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I happened to fall into a conversation today, in person (face-to-face), with someone who has had the opportunity to talk directly with the top leadership of the Church about issues of instruction and ministry. I didn’t know this about the person when we started to talk. (I’m being intentionally vague, so as to not give away any detail about this person or their situation. I don’t want any particular detail to influence anyone’s judgment of what was said, since I believe what was said was completely accurate and the speaker totally trustworthy – but more detail might bias a few of you. I simply will say that this person is not a “church leader” of any kind.) I want to share a few things I was told in our conversation:
1) The Q12 and FP understand that their words in General Conference normally are generalized and not new – or profound in a new way, speaking generally. This is because they do not want to be misunderstood – as much by the membership of the Church as by non-members. They are aware of how much their words tend to be heard subjectively and how much they tend to get distorted once they leave their mouths.
2) They almost all value an ecumenical approach to religion and religious conversation over a confrontational approach – even though they almost all believe what they believe very strongly. They all believe there is good, and even great – and even unique and worthy of emulation and adoption, outside the LDS Church – and they all lament the lack of charity in how many members speak to and about other people. This is true even more strongly about the younger and more recently called ones. Some of their most recent talks have been a direct address to this concern – but they tend to value teaching and testifying over pronouncements of command from the pulpit (again, given how many members tend to turn even non-command into command).
3) They almost all want multiple voices to be heard in church, as long as those voices are respectful and not disruptive or harmful. They don’t all share similar views about many things; they are open with each other and in council about those differences; they practice the council model and wish the membership would listen more when they ask them to practice that model, as well. (in a nutshell, listening to others before reaching decisions and conclusions)
4) A lower percentage of 70’s understand all of the above, and that rule extends naturally down the leadership chain.
Well, that is nice. But unfortunately, their message is not getting heard, or it is getting ignored. This is not working…fast enough…to stem the hemorrhaging.
Quote:Some of their most recent talks have been a direct address to this concern – but they tend to value teaching and testifying over pronouncements of command from the pulpit (again, given how many members tend to turn even non-command into command).
Which leads to this,
Quote:A lower percentage of 70’s understand all of the above, and
that rule extends naturally down the leadership chain. Which leads to those who are and do hear the message from the Q15 being ushered out and “unwelcomed” and excluded from local leadership positions.
Just my opinion.
I hope you are right…and hope the Q15 realize that “progress” needs to be happen quicker to stop the bleeding.
Lead follow or get out of the way. Ray, I would like to believe it and have no reason to doubt what you say. I just wish it reached my local leaders and members. Maybe over time and with patience – which is difficult.
I also wish the water got to the end of all the rows – but it does get to the end of lots of them. Doesn’t help those in unnecessarily dry areas, I know . . . Just as an example, my Bishop asked my daughter to speak in Sac Mtg before she leaves for the MTC. He then asked a younger daughter and either my wife or me to speak that Sunday. My wife smiled and said, “That would make it a farewell program, wouldn’t it?” His response was a return smile and:
Quote:I’d rather ask forgiveness than seek permission. If a member of the Stake Presidency is there and says something, I’ll thank them for the input and take it under advisement.
:thumbup: All I’m saying is that it is getting to the end of more rows than we can see.
Ray, I have heard and understood the same. I believe this is exactly correct. The challenge for the leadership, and this is a phenomenally difficult thing to solve, is that they won’t sacrifice the perception of harmony and unity at the top to silence a strident, hardliner voice. they don’t want the trumpet call to sound uncertain.
as well, this applies to 182 years of speculative pronouncements. to say that a given pronouncement firmly came out of a hat or other area of the anatomy, would be to make the doctrine if the church seem uncertain.
Certainty is the primary product of the Church. we are taught certainty in the testimony glove. there is certainty in following the prophet, for the lord will never lead the prophet or church astray. there is certainty in the literal stories and in the book of mormon. happiness is certain when we obey…and if we are not happy or certain, then it must be because of sin: therefore, you will certainly get better if you read the book of mormon and pray, then all things the Church teaches to do are certainly the path to perfection (which you have to achieve on your own) and happiness (if and only uf you perfectly obey).
