generally marked by large doses of medication, with all sorts of side effects.
-Major events later life (grandkids, death of a spouse, etc) will come into conflict with the roles of leadership.
Terms (Democracy?)Pros:
-Quicker change?
-Position given according to current ability
-Unfavorable leadership can do less damage
-Tends to align more with the current views of the membership.
Cons:
-Increases position envy and shame (already a major problem in the Church)
-Allows greater criticism of leadership.
-“Tyranny of the Majority”
-Forcing a change in leadership, due to term limits, can come at an inopportune time, which can make certain situations worse. While is true with death or disease, a term would cause this to happen more often.
-Inability to see long term goals through to fruition. Rapid change in leadership will frustrate long term goals.
-Will lead to a greater emphasis on quick, dramatic, revolutionary change, which more often than not, is devastating.
I remember when GBH was asked about this on Larry King. He basically extolled many of the virtues from Dande’s list without covering the negatives. This is something that is deeply entrenched and unlikely to change. both because of the difficulty to enact the change and the lack of will to do so.
The one modification that I would hope for is that Q15 members could go into emeritus status when their health declines to the point where they can no longer function productively within the quorum.
Roy wrote:
The one modification that I would hope for is that Q15 members could go into emeritus status when their health declines to the point where they can no longer function productively within the quorum.
I was thinking a three year term or something. Not a democratic approach to succession in the presidency – we can still use the seniority method, but we aren’t locked into one prophet for his lifetime, even when he’s sick. Same with the Apostle positions. They already do this with the other GA quorums. It would lead to a dynamic, ever changing church that would likely spruce things up a bit.
I think this will change, but it probably not until after I am 6 feet under (which I estimate to be about 20-30 years). We have had the first step recently, when one of the apostles (Elder Haight, maybe?) was ill enough that there was an announcement acknowledging that he no longer was functioning in his calling. I can see retirement for mental incapacity happening, although I certainly can’t guarantee it. I’m not sure I will live to see retirement for physical issues but good mental capacity. I also think it’s kind of unfair to the person who is sick to have to still carry the burden, even if they aren’t functioning. I remember how I felt when I was HPGL and was burnt out. I wanted official release from my situation. I think the person would be relieved if they have terminal cancer or something that makes it impossible for them to continue. Even Steve Jobs told the Board of Apple when he’d had enough and couldn’t do it anymore — notwithstanding his celebrity status, passion for technology etcetera. It’s symptomatic of a church with a very hard culture when it comes to its “volunteers” — although I know that the top GA’s are all paid.
I wonder how the members of the Quorum of the Twelve feel about it? If I had to guess, I have a feeling that they are fine with the lifelong calling, illness and stress notwithstanding. My guess is that individuals called to the upper echelons of leadership tend to be workaholics by nature and being an Apostle must be one of the best ways to stay very busy during your golden years. Wasn’t it Elder Perry who told the story about selecting a house to live in when he was younger? I think he sat down with his children and said (because of the relative distances of the houses they were looking at): “you can have a house or a father.” He was surprised when they chose the house, saying “Well, you’re not around that much anyway.” My own father (who is long retired) will from time to time say to me a bit wistfully “I wish I was going to work today…” (He wasn’t around much during my childhood either) A reference to Elder Perry’s story can be found here:
http://media.ldscdn.org/pdf/magazines/ensign-july-2015/2015-07-00-in-memoriam-elder-l-tom-perry-eng.pdf I’ve been watching The Americans, the series about a married couple who are KGB spies in the 1980s. The show has just entered the Gorbachev era of Glasnost (transparency). It’s been interesting in my mind to think of the parallels to church leadership. Because the USSR was an oligarchy (and aside from church leadership the only oligarchy I knew existed), when we covered that unit in social studies when I was in high school, I concluded “Oh, church leadership is like the USSR.” Well, what happened when someone relatively young and focused on democracy and transparency entered the picture? The end of the USSR. There’s no longer an oligarchy. Now it’s a bunch of small “democracies.” Gorbachev ended up ruling nothing and then Yeltsin was able to end up in power and now Putin. Yet, in the west we would say that the breakup of the USSR, the wall coming down, the formation of all these “democracies,” was probably a good thing (even if these smaller “democracies” are often just as corrupt, maybe worse). There’s no more arms race, no cold war, no iron curtain.
If you go with terms, you lose that control and you create more transparency. I am 100% convinced top leaders want to stay “relevant” and in charge. I’m also concerned that the longer we go with an increasingly old gerontocracy, the less relevant we are becoming to those not aged 60+.
hawkgrrrl wrote:
I I’m also concerned that the longer we go with an increasingly old gerontocracy, the less relevant we are becoming to those not aged 60+.
Where I see this is in the use of technology and teaching. A few years ago they came out with this new youth curriculum. It was presented in our Ward by the Stake as a marvelous, revelatory tribute to how advanced we were as a church that teaches youth. How we interact with them, how we are not scripted into a one-way conversation of teaching, and how we used technology to deliver our course materials.
The problem is, I’d been doing this techniques as a full time teacher for over 20 years (interactive) and 10 years (technology to deliver course materials). I sat there stunned that people felt this was a sign the church was “with it”. To me, that is an example of what happens when you get people at the top who aren’t socialized into the technology and methods of the time.
I wonder, too, do these elderly people really want to hang on to power until they die as Hawk suggests? Don’t they also get tired of the same old thing? Even if they are workaholic types like Gerald suggested? I remember JR Holland once complained in a joint PH-RS meeting in our stake about how we think we have religion because we have meetings. He said he didn’t agree, and that meetings were all he had to look forward to for the rest of his life. It was an Apostle complaining about having to attend meetings for the rest of his life!
An Apostle complaining about his job? He didn’t particularly enjoy meetings, from his comments –that’s for sure. Wouldn’t they too enjoy retirement and freedom from the often one-dimensional experience of being a church member/leader, even at their level?
To (over) extend the cold war analogy, you are not generally going to get shot at if you stay on one side of the wall or the other. But when you are not fully in (TBM) and you try to stay a bit in the middle ground between the two walls, it can be an uncomfortable place to be. What causes the wall to come down in the end? An ideal leadership should be mixed in age. The gerontocracy does lend itself to stability. I went to a talk on Quakers once and much as I admire them, it was obvious that at a lot of points they had been following the cause du jour.
Ironically one of the worst examples of cause du jour in the church was Ezra Taft Benson whose McCarthyite leaning fitted right in with the Cold War and could claim a sort of victory when the Iron Curtain fell.
I agree with SamBee that mixed ages would yield the best results, provided that seniority doesn’t rule. Funny, I just heard some old guy talking about the benefit of combining a group of old guys with a group of young guys and they said something like, “all ages and backgrounds [would] benefit from the perspective and experience of one another and of those in different stages of life.” The guy went on to say how the older group shouldn’t just take over the younger group, how the young and old should work side by side.
Now if I could just remember where I heard it.
😆 😆 😆 😆
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