What is there left to change?

[Anonymous]

GC is a week away. The web is rife with rumors. Most of them totally bogus. So…what is left to change?

Thus far,

[Anonymous]

mom3 wrote:

death rituals

I think I missed that change. Are we not washing the goat before the sacrifice anymore? Asking for a friend.

Today in F&T someone shared a conference rumor… that Nelson will tell people to stop spreading rumors. My ward. Fun at parties.

Edit: Oh, the veiled face thing. Duh.

[Anonymous]

More serious post.

All the changes in your thus far list have touched on the major cultural aspects of the church. All except maybe the WoW. I’m wondering what stigma still exists with coffee and tea in 2019. That and I bet the church could get a boost in converts if things like coffee and tea didn’t bar people from joining.

I’m trying to avoid making this a wish list of things I’d like to see changed, so all I’ll say is that whatever the changes may or may not be, after the dust settles please don’t make members go through another 30 or 40 year period where we rest on our laurels.

[Anonymous]

I agree with Nibbler that all the changes so far have been cultural, and thus have been a surprise to some who think everything is doctrine. I think there are plenty more cultural changes that can and will be made – not necessarily all this coming weekend.

[Anonymous]

I could see cutting mission lengths to 18 months for calls where the missionary already speaks the language and keeping “foreign-speaking missions” at 24 months – for men and women.

Lots of college students are getting endowed now and even being temple workers without having served missions, so no change there.

I could see a name change from the General Conference Priesthood Session to the General Men’s session.

I could see more callings being open to women.

I could see none of that happening immediately.

[Anonymous]

Unbundling temple sealings from civil marriage. That is a possibility given the prevalence of gay marriage. who knows. If so, I wish it had’ve been around when I got married, and my daughter. But that’s water under the bridge. If they do go that route, it’ll “cheapen the sacrifices” people made to get married without non-mem or less active family present. It’ll show that it really wasn’t all that important after all.

Whoever made up that dumb rule (the one year penalty)….and its weak justification is beyond my understanding :crazy:

[Anonymous]

Stake structure – needs streamlining.

Stake and area presidencies to be encouraged to use more telecommunications rather than meeting face to face

Temple(s) in Africa and possibly Asia.

Seminary.

I agree with many of the comments above.

[Anonymous]

I would applaud separating temple sealings from civil marriages

I could see serious changes to Seminary.

I also could see more explicit focus on service missionaries.

[Anonymous]

Old Timer wrote:

I would applaud separating temple sealings from civil marriages

I could see serious changes to Seminary.

I also could see more explicit focus on service missionaries.

I’d love to see more attention given to service missionaries. :thumbup:

[Anonymous]

This next GC, I would be suprised if there isn’t some kind of change. Just because of RMN’s track record, I’m sure there’s been something else in the system that’s been on his mind. My guess, is the missionary time for Elder’s being reduced from 24 months to 18 months.

A Churchwide policy allowing for separate temple sealings and civil marriages would be expected in the near future.

For doctrinal “changes”, I would like to see them to do away with any polygamous sealings. State that for those already done, it will be worked out in the next life, but no man will have more than one wife in the eternities. But given how RMN is a “celestial polygamist”, I don’t think I could see it happening for a while. JRH would be most likely to issue the change, I feel.

[Anonymous]

Old Timer wrote:

I would applaud separating temple sealings from civil marriages

I could see serious changes to Seminary.

I also could see more explicit focus on service missionaries.

I would like to see seminary be a remote, online thing to get around the headaches associated with early morning.

[Anonymous]

SilentDawning wrote:

Old Timer wrote:

I would applaud separating temple sealings from civil marriages

I could see serious changes to Seminary.

I also could see more explicit focus on service missionaries.

I would like to see seminary be a remote, online thing to get around the headaches associated with early morning.

I was involved with the American sign language / Deaf institute (not seminary but similar concept) and it got shut down a year ago due to insufficient funding or something. It was done online. I feel that seminary and institute being done online (especially for foreign languages or for people who live too far away for it to be realistically appropriate for travel purposes) would be a great improvement into helping shape the focus of these programs into the gospel instead of the “sacrifices” expected to attend.

[Anonymous]

grobert93 wrote:

I feel that seminary and institute being done online (especially for foreign languages or for people who live too far away for it to be realistically appropriate for travel purposes) would be a great improvement into helping shape the focus of these programs into the gospel instead of the “sacrifices” expected to attend.