The Middle Way is profoundly unpopular, because it acknowledges that NOTHING is certain, but rather, one needs to seek out for oneself, to learn through our own experience to distinguish good and evil. The Truth is that most reasonable and exerienced leaders, having had both a transformative spiritual experience as well as years of experience in the real world applying it, are enlightened and privately truly Middle Way…they would just never admit it. Why? because they have painted themselves in the corner with the “certainty trap”.
The certainty trap is the idea that there is a right and a wrong to every question, that god knows what the right answer is, and that god dictates the right answer, at least occasionally verbatim to his servants the prophets. Once god dictates an answer, through the voice of his servants, then it is gods truth, once and for all.. or at least until god reveals with equal certainty that it’s time to change god’s eternal, unchanging word. Therefore, no word of god pronounced as revelation can be changed without an equivalently scriptural word of god to change it. And since they are the words of god, then any doubt — any lack of certainty on the part of a member, is a token of lack of faith, caused, of course, by sin. It is the ultimate implementation of “the emperor’s new clothes”. and at the top, any truly honest leader recognizes that their personal spiritual insights are “uncertain”, thus they rely upon consensus among the brethren in order to implement “new revelation”.
In Joseph’s and Brigham’s day, everyone believed he was a prophet, so his speculations and pronouncements were treated with certainty, even if they were…pulled directly out of a hat…
I believe the Big 15 are wise enough and honest enough to realize that not all their words come directly from God. Given the scope of their knowledge, education, and experience, they surely understand that circumstances and applicability vary widely. What I don’t understand is the huge disconnect between the Big 15 and stake presidents. Often stake presidents are called by an apostle after consulting with a 70. Do stake presidents get any training or guidance about using an ecumenical approach and welcoming more respectful voices? At least half of my stake presidents that I have known (probably 8 over 15 years) have been hard core TBMs. And it seems like a Big 15 would have the authority to change things as relatively easy as having women pray in general conference and wearing a light blue shirt. Very small but highly symbolic things might go a long way. But I do believe that many leaders understand the value of diversity and that we are (slowly) headed in the right direction.
For the record…I would hate to be responsible for faith of 12 million people and billions of their dollars. I think the world, including the church, are feeling a spiritual awakening…the orthodox call it a mass apostasy. I’m sure the Q15 have many wakeless nights worrying how best to handle it…and protect faith and the kingdom.
I will give them that benefit of the doubt.
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Last night I did some training with the SS president and all the youth teachers. We talked very openly (at my prompting) about the new way of teaching and about not passing on false doctrine(blacks and the priesthood, etc) and being honest with the youth about our history, our doctrine, and our leaders. Every person in that room expressed relief and gratitude for the direction the church is going. There are some very devout members and I wasn’t sure how all this was going to be received. I shared some thought about what Ray said in his post and I think it gives us all hope that things will get better. No one in the church can see the the way the youth and many others are leaving or going less active without seeing something has to change. wayfarer wrote:Certainty is the primary product of the Church…The Middle Way is profoundly unpopular, because it acknowledges that NOTHING is certain, but rather, one needs to seek out for oneself, to learn through our own experience to distinguish good and evil.
The Truth is that most reasonable and exerienced leaders, having had both a transformative spiritual experience as well as years of experience in the real world applying it, are enlightened and privately truly Middle Way…they would just never admit it. Why? because they have painted themselves in the corner with the “certainty trap”.Personally I don’t believe most top Church leaders are secretly Middle Way Mormons; to me they generally look like typical everyday TBMs that have risen up through the ranks over the years. Almost everything they do and say makes more sense from a traditional orthodox Mormon perspective than it would from a “Middle Way” perspective. So when Boyd K. Packer said, “Why would God do that?” and when Gordon B. Hinckley said that the strict Church standards were “wonderful” because they would supposedly make people live longer and be happier and healthier I think they honestly believed it themselves. Sure some of them could have had more doubts than the average TBM but my guess is that most of them still believe that the restoration really involved some divine intervention and they rationalize that if the Church was good enough for them then it is supposedly already good enough for future generations as well.
