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Regarding the Idaho case in the link of the OP… Quote:“After a quick prayer, he introduced himself and said he was there “to look into” Chelsea’s “tragic and horrendous” story.”
Maybe the prayer was just for the first meeting and did not precede every meeting. Still, it seems like a really odd mixture of the spiritual with the bureaucratic. “First, let’s invite the spirit of God into the meeting. Good. Now that we have that out of the way, I am authorized to offer you up to 300k if you sign this NDA and promise to destroy all the recordings of our conversations.”
(This is the background.) I will try to make this brief. I joined the church when I was a senior in college. I was married with a wife & a 4 yr old daughter.
Within a couple of months, my wife said she wanted a divorce. After the divorce, she & my daughter moved to California & I stayed in
the Midwest. My daughter would come out in the summer to visit. Both of us stayed active in the church & stayed “friends” for my
daughter’s sake. We both stayed active & got married to members of the church. Then, the “ex” got divorced again.
When my daughter was about 13 yrs old, I got a call from my former in-laws saying “you have to get your daughter away from her mother
& California”. I asked why & they said there was sexual abuse going on by a new boy friend of the ex.
I made plans to bring my daughter to our house for a visit. I called my ex & said that our daughter is staying here with me & she had the
choice to give me voluntary custody or come to the Midwest & we could fight it out in court. I told her I knew what was going on & she
gave me voluntary (permanent) custody.
(This is my point.)
– When I called my daughter’s Bishop in California, to tell him about the abuse, his only response was, “can I use your name in a Bishop’s
court?” They excommunicated the ex. There was no effort to ask how my daughter was doing. Or, any sign of compassion or empathy.
– When I talked to my own Bishop, to prepare him for my daughter coming into our home permanently, again, there are no sign of compassion
or empathy.
– After these contacts by the church, I felt like I was to blame for what happened to my daughter. The conclusion I came up with is: the
church isn’t really trained on how to handle sexual abuse at any level of the organization. So, their approach is to be quiet & hope it goes
away or disappears.
– After this experience I was angry all the time. Church had no relevance or purpose for me. It took a lot of time to get through it.
SilentDawning said:
Quote:So, I have a question — is it too much to hold the church to a higher standard when it comes to the inevitable tradeoffs between the temporal and the spiritual? Or should the church be held to a higher standard where they are expected to sacrifice temporal interests for spiritual ones, even when this can cause significant financial, reputational or other harm to the church?
I would be satisfied with a higher Christ like compassion & empathy. There should be an announcement by the 1st presidency to report all sexual
abuse to the legal authorities. The church policies & procedures must be secondary to the legal responsibilities. Yes, the church should be held
to a higher standard.
That is a heartbreaking story, my friend. My heart goes out to you and your daughter. I am very sorry for your experience MM. Your daughter is lucky to have you in her corner to take her out of that terrible situation.
I know something about what you must have felt like think that you were to blame for failing to foresee and prevent your daughter’s abuse. For me, the LDS teaching suggested that if I was righteous enough then God would bless me and my family to the degree that these sorts of situations wouldn’t happen. It is an LDS themed version of the Prosperity Gospel. I had failed to be “enough” to prevent it. Even more distressing at the time was that I didn’t have the tools to repent from not being enough. If the faith of the mustard seed is powerful enough to move mountains then I should be able to call down the powers of heaven, but how? If I am too weak or faithless then how do I stop being too weak or faithless? For me, there was great relief in the evangelical idea that I am designed to be weak and “not enough.” It was never in my power to control many things (not in the past, not in the present, and not in the future). This freed me to give it over to Jesus, believing that He is “enough” to shoulder it all. I found acceptance for my weakness. I do not pretend that our situations are the same and only share what was helpful for me. Your mileage may vary.
Minyan Man wrote:
the church isn’t really trained on how to handle sexual abuse at any level of the organization. So, their approach is to be quiet & hope it goesaway or disappears.
Yes, I think that we do a passable job at administration or management of the church. I believe that the only way for a church leader to be skilled at counseling or ministering, compassion and empathy, or active listening is if they had this skill/training before being assigned as a church leader. I am unaware of any church training that would make a leader better in the ministering department. (OTOH, I do believe that there is training to help church leaders not put the church organization in legal liability.) I think this is part of having a lay clergy where we are basically run by conscripted volunteers. My current bishop is a retired HS sports coach and I believe this very much shapes his worldview.