I was actually sort of relieved when my son decided he would not attend seminary. No car to buy him, or alternatively, no getting up at ungodly hours sitting around for him to then miss the bus, and have to drive him to school. I was 1/2 to 3/4 of a work day just to get him back and forth if he had’ve wanted to go.

[Anonymous]

Quote:

I’d love to see more attention given to service missionaries

In my area, that is already in the works. Elder Bednar must have dropped the plan when he visited.

Quote:

I could see serious changes to Seminary.

I think under the new family study plan it would be simple to eliminate it as a program. For decades people could get into a church university without needing to graduate seminary.

Quote:

My guess, is the missionary time for Elder’s being reduced from 24 months to 18 months.

This one annoys me, we flip flop that number around so often- and the validations we come up with for it are nauseating. One group is always considered more noble than the other.

Quote:

For doctrinal “changes”, I would like to see them to do away with any polygamous sealings. State that for those already done, it will be worked out in the next life, but no man will have more than one wife in the eternities.

I will vote for that one. Or the alternative is that women can get sealed to a new husband, if they are divorced or widowed and it counts. Even the playing field or cancel the program.

Quote:

Unbundling temple sealings from civil marriage

Yes please.

I would like to see GC reduced to Sunday only, with the Mens or Womens Meeting on Saturday night only. Like Stake Conference. When I was a youngin’ – GC was 3 days long. We managed to move to 2 pretty well. Let’s keep going.

Next – Cancel Trek. If we are droppin’ the word Marmon, let’s drop the dead babies, and bonnets, too.

Last of all – Women can have their own Meeting. No men allowed/needed/required/requested. OR – The chicks get to come to Men’s Night. And sit, speak, lecture, etc.

[Anonymous]

mom3 wrote:

Last of all – Women can have their own Meeting. No men allowed/needed/required/requested. OR – The chicks get to come to Men’s Night. And sit, speak, lecture, etc.

To this I’ll add…

We’ve talked about the phenomenon of only 4 or 5 women speaking during general conference, and that was during the years when there was a general women’s session every conference. Compared that to the 30 or so talks from men. One issue is there are 115 men (FP, Q12, P70, GA70, PBP, SSGP, YMGP) and 9 women (RSGP, YWGP, PGP) in the pool of people to tap to give a talk during general conference.

Solutions to even things out:

1) 4 or 5 women speakers and 4 or 5 men speakers. Reduce general conference down to a single day.

2) Even out the numbers of women and men in the group that gets tapped to give talks during general conference.

a) 115 men and 115 women

b) 62 men and 62 women (keep the same number of general officers

Seminary:

I’d really like for them to move completely away from early morning seminary. I could see the online option but I have my doubts that they’d remove the requirement altogether.

Leaders are worried about youth retention. I’m sure they see reports about the number of members that go inactive right around that age and I’m sure they see reports about the general populace distancing themselves from churches. The mindset may have shifted, but thus far the mindset appears to have been that more is more. If kids stop going to church it means that they didn’t do enough church stuff leading up to their departure.

Personally I see it differently. Some kids are just going to leave regardless. Other kids may leave because they haven’t had much of a choice in the level of their participation and the programs are very demanding. Reaching adulthood means making their own decisions and the first thing they are going to decide is to be done with the more demanding things in their lives that they don’t view as being beneficial.

But back to seminary. Seminary is viewed as one of those more is more things. There’s probably a report out there showing that if someone isn’t attending seminary their chances of leaving church increase and if they graduate from seminary their chances of remaining in church increase that much more. Never mind the correlation/causation thing, leaders would have to overcome the fear of losing youth if they were to drop seminary entirely.

That may be why they added seminary graduation as a requirement to get into BYU. To give kids more of an incentive to graduate seminary so they’d have a greater chance of staying active. That or everyone under the sun was trying to get into BYU, there’s a limited number of seats, and seminary graduation got lumped in just to weed out people.

There’s also the rumor that some countries, Brazil in particular, that require clergy training for people to receive a missionary visa. I don’t know whether that’s true, but the rumor was that seminary filled that role.

They also announced a change to the seminary curriculum to align with SS for the youth, so I don’t see them dropping seminary entirely.

Online? Maybe. Hopefully. Though with my experience with the culture I’d expect there to be lots of policing of youth and parents to make sure their kids did the online thing. Which is still better than getting up at 5:00AM.

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