So that’s why I think most of them are basically caught up in the certainty trap themselves rather than simply feeling constrained by what other members will think if they say anything to undermine some of the exaggerated certainty. They have definitely painted themselves into a corner the way the doctrines have evolved over time but I doubt that most of them are fully aware of this situation and I think it is more a case of them seeing almost any threat to seemingly minor doctrines and policies as a threat to their entire belief system and identity which is so painful for them to seriously consider that they have basically gone into a state of denial where they simply try not to worry that much about some of the inconsistencies and troubling history. This is also one reason why I think they are so reluctant to make changes and they don’t really know what they can or should do about an increasing number of members losing their testimony because of easier access to information that isn’t faith-promoting on the internet.
wayfarer wrote:to say that a given pronouncement firmly came out of a hat
or other area of the anatomy, would be to make the doctrine of the church seem uncertain.
That is the single funniest thing I have read on this site. And simultaneously one of the most prescient. I think the Big 15 are between the proverbial rock and hard place. They are losing members to disaffection because of lapses in logic, whitewashed history, etc. But from their perspective, would the cure be worse than the disease? To assuage many of us here on Stay LDS (and others who think similarly) would require the Big 15 to give the TBMs a dose of medicine that may likely drive legions of them from the Church. What would be the effect on the TBM population if the Big 15 came out and said “You know what, JS didn’t actually ‘translate’ the BoM, he just kind of ‘received’ it by looking into a white rock he’d dug from a well and placed in a hat. Oh, and we really didn’t have any doctrinal basis for the Black priesthood ban; we just had some leaders who unfortunately reflected many racist beliefs common for the time. Oh yeah, and also ….”
When contemplating the effects of brutal honesty, I can only imagine the Big 15 promptly call for a change of pants to be delivered. Metaphorically, the Church is a very large ship not wont to quick turns. I think the Big 15, understandably, have determined that gentle course corrections are the only way to steer the Church to a more solid intellectual, ecumenical, spiritual footing without unhinging large numbers of TBMs.
Kumahito- I agree greatly with you. They really have little choice but to go slow. I have a friend in my ward who really would crash if something like your confession took place. Her childhood was marred by parents with addictions, the church and it’s culture are her rock. If the underpinnings of that rock and the goals it has helped her create were gone, then life would seem hopeless. It would mean that working to improve had no purpose and might as well just head down the road her parents had already been on. To quote scripture, “like a dog to it’s vomit.”
To be honest I would crumble for her if that happened. I am just fine adjusting my learning than to hand her a blow like that. Now I know it could be debated that her living with this imagined religion is just as unfair, because someday she would face the disappointment, but I believe in life’s unique benevolence, whether it comes directly from God or the energy that directs souls, and for her the rigidness of Mormonism has given her so much, it would be cruel to rob her of a life source just to suit me.
I am glad the next few decades decisions aren’t mine.
mom3 wrote:Now I know it could be debated that her living with this imagined religion is just as unfair, because someday she would face the disappointment …
I still live in an imagined world based on what my heart and mind creates from my senses. Everyone lives in their own imagined world (their imagined “religion” being a subset of that world). We feel great joy and relief after we settle in comfortably to our new post-faith crisis imagined religion (whatever that is), believing we now have it all figured out.
But to me, my series of experiences over my life coming to realizations that I did NOT know “the truth” about things … that leads me to see a pattern. It’s most likely that I will continue to have such epiphanies and uncomfortable adjustments. It seems a lot like the Mormon term “Eternal Progression.”
So even though we may now have a broader and clearer view. We are still fundamentally in the same bind. We are qualitatively no better, even if we perhaps have a larger quantity of “truth.” We still have a long way to go before we can claim to no longer live in our own flawed imaginations, that we see reality without filters in the way.
All that is my long way of agreeing. I find it imprudent to push others outside their worldview, especially if it’s just so that I can feel good about myself for a few moments and feel validated.
What would happen if the Q15 devoted the next General Conference to exposing all the controversies? I imagine there’s be a couple million brothers and sisters all flooding into faith crisis doom spiral without a support structure to replace their destroyed imaginations. We already can’t keep up with the existing flood of people who are discovering this information on their own.
