Regarding High Expectations

[Anonymous]

Roy wrote:

Are you saying high expectations for your interactions with the members or high expectations for the church in general? If members, then it is a mixed bag obviously with a trend that skews towards some people being fake or doing the right thing out of a sense of duty rather than sincere concern. If church itself then I might take this into a discussion of how the church seems to be silent on many real issues that affect humanity (choosing instead to largely preach to the choir).

It’s a mix of both really. This always leads to a discussion about “what is the church” when I use the term “Church” without qualification. For me, the Church is an organization, and there are certain features of organizations such as:

a) Consistent leader behavior in both the ecclesiastical and temporal arms of the church

b) Consistent culture

c) Policies and Procedures

d) Values

e) Claims about its origins and benefits to humanity.

So a) entwines consistent leadership behavior with the organization itself. Culture (b) is somewhat entwined with leadership behavior as leaders’ talks in meetings shape culture and attitudes they want the membership to adopt. Men make policies and procedures, which also typifies the organization. It’s values are often the result of the types of leaders the organization raises up, the culture, and are implied in leaders and eventually, general membership behavior.

So, I would say that I have high expectations of the church in terms of its policies and procedures, and the behavior of its leaders based on its claims about its origins and benefits to humanity. While there are isolated pockets of bad behavior from leaders, there are many patterns of behavior, which, in my view, don’t seem to live up to the church’s claims about its origins and its corner on truth, its divine commission. These patterns are found in policies and procedures, values the church holds, the culture it has consciously created, and the patterns of inconsistent application of values I have seen over the years.

At the individual membership level, I do have expectations for kindness and civility, and I think those expectations are higher for adults who have made promises in the temple than for people in the secular world. There have been disappointments in that area as well. But those are far secondary to the organizational expectations.

I agree with Candace that reducing your involvement tends to mute the high expectations a bit. For me, it’s based on simply not being exposed to it, and not paying large sums of money and time — the less I put it, the less I expect from the experience.

[Author]

Posts