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Bishop got up and said they had an important lesson today to talk about the importance of Home teaching, Asked us to turn to a scripture in the DC, and for some odd reason I got a coughing fit. Then went and sat in my van. I just couldn’t deal with it today. Talking about ‘assigned friends’ as I call them and knowing that they want to double the routes because the stake said we couldn’t do ‘letter routes’ any more. Wow. double the amount of people we already don’t visit. I figure the percentage is less than 30 percent in the ward, because I simply don’t do it. Sure. What a joke hometeaching is. If they wanted to be there at Church, I figure they would be there. Stop bugging people. Quote:Walked out of PH today
Welcome to the club.
this is too bad, especailly after you had had such good expereince with the temple and such.
fwiw – Our branch got permission from the Stake to do just the exact OPPOSITE. We paired the HT down to half, listed one family per companionship that we wanted visited in the home, and told the Elders/HP that ANY kind of contact whether phone or mail or person at the post office etc would be considered as HT until further notice.
I think the vast majority of members that do home teaching do not like it. Maybe some do but it is just another one of those things that is ingrained in the church that they can not seem to change. Surely there are better ways to check on the members other that assigning friends. This sounds tame compared to the meeting I experienced within the last year. I too was using letters to keep the Stake off my back regarding home teaching. For my full three years in the HPGL calling, I made a commitment not to harp on home teaching or come down on anyone about it. I figured they were sick of it, as I was after 27 years in the Church. The letters worked to give us respectable enough numbers the Stake left us alone. About three months after I was released, the Stake visited us at a Ward Conference. Apparently the new HPGL had stopped the letters since the Bishop wouldn’t ever fund them (I paid for them myself when I was HPGL). The numbers were terrible.
The member of the SP in charge of the PH meeting divided the priesthood into two theoretical groups — the “Slackers” and the “People who do home teaching”. Then he simulated a courtroom drama where two people were asked to defend each side’s position (the SP member was a lawyer). Our Bishop piped up and said “Slackers???????”, which was about the only attempt at posivity in the meeting. The SP member kept going. My personal walk-out impulses started flowing, but I didn’t leave — I stayed, choosing to view the meeting in a detached way. I did my home teaching faithfully so it wasn’t a personal affront.
Then, the HC member got up and RIPPED on everyone “as he felt directed by the Spirit prior to the meeting”. He used a harsh, near yelling tone of advice, and used words such as “there is no place in the Church for priesthood holders to be looking at pornography”…..
Next time that happens, I think I may also have a coughing fit. I will probably resort to more gentlemanly walk-outs as another coping mechanism.
I didn’t let it stop me from doing my home teaching that month though!
I got a new HT list today. They took off the one person I wanted to visit and added a guy who constantly begs to be punched! Our new home teacher informed us of such after testimony meeting, I wonder if he would be okay if we brake warm bread and each have a glass of wine as Brother Joseph taught? I’m just so sick of being pressured into doing things that I don’t believe in. After I realized Prophets, Seer and Revelators are just good men trying do what is right and not walking and talking with God as I was taught, everything changes. f4h1
One non-Church reason I do it is out of compassion for the local leaders. They get all this pressure from the Stake to make this impossible program work, and it can be deeply unsettling. So, I do it as an act of service to make their lives better. Occasionally, the people I home teach like it and want me back. I write letters to the ones who don’t care and call it done, and I try once to get the family. If they aren’t there, I leave a note on the door so they know I’m available if they need me.
Toward the end of my stint as an HPGL, I looked at HT as a buffer between myself and the families…a way of stemming overloads on my time. I now look at it through the same lens — as a way of providing our worn-out HPGL with some relief.
I walked out once on an EQ home teaching lesson. They were doing hardball tactics, and were going to go around the room to each person to ask them about home teaching. I don’t remember what they were asking anymore, but I realized I was not going to be able to hold my tongue when they got to me. After the first two or three people, I got up and walked out. One of the guys in the EQP saw me later in the lobby and asked if everything was alright. I just sort of shrugged it off and let it go. I don’t have anything against HT, but at that time, I just knew that I was probably going to say something I regretted. It really was best for me to walk out.
Brian Johnston wrote:I walked out once on an EQ home teaching lesson. They were doing hardball tactics, and were going to go around the room to each person to ask them about home teaching.
I saw this tactic used in an EQ quorum in Canada. The EQ president went around the attendees and spoke to each person. One brother, when asked if there was any reason he couldn’t do his home teaching the coming month, replied to the EQ President:
“I don’t think you should be asking that question”.
This put the EQ president on the defensive, and the tactics stopped. The brother who stood up didn’t challenge the EQ president further, but I think it made everyone in the room think twice about whether public shaming is a good way to lead others in the Church.
This is two-sided like many things. Yes, there are some people who don’t want constant contact, but on the other hand, when I was ill recently, I appreciated people checking up on me, I could have been in serious trouble.
So it cuts both ways.
Some people want to be contacted regularly and get upset that people don’t care if it stops; other people are more independent, want to be left alone and get upset that people keep trying to visit them. The “proper” solution varies by individual, but that’s almost impossible to analyze quickly – so the “easy” way is to lump everyone together into one category, the must-be-visited group. The proper solution, ironically, already exists in the Church, imo – PPI’s. When done correctly, they don’t focus on numbers but rather actual people – and HT can be adjusted and adapted accordingly. That’s just much harder to do than focusing on the numbers.