Old-Timer wrote:The Q12 and FP understand that their words in General Conference normally are generalized and not new – or profound in a new way, speaking generally. This is because they do not want to be misunderstood– as much by the membership of the Church as by non-members. They are aware of how much their words tend to be heard subjectively and how much they tend to get distorted once they leave their mouths… they all lament the lack of charity in how many members speak to and about other people…they practice the council model and wish the membership would listen more when they ask them to practice that model, as well. This makes it sound like they understand there is a lot more to everything than what they want to talk about in conference or lessons and they are intentionally trying to simplify things mostly for the sake of the rank-and-file Church members which doesn’t really surprise me at all. I understand that they are probably much more concerned with what the majority of active members think than what any non-Mormons, ex-Mormons, or disaffected members think and they see average TBMs as their primary target audience they are trying to cater to. However, my primary criticism of their overall approach is not that they rarely if ever say anything original or ground-breaking as much as what they repeatedly choose to focus on the most (Matthew 23:23-26).
Faith, hope, charity, goodwill, humility, patience, forgiveness, kindness, etc. were all a big part of the original gospel taught by Jesus, Paul, and others according to the Bible. So it seems like Church leaders could easily focus on these principles much more than they do without really confusing or damaging the beliefs of most active members at all. But instead it seems like we generally hear mostly about things like testimony, temples and temple worthiness, obedience to prophets, tithing, the WoW, sacrifice, priesthood, the restoration, and how great Joseph Smith supposedly was. For example, they could definitely talk more about the idea of being nice to less faithful members but instead we hear about how bad “permissiveness” is and that Satan is supposedly going to get you if you ever try alcohol or tobacco which will tend to have the opposite effect (judgmental and self-righteous attitudes).
That’s why I don’t buy the idea that there’s not much they could do differently. It’s also why I think they are generally limited by the typical TBM perspective themselves rather than being very open-minded about new possibilities. If TBM apologists can look at every single problem and still believe in the restoration, revelation, the BoM, etc. almost exactly the way the Church teaches then the Church presidents and apostles definitely could as well if not more so because they generally don’t even try to provide an answer to the worst problems unless it is some evasive comment like “it’s in the past” and “don’t worry about those little flecks of history.” Sure they might know about many of the same issues we talk about but I just don’t believe most of them have ever connected the dots enough to realize quite how much doubt all of this combined can stack up against their official story for the average person because if they did I would expect them to quickly change their tune or at least tone it down a bit.
Quote:I also wish the water got to the end of all the rows – but it does get to the end of lots of them. Doesn’t help those in unnecessarily dry areas, I know . . .
The Church has simply gotten too large too fast. When I was a child, it was not unusual to have a general authority come to one our stake conferences. And I mean one of the Quorum of the Seventy. NOT one of the area authorities or members of the 11th Quorum of the Seventy (or whatever they are.) With these increasing levels of bureaucracy, messages and attitudes and opinions get diluted. Nothing Ray said in the original post surprises me. I have no doubt that the First Presidency and Quorum of the 12 are good men irrevocably committed to their positions and the Church. They are bright men too who are,I’m sure, aware of some of the issues that challenge the Church’s stability. But when you are so removed from the day to day functioning of a ward or individual members, how can you sort out the occasionally overzealous bishop or stake president whose inherently fallible humanity and inexperience results in some very unfortunate events. Or how can you easily identify the overly ambitious individual whose unspoken (and perhaps even unconscious) goals is to get as far up in the Church hierarchy as possible, resulting in them imitating behaviors and attitudes they THINK the general authorities possess. (My wife and I often joke about “bishop wannabes” in our area: individuals who always wear dark suits and talk like funeral directors.) If the local leaders were better, fewer would leave the Church regardless of what dismaying information they encountered that challenges some of the preconceived notions of Joseph Smith, the early Church, etc. I am not personally at that point (leaving the Church) but one thing that would (probably) keep me active is the relationship I have with my bishop who I consider to be a good and humble man who genuinely cares about me and my family. Would that all members could have such a man as their bishop!
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