Roy wrote:
Yes, I think that we do a passable job at administration or management of the church.I disagree. With conscripted volunteers, you clearly won’t get the same level of service you might get from a paid, trained professional.
Here are a few examples:
a) One Bishop gave a fireside and commented that he normally wouldn’t fall victim to last-minute emergencies when people felt they needed to see him urgently. He said “You’d be surprised how long people can wait”. That doesn’t sound like very good service to me.
b) One of my Bishops had been a Bishop 3 times, in addition to a Stake Presidency member — in his 70’s. He was burned out. He had no capacity for handling interpersonal problems or conflicts between organization leaders. He would let problems fester and wouldn’t address them unless forced.
c) I am a musician, and played jazz at a dinner put on by a local non-LDS church where they were asking the membership for money to buy their own building. The pastors spoke and they were GOOD. I was wishing that we had that quality of speakers in our church on a regular basis.
d) Bishop’s don’t get much training in how to counsel others, although they are expected to be the spiritual advisers to their Ward. So, what you get is the opinion of a normally successful person, but not anyone who knows how to really counsel others.
e) one of my commitment crises involved being completely ignored by our Stake Presidency when I needed to be released as HPGL. The president was always traveling to Japan and was a senior executive at a large company. I can see how little time he had for his priesthood responsibilities if he could let me go on for months and months and months with no communication from anyone — including the HC over our Ward who just said “I don’t know anything” — and made no effort to find anything out either.
I think our lay clergy is a huge financial boon to the church, but in terms of the timing of service, and the quality of leadership, it’s nearly as good as it would be if we had paid, trained professionals leading us in key positions. People with time to do their jobs properly.
Right. I agree with everything that you wrote SD. What I meant in my comment about doing a passable job of administering the local church is that we have regular SM with assigned speakers, hymns, maybe a musical number and all of that is put together in a program. There are people assigned to teach sunday school. The bills get paid and the lights stay on. Tithing and other offerings are collected and sent to SLC. Those are the types of things that I mean by “administration” and you are correct that it is too often just the bare minimum. This is not a complaint against my bishop or any bishops really. It is a huge job that they are expected to juggle between work and family responsibilities.
Which positions would you prefer be paid? (Sincere question to see how extensive that would be.) Old-Timer wrote:
Which positions would you prefer be paid? (Sincere question to see how extensive that would be.)
Personally, I have an all or none opinion.
Ideally, I think we should be the unique church we claim to be and be unpaid from top to bottom. The only people receiving money from the church would be recipients of humanitarian aid and welfare for the poor. That would be my ideal anyway. Considering how many operations the church has going that couldn’t be done without paid professionals, it’s an impossible ideal. At the very least, I would like to see the general authorities stop receiving their “modest stipends.”
Since that is never going to happen, I say we should then be like other churches and pay staff at the local congregation level. Pay the bishop, secretary, clerk, teachers, youth leaders, nursery, janitors… Everyone needed to make the church run each week. Let volunteering be for things like singing in the choir and setting up and taking down chairs.
I also would like to see a change in how tithing is managed. Rather than sending all tithes on to Salt Lake and getting back what pittance HQ says they can have, I think each ward should be free to spend their collected tithes on bills and activities and send whatever extra is leftover up the pipeline.
PazamaManX wrote:
Personally, I have an all or none opinion.
Before joining the LDS church, I was a member of the Methodist church. One of the things that attracted me was
the fact that there were no paid positions. The positions were considered callings not employed paid positions or
careers.
In the Methodist church, they would pass the collection plate & members would put in their donations. I’m sure other
denominations work the same way. They had a membership board that would hire (& fire) the Pastor, if needed.
The local boards would become the ruling body & not the church headquarters. I believe that the LDS church would
not be looked at any differently than the other denominations. When there is no difference, there is no draw or
attention by investigators. Then the argument could be made that the FT missionaries should be paid.
I do believe there should be paid specialists. For example, Psychiatrists & Psychologists.
I hope my remarks are not off topic SilentDawning & PazamaManX.
MM has a good point. I know that the decision on where to draw the line of who gets paid and who is a volunteer is a hard task for most non-lds churches. I remember talking to a nonLDS friend about a conflict in his church about whether to play the music director. The music director was an accomplished professional that was paid for their musical talents outside of church. They spent hours in their church assignment and everyone agreed that the musical presentations were top notch. Why shouldn’t they be paid? but if you pay the music director, do you also pay the worship team? What about sunday school teachers? What about nursury leaders?