When I was first married, I had one of those Home Teachers you read about in the Ensign. He was interested in our lives, he kept looking for things he could do for us (home repair, etc.) and generally befriended us. Later after we became good friends with the family his wife told us that when the kids were younger she petitioned the Bishop to assign this man his own family as sometimes his HT efforts left things undone at home. So, I generally like HT. I do not like high pressure tactics. When I was ward mission leader, I discontinued the BOM challenge (give this BOM to a friend and report back next week) in favor of the share a spiritual experience minute. I just got tired of having a BOM forced on someone every week.
Yeah, HT is a sensitive topic. I sometimes envy the Catholic Church’s Godparents idea. Here, people are designated practically family to you for the rest of your life after you are born. I can’t believe my friend’s godparents still come around to every birthday party and are really “there” for him. If you want a good chuckle about home teaching watch a U-tube video that shows a spliced video of Tom Cruise (advocating for Scientology) and then it shows the interviewer (obviously spliced) making the video’s topic to be on home teaching. I think it is hilarious. Yeah, whenever this topic comes up in priesthood, my first instinct is to bail, but then I decide to share the positive influences of home teaching I had been blessed by as an individual and also the positives I was able to do in life. I think it is crappy that the Church quantifies HT. When I was in an EQ presidency I always tried to make it about the people. My question was “How are your families?” I would “make-up” the numbers from what types of responses I would get. If I got a long pause, and a um-I knew they didn’t see them and I said, well just try to give them a call if you can. I probably counted chats at church (without a true home visit). I hated the technicality BS. The best was when I was a missionary and this member family had us over for dinner, and I forgot to confirm the dinner appointment with the member since we got into our apartment late. The member was really frazzled and said, “Why didn’t you confirm.” I said, “you signed the calendar,” and I didn’t get your call until late last night. The wife said, “All I can really make is tuna fish sandwiches.” I replied: “well, I guess that is better than our mac and cheese that we make.” Then, I replied knowing the brother was the home teacher of this new convert family–“By the way, did you know brother so-and-so’s house burned down last night.” Boy did that guy feel like a jackass.
Here’s the thing: When you are a full-time missionary your job 24 hours is to do retention, teaching the gospel, basically home teaching. When you are a home teacher your priorities are: How is my own Family? Am I doing a good job keeping food on the table for my own Family? Can I get my own sorry self to church on a regular basis? Do my wife and I even get a date night, when I’m going out with another man to see another family that I am assigned to see? After writing this last question, I now feel like a jackass-since I have home taught for an hour with my HT companion, yet I didn’t even take my own wife out on a date for the month. Where are my stinking priorities? If I don’t have time for the most important people in my life? How in the heak am I gonna have time to HT? These are the questions Elder’s quorum presidencies need to ask their volunteer home teachers in Elder’s Quorum and High Priests. Maybe if the EQP and HPGLs asked such questions of their Quorum members to show that they care and that they are having their own personal issues, then perhaps a change would be made in Home teaching “numbers’ and “attitudes”. The attitude is: Why can’t you get going and do your HT, are you lazy, scared, or past feeling, or just don’t care. There is not empathy at all for those who don’t do it. I don’t even hear, great job guys; I hadn’t gone for like three months and then went for three months and then I just heard the same thing. So was I just picking up someone’s slack?
I just finished reading a book called “It’s Your Ship” about an apparently very popular and successful, results-getting commander of a navy ship. One of his principles was to remove the drudgery from the jobs in the military where possible. This helped retention, since they tended to keep only 20% of the new recruits. Most had enough by the end of their first term of commitment. He got rid of a bunch of tedious tasks, like painting the ship 4 times a year. He found ways of replacing steel parts with stainless steel, which reduced the need for painting.
I was thinking the whole time about moving, hometeaching, chapel cleaning, etcetera — how after a person has a bit of a honeymoon period after baptism, they eventually get heaped upon with these things. It would be nice to make them purely voluntary, and even to mix it up every couple decades, just for us “old” (middle-aged) geezers.
The last time I went HT was kind of what I’d like it to be. We said a prayer, and we socialized, and I helped sort out some stuff on the family’s computer. It didn’t feel a chore or a scripted lesson. That said, our HT program here has fallen apart. There was an unfortunate incident in priesthood recently, where a member berated the new elder’s quorum leader for this, which was very uncomfortable for all, and also unfair on the new guy.
Cadence wrote:I think the vast majority of members that do home teaching do not like it. Maybe some do but it is just another one of those things that is ingrained in the church that they can not seem to change. Surely there are better ways to check on the members other that assigning friends.
The feeling of the entire program has lost it’s savor with me. My intentions for visiting teaching in the past were to drop some sort of lesson on them in hoping they will come back to the church. I forgive myself for doing this as it’s what I thought I was supposed to do and yet have been very offended by those who come only for that reason. I’ve had one good experience with visiting teachers which left me with an endearing relationship 10 years later. This is the model I will emulate. Sometimes they gave me lessons. Sometimes I gave them lessons. Many times it was just visiting and fellowshipping with no hidden agendas. This stands true of my friend even today. She stands by me through my disaffection and she herself is a practicing LDS person.
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