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I have a ____________ who is inactive (left the church) etc.
I have heard it from Bishopric members, RS Presidents (Stake and Ward Level), our Sunday School teacher, Relief Society teacher. I know families who don’t say it publicly but they tell me privately.
Today as I listened to my 3rd or 4th lesson where class members were clamoring with relief to say they had friends, family, etc. who had left I really began to wonder. Over here we keep thinking it’s a lost cause this disaffection/crisis deal. I am less sure now. There is a tide that is being addressed. Members may not know it, but they are yearning for answers, for healing, for hope. Presently their hope is in outdated modes, but the searching is bringing up softer answers, kinder considerations, and realizations.
Without even trying the ship is shifting. No telling where it will land.
When I was in the turmoil of my faith crisis (when I wanted to say “did you know THIS??”) I kind of felt that the church was going to “go down” before longer. Then I heard others say how they had the same feelings in the past – and the past for them was more than a decade. I then realized that it was me that changed and not the church. But over the last few months I am adjusting my take on when we might either have a tipping point of a large number of people leaving. I don’t think or expect the church to go down. But it will shift. And not from the top but from the middle and bottom. As I listen to the disclosures, and the response’s and efforts from active members (especially when the leaver is a family member ie child, spouse, sibling) the clear response isn’t so clear. Active members still want those connections. They may not comprehend the why when some one leaves, but they aren’t ready to be cut off from them, no matter how bad it hurts. To me this is big. Active members trying to navigate relationships between a church they love and a family member they love. There are no books or talks to really navigate this with. Spouse’s who are divided on church are still married. Families with “less active” members are still engaged in connections. This will change the course of the ship.
I am curious how long it will take to make the adjustment, but in my ward and stake, enough people are commenting that I believe it is already underway. I make no guess how the final outcome will arrive but I see it as a plus.
I agree, mom3. It is happening and the discussions are started. It kind of feels like these are the things 7 or 8 years ago on the bloggernacle people were raising as issues the church should be aware of, and they seem to be just getting around to things now that we can see. The slow turn makes me feel like they don’t know how to have the discussions successfully, so they move forward slowly.
It makes it feel like they don’t have an answer for it.
But it is definitely a recurring theme I hear also. Perhaps they are past the denial stage, and perhaps past the anger stage of accusing all that are raising the issue as “apostates” or “anti”. Perhaps they are in the bargaining stage now, trying to find what the people that are leaving the church are searching for and how to accommodate without giving in completely.
The slow turn is not really helping the hemorrhaging. Perhaps they believe it will be ok. They can be brought back at some point.
It just feels a lot of the message is from a defensive posture…”we’re not the problem…the ones that are leaving are the problem…poor, poor souls…I hope they’ll change.”
So far, that seems to be the response I hear.
My guess is that it becomes more and more common…all families are dealing with it…they eventually run out of excuses and need to look at what changes need to happen to reach their mission as a church. And sadly, the casualties are many with such a slow response.
Heber13 wrote:Perhaps they are past the denial stage, and perhaps past the anger stage of accusing all that are raising the issue as “apostates” or “anti”. Perhaps they are in the bargaining stage now, trying to find what the people that are leaving the church are searching for and how to accommodate without giving in completely.
I hadn’t thought of the Church itself as going through the stages of grief. That could be a really useful insight.
It also tracks well with an idea I had recently that the Church itself is going through a faith crisis.
I’ve been hearing this for at least fifteen years. Heber13 wrote:It just feels a lot of the message is from a defensive posture…”we’re not the problem…the ones that are leaving are the problem…poor, poor souls…I hope they’ll change.”
On Sunday we had ward conference. During priesthood 2 high councilmen taught us about the gospel essay on the first vision and the one on polygamy. The first HC actually said that the people at Google are not very religious and seem to actually be hostile towards the LDS movement…and that is why all this terrible stuff pops up when you type Joseph Smith into a search engine. He told us a 3 or 4 step process for how to find the essay once you get to LDS.org. The second HC got up for his gospel topic essay and said that he found the essays just by typing “gospel topic essays” into a search engine. I thought that was funny.