There are also challenges with relying on a paycheck from the church for your income. If you are a paid sunday school teacher, does the church terminate your employment if you do not have a current TR?
Lots of questions, trade offs, and unintended consequences exist down that road.
Old-Timer wrote:Which positions would you prefer be paid? (Sincere question to see how extensive that would be.)
If the only change is making a few local callings paid then I don’t think it will resolve anything, it may even make some things worse.
It would help to know what problem we’re trying to solve. For me the problem is that the bishop (seen as the shepherd of the ward) isn’t trained to minister. They’re just a guy with a day job doing the best they can with the experiences they’ve had to help people in the ward with their spiritual needs. They do all of this in what little free time they have.
If you make the position of bishop paid, nothing relevant to ministering changes. They’re still juggling a career. They’re still untrained. The only difference is that now they’ve got a little extra money to compensate them for their time.
Adding money into the equation may make matters worse because I think it would increase the competition that already exists to become bishop. There would be new problems.
What about the EQP or RSP that wonders why they aren’t paid because they feel like they put in even more time at church than the bishop. Making those callings paid as well would push the same problem down a rung.
- What about when the wealthy dentist gets called to be bishop? There would be people thinking that the wealthy dentist doesn’t need the money but their family sure could use it, so they should have been called.
- What about the SP that calls a buddy to be BP just to give their buddy a financial boost?
Adding money to the equation would make the existing problem of coveting callings far worse.
Minyan Man wrote:In the Methodist church, they would pass the collection plate & members would put in their donations. I’m sure other denominations work the same way. They had a membership board that would hire (& fire) the Pastor, if needed.
I’ve had experiences with the Presbyterian church but it sounds like they operate the same in that regard. The following comments will be based on my observations with that Presbyterian church.
The only conditions where I’d call for the position of bishop to be paid would be because that would be the person’s career. They wouldn’t have a day job and perform their ministering duties on the side, being bishop would be their day job. They’d be trained for the job, ideally with a degree in counseling, psychology, therapy, divinity, etc. Real training/degrees, not ones where the answer to every problem people have is “be better at Mormoning.”
The Presbyterian/Methodist/Protestant model doesn’t fit very well in the rigid LDS church model.
In the protestant model a preacher can come from anywhere. A candidate can be interviewed from across the country and if they’re hired they move somewhere where their commute will be reasonable.
That model doesn’t map to the LDS model very well, where congregations are within rigid boundaries and callings are staffed by people that are already in a ward. There may not be a person that’s qualified and trained that lives in ward boundaries. The church would have to relax boundary restrictions to get the right people in each unit.
The issue of getting people trained and qualified would be a problem that would last a very long time. Right now, how many members have training/degrees in counseling, psychology, therapy, etc.? It could take a generation to train up enough people.
There would also be an issue with the existing model of where a bishop serves for a period of time and then they are released. I’m not sure how that would map to an environment where the bishop is more of a career.
One benefit in having a dedicated, trained, professional bishop would be a reduction in need or significant shift of responsibilities in the EQP, RSP, assigned ministers, callings.
I try to envision what the qualifications the church would look for in a paid ministry. This is what I came up with:
– Did he successfully serve a FT mission? check.
– Did he graduate from BYU? check.
– Does his wife fit the 1st two requirements? check.
– Have they both served in key ward & stake positions? check.
– Have either of them been inactive (for any reason)? no.
– Do they come to church every Sunday? check.
– Have they continuously held a temple recommend? check.
You can see where I’m going with this.
Some of the best Bishops I’ve known have been converts to the church.
They have had “life” experiences. Overcame problems, hardships & challenges.
They treat other members as a real-life brother or sister.
Some had problems & hardships that they faced & overcame. BIG check for me.
Re: paid mental health personnel (in comment above): The Church does this. The Welfare Department includes a quite large group of licensed mental health professionals, located around the world, and all of the costs are covered by the Church. There is no charge to the people they counsel. I do not want a full-time, paid local ministry. Part-time compensation might be okay, but it would be tricky and subject to criticism, as well. Also, if Bishops are compensated for their time, for example, Relief Society Presidents also should be paid – and so should Elder’s Quorum Presidents, and Primary Presidents (at least for part-time work). I’m not sure what the cutoff would be, based on expected time spent in the position, but it is a Pandora’s box, in my opinion.
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