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My husband tells me that the last two weeks, the third hour lesson has been on ‘hastening the work.’ I’m in Young Women, so I don’t attend Relief Society during the third hour, which is probably a good thing. I doubt I would have gotten answers to the questions I have on ‘hastening’: 1. What sort of metric are we using to measure the hastening? Are we looking for a percentage increase, or what? How will we know when we reached that goal – will it be announced in GC that we have hastened all that we need to hasten, well done everyone, now the Second Coming can occur?
2. What’s the hurry, anyway? My husband speculated that the reason for the ‘hastening’ is because there are a lot of people who have been waiting in the spirit world for a long time to have their ordinances done. But… as I am fond of saying, “the dead aren’t getting any deader,” and I don’t believe that time has the same meaning in the spirit world as it does in the mortal world. Furthermore – genealogy and temple work tend to favor those who have died more recently, since their records are more easily accessible. A person who died in the year 200 in Central America has been waiting a lot longer than a person who died in 1750 in Europe, but there are likely no written records for the former, so she has no choice to wait until the Millennium to have her work done.
There
seems to be evidenceloathebuzzwords. 😈 It has just felt to me a lot of “get busy doing stuff for the church” and not as much “Try to live like Christ and help your fellow humans that are in need of help.” But I have been rather cynical as of late, so take my comments with a few grains of salt (unless you have high blood pressure and you need to stay off the salt).
I’ve never asked the question either. I will now. Thank you. I’m almost sure that the answer will be that we take it on Faith.
As I do FH, for some reason that I can’t explain, there are some people that seem to be helping me to find them.
There are others: not so much.
I’ve thought about this question, too. Putting on my very orthodox hat, I think it has to do with the idea that the end is near and we have to get all the people we can before that happens – dead and alive. Taking the hat back off, I don’t particularly care. What else are we going to do during that thousand years of no vices? As a related side note, one of our old venerables recently passed away. He was certainly a true believer, but much more in a childlike way and not likely to ever disagree with someone in a meeting. I’m not sure he ever finished high school, but definitely had no further education. His patriarchal blessing said that he would see the second coming and he was convinced that it meant that he would be alive when it happened, although more apologetic types would point out to him that it didn’t necessarily mean he would be alive when it happened because it only said he would see it (splitting hairs as apologists tend to do IMO). Unless I’m on an island in the Pacific with the survivors of Oceanic 815, the second coming didn’t happen recently. His younger sister’s blessing says the same thing, although she does take a less literal view of it. It was apparently common at one point for patriarchs to says such things, these people are natives of the area and probably had the same patriarch all those years ago. Even though they both believe the second coming is imminent, they also aren’t particularly going about the business of hastening anything. The sister is a part time temple worker (two Saturdays a month) but they don’t make missionary referrals or do their own family’s work.
That’s all I got. Indeed, what is the hurry?
I need to get a pair of these so when I walk I am making the world a happier place 
[img]http://myhoneysplace.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/119-400×266.jpg [/img] There’s no hurry anymore. I will get to it when I have time, and perhaps, when I have evidence it’s important 🙂 My trigger phrase. 🙂 Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
― Henry David Thoreau
I’ll give my answer to your questions. They are only my answers and based on my experiences. “Hastening the work” can mean something very different to different people.
Joni wrote:1. What sort of metric are we using to measure the hastening? Are we looking for a percentage increase, or what? How will we know when we reached that goal – will it be announced in GC that we have hastened all that we need to hasten, well done everyone, now the Second Coming can occur?
The metric that the people I reported to as WML were interested in was the number of convert baptisms per missionary companionship per year. The number for the previous year was shared. We were told it wasn’t good enough. We were asked to come up with a goal for the new year. We came up with a numeric goal for the year, naturally it was a little higher than the previous year because we had just been told how the old results weren’t good enough. We were told that our new number didn’t represent “hastening the work” and we were extended the challenge of tripling the numbers from the previous year.
