In the LDS church we are told that the leaders can’t lead us astray and that the church will never fail because it is Christ’s church. Every decision that is made by the leaders is direct revelation from God because they meet with him weekly. This sounds wonderful actually, however it doesn’t explain why the leaders are seemingly going from one failure to another.
Overview
I don’t want this to be critical of the leaders of the LDS church. I am not the type of person to spin everything into an attack for views and clicks. There are plenty of other people doing that currently. Maybe if I made my living this way then I would be tempted to. However, according to Christ those that do that “have their reward”.
I do though want to focus on a few core changes which have recently been made in the church and how they really haven’t turned out the way that they were expected to. In many ways the LDS church is run like a business, however it also has no accountability like a regular business does. For instance, if multiple changes were made in a business, that were detrimental overall, then they would be rolled back or the leaders replaced. The business would also be accountable to their shareholders, or their bottom line.
However, in the LDS church the leaders can never be replaced, everything the leaders do is God’s will, and we are taught that we must pay tithing if we want to go to heaven. We are also told that we must sustain our leaders to go to the temple and that the temple is required to be in God’s presence again. Simply wanting our leaders to do good is not enough, sustaining our leaders means to obey them and to never criticize them.
This honestly creates a perfect situation for manipulation whether intentional or unintentional. I do think the leaders are really good people that are doing what they personally feel is the best in the situation. However, this really doesn’t mean it actually is. We must separate the person from the office they hold.
Come Follow Me
The first thing I want to look at is the Come Follow Me program which was introduced in June 2018. Initially I thought this was a great idea and would help my family to study the scriptures more effectively. My wife and I did it for 4 years or so and it was kind of nice during the pandemic. However, after doing it for a while then I realized that it was quite selective in what it covered and gave a false sense of actually understanding the scriptures.
This is the same with the Saints books which the church has put out. I used to read that to my family, and I remember reading it and seeing that it was really very misleading in specific cases. In other cases, it was provably wrong. I do understand that the Come Follow Me program never claimed to be authoritative. It was always my responsibility to understand what I was reading.
However, almost without fail, the lessons will ignore important topics or describe what the church wants you to think about the scriptures. This is a fundamental problem in ensuring that we have a basic level of scriptural literacy. How can we say that we understand the scriptures, when we only understand what the church wants us to think?
To illustrate this point then we can look at the Come Follow Me lesson for this week and last week. The lesson for last week covered D&C 26 which is frankly almost completely ignored in the church. In this section, Joseph is told that everything in the church was to be done by common consent.
And all things shall be done by common consent in the church, by much prayer and faith, for all things you shall receive by faith.
D&C 26:2
The early church understood this quite literally. Things were voted on and decisions were binding on the members if the majority of them agreed. For instance, in an 1841 conference a vote was taken concerning newly called leaders. Several people disagreed and the callings were therefore adjusted. In an 1835 conference, the Lectures on Faith were presented to the church and a vote was taken to accept them as binding on the church. The vote was unanimous, and they were adopted. Today the idea of common consent has been massacred from its original intention.
The idea of common consent today is to sustain your leaders and do what they say. We no longer have any say in the church. The only thing we can do is to sit down and be quiet. We can see this in the conference talk that is linked to the section describing D&C 26. In this talk President Eyring says that someday we will have to stand before God, and he will ask us how we sustained our leaders with a version of the following questions:
- Do we look for weaknesses in our leaders?
- Do we look for evidence the leaders are God’s servants?
- Do we obey our leaders?
- Have we told others good things about our leaders?
- Do we pray for and love our leaders?
I completely understand that we should love our leaders as Christ does. However, we should love everyone as Christ does. Placing our leaders though into a special untouchable category is not the solution. The solution is that if someone makes a boneheaded decision then we should correct the error and move on. We shouldn’t have to follow the bad decision, just so that we don’t upset our leader’s feelings.
The lesson for this week is equally perplexing. This lesson covers D&C 27 and 28 and begins with a look at D&C 27:5-14 which describes priesthood keys our leaders have. The interesting part about this is that these verses were not in the original revelation and were added at a later time. In fact, almost all of what the lesson covers about D&C 27 was actually added at a later date. If we look at the original revelation, then it has about 190 words.
The updated revelation though has more than 650 words. This means it is almost 3 1/2 times as long. It also includes all sorts of priesthood concepts that God felt weren’t that important when the revelation was first received by Joseph. In fact, the entire rigid priesthood concept, that we know today, seems to be a later invention.
Now that we have Come Follow Me then that means twice a month we get to hear the leader’s opinions through conference talks, and now twice a month we get to hear the leader’s opinions about the scriptures. Why can’t we have a general discussion about a subject where people share ideas that may contradict someone else’s idea? This is an important aspect of making our own decisions. If we can’t be helped to think of things in a different way, then what is the point of thinking about them at all?
Ministering
The next major change in the church was the announcement that home teaching was being replaced with Ministering. This is also something that I thought would be a good idea at the time. I always strived to be a 100% home teacher and generally was successful. I do admit though that I did this mostly because I thought it was what God wanted. However, it also was a time to have a spiritual discussion which I always enjoyed. Church shouldn’t be the only place that we speak of God.
During the home teaching program, my home teacher would also visit monthly, and we were always very receptive of him and enjoyed our visits. It gave us time to connect with others in the ward on a more personal level which I really liked. I have always enjoyed personal more intimate discussions instead of larger more chaotic group discussions.