The teacher was assuming that there is someone at google making decisions about what searches return what results. It doesn’t work like that. It is all algorithms tied to how many web pages linked TO certain pages, how many clicks it gets, current trending, and a bit of your own search history all combined. And when describing the church, I like the saying that the church is having a BELIEF crisis. As someone who has been involved in organizational change management for a long time, “pruning according to the strength of the root” is one of my favorite descriptions of change. We often want and expect major, top-down change, but I have found it works far better when the average people in the organization are aware of and want the change – when the overall organization can handle it without massive upheaval. We are closer to that point with regard to many issues than we ever have been – much like where the membership was in the mid-1970s with regard to the race-based Priesthood ban. (The splintering after the Manifestos is a good counter-example.)
LookingHard wrote:The teacher was assuming that there is someone at google making decisions about what searches return what results. It doesn’t work like that. It is all algorithms tied to how many web pages linked TO certain pages, how many clicks it gets, current trending, and a bit of your own search history all combined.
Apart from sponsored results, there are ways to manipulate rankings, or even lower embarrassing entries.
SamBee wrote:I’ve been hearing this for at least fifteen years.
From the long-term perspective, do you feel anything has really changed in the last 15 years? I would have to say in the last 2 years it has changed a bit in that you hear many conference talks about the subject, so I am sure that the leadership feels things have changed a bit.LookingHard wrote:SamBee wrote:I’ve been hearing this for at least fifteen years.
From the long-term perspective, do you feel anything has really changed in the last 15 years? I would have to say in the last 2 years it has changed a bit in that you hear many conference talks about the subject, so I am sure that the leadership feels things have changed a bit.Yes and no. The stupid announcement on gays has upset many people, me included – I don’t deny it. But I’ve been hearing about lost sheep for years. LDS are an invisible minority here or at least the only experience most people have are missionaries in the street… you could live your entire life without ever meeting Mormons (or should I say knowingly so.)
We have a number of older members whose children have all gone inactive. Some at the earliest opportunity when they leave home. One of our ex-bishops “lost” all his children long before I came along.
Internet material has been available for years. Including very anti-Mormon stuff. I use that term properly here. Some of the stuff I read about the endowment was plain untrue – and I found that out when I eventually took out my own.
From the church POV, being badgered to go on a mission alienated me. Apart from having to make all my own arrangements – such as maintain an empty home for two years while I was away – and raise cash… I really was not and am not in a position to do all that.
Obviously I myself was inactive but we have so many inactive people in our ward that they essentually left me alone. They mainly remember the inactive who are related or married to others.
It’s a theme I’ve heard since day one of becoming a member of the church decades ago but it’s also a theme I’m hearing more and more lately… and I don’t believe it’s because I now have a greater bias for hearing it. Talks about doubts and people that leave the church has become a general conference staple. In the past there were always talks along those lines but now it seems like there are 5 or 6 talks every general conference weekend. Heck, during the last conference (or the one before) there was practically an entire session dedicated to doubts and people leaving.
I’m hearing it even more locally. Practically everyone has a close friend or family member that has left the church. It’s a subject that comes up often during sacrament meeting or in comments people make in lessons. The talk is also different than it was in the past. The past narrative was usually about someone that stopped coming to church due to laziness, taking offense, or struggling with unresolved sin. Now the narrative appears to have shifted. I hear talk about people in “good standing” making a conscientious decision to stop attending church. In other words they didn’t fade away due to lack of commitment, they flat out rejected church. Maybe the narrative has changed to better reflect reality but the shift has changed the way the people that remain view and talk about things.
Each ward will be different. I haven’t felt a change in the direction of the wind in my ward. In my little corner of Zion we’re still busy maligning the people that leave.
😥 Quote:In my little corner of Zion we’re still busy maligning the people that leave.
I think that point is what blew me away in the last couple months, in my little corner of Zion, I am hearing softenings. The following are exact quotes made in various ward meetings.
Quote:I look for the good. My daughter and son-in-law may not be in church like I want, but they are great parents. That’s important to me.
Quote:It was a knife my heart (child leaving church) so I began to plead with God, he reminded me that she fought for her agency just as much as I did and who am I to take that from her. I now leave it in God’s hands.
Quote:My cousin left and my aunt has asked us to give him time. And that he is still part of our family.
I can’t say everyone is heading that way, but if it is happening in one area, maybe it will spark change in another. Then we might really get somewhere on the Zion path.
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