Religion never felt more corporate than it did on that day. Not all experiences are good ones and I’ve picked the worst to share. There were many good experiences as well but they seldom involved metrics, and you asked about metrics.
:angel: To be fair nothing approaching this was ever discussed at the local level, I always felt concern for the individual at the local level. I suspect this is the sort of thing that only leaders concern themselves with.How will we know when we reach the goal? With goals like that it’s very simple, you’ll never reach them… even when you do.
2. What’s the hurry?
Your husband and DJ gave the orthodox answers. Putting it in temporal terms, it can be like what happens when a cure if finally found during an epidemic. Hasten to disseminate the vaccine/cure/preventative measures. The quicker the measures are put in place, the more lives that are saved. That’s a rather extreme example when juxtaposed with doing missionary work but I feel the sentiment or the driving force is similar in nature. If spiritual death is a thing it makes sense to want to spread the cure.
Still, with eternity looming, it’s hard to make the case to be in a hurry.
Sometimes people face trials that are so severe that it breaks their spirit or robs them of a bit of their humanity. Sometimes all that someone is left with is the hope of a better life in the eternities. The healing that the eternities offer will eventually get here but what if there was something that could be done today to make that pain go away? What if that joy we wait on could be felt right now? Giving someone their quality of life back is something I’d love to hasten.
I don’t know where that fits with the departed. I’ll borrow from Thoreau again:
On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend’s life also, in our own, to the world.
― Henry David Thoreau
And just because I can: 
[img]http://i.imgur.com/eVcdqkH.gif [/img] Joni wrote:What’s the hurry, anyway?
I think the answer is pretty obvious to me. We live lives at a break-neck pace. In the past, and I don’t mean the distant past, we had time to enjoy life and to be committed to a cause (the Church), but now, powerful forces fight each other over the landscape of our calendars. Let me give a couple of examples of the many that I could bring up.Two decades ago, when I left work, I left work in a very real sense. Now, leaving work just means that I get in my car and drive to a different location, but my laptop and my phone are never far away and I ‘work’ during what used to be my personal/family/Church time.
Additionally, I think the time commitment on parents now is incredible and unrealistic. Soccer, swimming lessons, overdue books, fund raisers. Play dates? Are you kidding me? My mom told me to be back in time for dinner. My next door neighbor would just stand in his front yard and call his kid’s name a the top of his lungs. That was the clue that it was time to come home. This makes it sound like I lived in another Age of Man, but I’m not that old. I just moved from the EQ to the HPG and I have kids still in college.
Facebook, google, Pokeman Go, PTA, NFL, CSI, ADD; we have so many factors that tug at us. Hang on a sec, I just got a text… OK, I’m back now… I have actually felt annoyed to be invited to a wedding reception for a friend because I don’t have time on Saturdays to stop what I’m working on, and I think that’s a great comment about our lives.
Hastening the Work is just a way in which the Church is competing along side of all the other combatants for your time. At that level, it’s no different from what anyone else does.
My husband works in sales, so he spends a lot of time thinking about his numbers. (I’m serious… he gets home from spending 9+ hours at work, and immediately logs into the tracking software from our home computer, so he can see how his stats changed on the commute home.) Imagine if his boss said to him “you need to do better, you need to have better numbers” without telling him any of the following: – what his numbers look like now, so he has a baseline
– what they expect him to do differently from what he’s already doing
– what they are going to change on their end to allow him to work more efficiently (One of DH’s big complaints about a previous manager was that he was eating up an hour or more every day on pointless meetings. Fortunately, the Mormon church is immune to THAT
😆 )– what the reward is for success/what the punishment is for failure
– by what percentage they expect him to increase his sales
– in what timeframe
– what kind of guidance will they give him in the interim (like, meeting monthly to discuss a 6-month goal)
– and on, and on, and on.
They don’t simply say “hasten the work of selling our company’s product.” That would be so meaningless as to be borderline insulting.