After the change to ministering, it seemed like my home teacher just dropped off a cliff. He still was very polite to us, however there was no need for him to visit anymore so he frankly didn’t. He was a great guy and would swing by to say hi and such, but you could tell it was completely different. Ministering was now basically just saying hi at church and that was it.
After the sudden switch to ministering, it was so confusing honestly. My families didn’t really see the need for a visit anymore so that fizzled out, and random unannounced contact always seemed awkward to me. I honestly didn’t really know what to do. I wanted to do something, but I also knew that if my families needed something then they weren’t helpless. They were just as capable of solving their problems as I was.
I am not claiming that home teaching was perfect, or even the best way of doing things. However, it was something tangible that gave the members an opportunity to really get to know each other. I did always think it was strange to be assigned a friend. However, I do remember one home teaching visit that turned into a 3-hour discussion about the church and everything else. Things like this are rarely going to happen with ministering.
I do understand that everyone’s experience is going to be different. Some people are more gifted socially than others. I think though that ministering was the church’s way of fizzling out the already failed home teaching program. When I was in the Elders Quorum presidency, and as Ward Clerk, I saw first-hand that the church generally struggled with home teaching and ministering has only made that worse. The sudden change from a structured program to a completely unstructured program, may have been good on paper, but was a complete failure in practice.
Youth
The next major change in the church was the announcement that the youth program was being switched to a self-directed one instead of the rigid Boy Scouts of America linked program. I completely understand the need to separate from the Boy Scouts of America and fully supported it. Growing up, I never really got into the BSA however I did like several aspects of it.
The problem with this though is that the church had more than 100 years of experience with the BSA style of doing things. In addition to this, the church had all sorts of leaders, at the local level, that were experts at helping the young men. Not just mindlessly do merit badges, but in actually helping them through the program. There is absolutely no reason the church couldn’t have separated from the BSA and then gone with a similar Christian themed organization or even done their own BSA style of doing things.
The LDS church could easily have taken all the good from the BSA and incorporated that into their new program. Instead, they took nothing from it and made a massive instantaneous switch from a highly structured program to a highly unstructured one.
I served in the Young Men’s during the BSA time as well as after it. During the BSA time, I saw the Young Men have a general purpose and structure for their meetings. Of course, this wasn’t perfect and sometimes it felt forced. However, after the switch then essentially there was no structure, and the entire Young Men’s program was self-directed.
The program was designed to get the Young Men to lead and direct, but how do they do this unless they have good examples? The main issue with having the young men self-direct is that every activity devolved to the lowest possible level. Why do things outside of the box, when staying in the box is the simplest thing to do. In addition, BSA style programs encouraged leaders to stay with the young men for several years. This allowed the leaders to get to know the boys and them to know the leaders. There was a possibility for real bonds to be made.
Now, it seems the young men’s program is treated just like any other calling. You have it for 6 months or so and then you get a new leader. There is not the same incentive to develop things like there was before and no incentive to get to know the youth who are the most important people in a ward. The church can’t survive if the youth don’t find value in the church.
In addition to the BSA change, the church made the change of removing the Young Men presidencies and assigning these responsibilities to the Bishopric. In essence, they removed the young men focused leaders and replaced them with adult focused ones instead. Not only this, but they replaced them with the absolute busiest people in the ward. How does this even make sense?
Changes like this mean that the Young Men are likely to suffer and consequently the church will as well. This would only make sense if the church offloaded some of the Bishopric’s responsibilities. However, that would be admitting that many of the things the Bishop currently does, do not in fact require priesthood authority. If this is the case, then why not get the Young Men presidencies back? The more the LDS church tries to fix things, the more that they seem to be tying themselves into a knot. Replacing the BSA with a self-directed program and eliminating the Young Men presidencies was another change that looked really good on paper, but was disastrous in practice.
Conclusion
I understand the reasoning behind every single change. However, it really seems like the changes were made without an understanding of the church organization itself. Like they were made by bureaucrats who only see the church as PowerPoint slides and excel spreadsheets. The changes all make sense at a high level, yet they all fail when put in practice.
Leading a massive organization like the LDS church, has to be difficult. I am not thinking I could do much better. However, the real problem lies in the very nature of the church itself. We are led to believe that the leaders are doing these changes at the will of God. This would then mean that God wants us to be indoctrinated by our leaders, have a fellowship program in name only, and have a failed young men program. This seems very strange to me. Why would God want this?
If the changes were not from God, and the leaders were just doing what they felt best, then why can’t we do something better? Why can’t we do something that actually works, and that is actually going to help us to become better disciples of Jesus? According to the Come Follow Me lesson for last week, then we should have been allowed to vote on each of these changes, yet we were not allowed to. They were just forced on us whether we agreed or not. Is this what God wants? Massive changes to the church based on the whims of the current leader?
I also can’t exclusively blame the leaders as whatever happens in the church is a reflection of the people in the church. The Young Men won’t fail if their parents don’t fail. Ministering is not needed if everyone is godly. Lastly, people will have a true understanding of the scriptures if they seek out and study things for themselves. Therefore, this is a problem of the members as much as it is of the leaders.
However, the reality is that we are nowhere near these levels. We do need to study the scriptures without the interpretations of men. We do need to minister to one another and get to know our fellow followers of Christ. We do need to help the youth to develop an understanding of the good news of the gospel. None of these things will happen if we simply follow the leaders. Yet we are told that we must follow the leaders for them to happen. Mormonism is a paradox that is only getting more complicated.