Joni wrote:…One of DH’s big complaints about a previous manager was that he was eating up an hour or more every day on pointless meetings. Fortunately, the Mormon church is immune to THAT
😆 )…
True – Monday nights are (generally) off limits.
Joni wrote: “Because I loathe buzzwords”
Let me ponderize for a bit about the need to hasten the work.
I understand the urgency felt by many TBMs to hasten missionary and temple work, and it seems we’re often presented this as a race against the second coming. We have to bring the gospel to every nation, kindred, tongue, and people, as well as do the temple work for everyone who died without accepting the gospel. I also understand the use of business metaphors and tactics in the hastening process. I think it’s natural, especially from leaders who come from a business background, to apply a goal oriented approach. Wasn’t it President Kimball who first asked us to lengthen our stride and taught us that a goal unwritten was only a wish? Kimball was an insurance man. I think it might be interesting to see if some of the new business models, unlike the sorts of tactics Joni describes of her husband’s employer, make their way into our mainstream church culture and church “missions”. Models that move away from carrots and sticks (which still work well when you’re just wanting to increase quantity) toward models that reward and foster autonomy, mastery, and purpose (which are far superior factors to foster when the goal is to improve quality, creative thinking, and worker happiness).
I didn’t start this post to toot my own horn, but this following example maybe highlights the difference.
Several years ago, I was called to be the WML. I did not want to do it and didn’t think I could really fulfill the calling as it should be done due to my somewhat unorthodox views and growing disaffection. I basically told this to the bishop, who told me it was ok and that he wanted me to do it “my way”. So I did. No meetings, no goals. I even gave a talk to the ward and told them to stop being missionaries, and to just be nice to their neighbors. The stake expressed frustration to our bishop about our wards lack of participation with the stake goals, and that we didn’t have any ward baptism goals. God bless our bishop for sticking up for me and not passing that pressure down the line.
As it turned out (and I didn’t know this until later when the bishop told me), the year I was the WML our ward had their highest number of convert baptisms and led the stake. Coincidence? Maybe. I certainly didn’t take credit (or blame, hah) for the increased baptisms, but I do think the general change of mindset helped create a condition where ward members may have been a bit more kindly. Did our ward’s approach create a flurry of interest and change the way our stake approached missionary work? Nope, other than several people from other wards requesting copies of my talk, everything settled back into LDS normal after I was released. At the very least, I learned that a somewhat disaffected and unorthodox member could serve as a WML and was at least just as affective (from a church goal baptism sense) as anyone else. At least that time.
Oh, and the ward missionaries were really happy that no one was asking them to meet all the time or giving them goals. Goals are hard to own when they’re not your own. They were given complete autonomy with no one really asking for results, and ward members weren’t told how they needed to find people for missionaries to teach. Just some encouragement to relax and be nice.
CNSL1, I love that story! I love that you didn’t fall in line with the normal “rules” and I love that it worked. I honestly think all ward service: callings, VT and HT, and of course missionary work would bring better results without all of the goals and strict guidelines trying force members and missionaries to do everything a certain way. It’s almost, like if they let go of their grip it will all fall apart and it will be a disaster.
Funny, when people are just allowed to be themselves and allowed to just be kind, everything feels more authentic. People truly feel loved instead of just a checkmark on somebody’s to do list.
I really wish your stake would have made the connection and started to change their ways. Maybe other stakes would have taken notice and widespread change could have happened. Instead we get to do more and more programs badgering members to be friends with neighbors just so we can get them to church. Sigh….
A friend and her husband asked us over for dinner last night. We have done social things with them in the past. They were called as Ward Missionaries a month ago. This dinner felt different. Dinner prayer was more formal .. Like starting a meeting. We were no longer two couples just enjoying an evening. We could feel the underlying agenda. DH and I left sooner than our norm and felt saddened by the change. It wouldve been nice to just enjoy the evening.
We are still friends .. But I am now a statistic. Sigh.
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