In response to my counselor sharing concerns about us going in many directions

Steven,

Thank you for candidly sharing your feelings.

I’ll share my thoughts. My apology, too, as this may be long as well.

First, being a singe-message stake presidency is not realistic in today’s Church, in my opinion for two reasons:

1. With so many announcements from SLC, we have a lot of different messages and directions coming at us with the expectation that we’ll implement them effectively (5 elements of Work of Salvation, 9 key indicators on Quarterly Report) and at the same time efficiently (“reduce and simplify”)…yes, like Elder Ghent said, we don’t have to jump on all of them, but to focus on one and ride only that message for the length of time you’d like is not realistic or wise—again in my opinion;

2. Just a year ago, every ward had three key men (bishopric) who realistically had the responsibility and authority to move forward the work in that ward. In April, that changed to five people (bishopric + EQ - RS presidents). In October, it went to nine people (bishopric + EQ and RS presidencies). Who’s going to help and train them in their new responsibilities…and hold them accountable? If we expect the bishopric to do that, then we’re back to everything going through them. Because of the priesthood key relationship between the EQ presidency and stake presidency we are the ones who should take the additional  responsibility for conducting the training through the HC, as we’ve done in the past but now with more focus.

I feel we have done a good job in helping the bishoprics to focus on the rising generation and shift more responsibility to the EQ and RS presidencies. But it means we and the HC will need to step up.

As for the quick turnaround of the document I introduced in HC. My apologies for how quickly that came together. I’m sure I could have done a better job in slowing down that train. Please forgive me. 

I was somewhat weighed down by the vagueness of the Oct 6, 2018 letter. We all seemed to be a little uncertain how to implement that, evidenced by the bishops calling sisters to serve as the Ward Temple and Family History Leader. And we had done the same, too, it seems with Jodi Nelson’s calling. I was also struggling with the document I sent you the week earlier suggesting that the HC begin conducting quarterly training with EQ-RS counselors and WML. So when I watched the RootsTech Leadership presentation everything suddenly came together and cleared up in my mind. It was such clear and direct revelation that I didn’t even give a second thought about counseling with others. I just wanted to get it out as quickly as possible to dispel the five months of “confusion” we had all experienced.

It was not revealed to me exactly how we’re to engage the HC in this additional training. But at least we have the “scaffolding” in place—the structure for conducting the training—and I’m confident that through our counseling as a presidency and HC we’ll discover how to help the leaders become more effective in moving forward these two all-important elements of the Work of Salvation dealing with “gathering Israel.”

Let me return to your concerns about our jumping around to different training topics. 

I hope we are not a stake where unless the stake president is focusing on it, it doesn’t happen. That’s why a stake president (certainly in my case) is blessed with two mighty counselors and 14 wonderfully capable HC, clerk, and exec sec. So when I hand you and Steven the baton of a matter of that I feel is of great importance to the Lord, I appreciate you both (working through the HC and others) receiving those batons with as much fervor as I held initially. Just because my focus has changed does not mean we can’t keep moving the previous hot points along, too. We are capable of being more than a one-track stake. When we were called into the stake presidency, we were handed keys to a machine with 36+ moving parts (12 HC each with an average of 3 assignments). Fortunately, the Lord has given us these capable leaders who can focus on helping those moving parts become even more effective. It’s our job to help each of those HC to measure up.

I am not overly concerned that we’re moving too quickly or putting too much on ward councils. Hopefully they’re getting the message with what we’ve seen from the Brethren in the past 12 months that they must learn to delegate. How we’ve seen the Brethren move so much responsibility and authority down to the EQ and RS counselors has been stunning…but very telling of how the future of this growing Church looks. So it breaks my heart when we hear a bishop tell us that their ward council meetings are not needed weekly because they end up talking about the same people over and over. They haven’t caught the vision yet of where this Church is going. That is my failure.

Finally, let me remind us that we were not called to be “caretakers of this stake.” The parable of the talents tells us that the Lord expects us to move things forward, whether on one or many fronts. With the variety of fronts the Brethren are approaching…so very quickly…our role, in my opinion, is to follow their lead and help more leaders and members to step up and assume greater responsibility on as many different fronts as possible.

I hope this is helpful. I am so grateful for all that everyone in stake and ward leadership are doing. It is an honor to serve with you and the others in our presidency.

Crismon

Hi Everyone,

I mentioned in my other email that I'm feeling some worries about how fast and how often we're emphasizing something new for the wards to be doing.

Our turn-around on the meeting that was on Thursday was so fast that I don't know that they have had time to think about what that should look like in their wards. I worry that when we do all of the work and interpreting and explaining to them that they either come to expect it all of the time from us or stop thinking for themselves and just sort of do what we say to do. With the turn-around on the meeting from Thursday, we didn't give Brother Howes any time to ponder and reflect and counsel with us. I'd like to talk about this some more on Sunday in our meeting.

I'm worried that when we move from one thing to another to another that we're not consistently able to emphasize something to gain considerable traction in something. I know that President Lewis felt strongly about having everyone in the Stake do the Self-Reliance class. I think that's stalled some because we focus our attention on other things that pop up, like the Temple and Family History and like Gospel Teaching in Sunday School and like Missionary Work.

Likewise, Just Serve--President has felt very strongly about getting members to serve more often. But then, it doesn't go as well as it could because ward leaders are being pulled in many different directions from all of the different big things that want them to emphasize. So I worry that everything gets done a little (some people do service, some people do Self-Reliance, some people do family history, some people consistently do missionary work, some leaders focus on the youth, etc.) I know that I am pulled in many different directions--I'm sure it's only magnified even more on a ward level.

I'm sure some of this is incoherent, as I'm writing it in my cold car as I wait for Violet's dance lesson to be done, but I guess what I'm possibly proposing (if I'm really proposing something) is that we settle on what it is we'd really like to emphasize/focus on and stick with that and not get away from that idea. If we feel like the temple and family history and missionary work "vein" is the direction we'd like to focus on, then we can focus on that and ask the ward councils to spend their time on that instead of self reliance and Just Serve. Or do we feel like we want Bishoprics to spend time focusing on the youth, so we shouldn't push them to concentrate on temple and family history and missionary work until they've got the youth all figured out? Or have the Bishoprics spend time with their SS Presidencies to focus on good 2nd hour teaching? Even though we can help train SS Presidencies, it's still going to come down to Bishoprics working with them to have solid teaching. I do think that it's still a matter of what the Bishoprics/Ward Councils spend their time on that work well in the ward. (I also worry that a 1-hour meeting once a week isn't enough time to try to focus on more than 1 thing at a time, but that's another long email.)

All things to mull over and discuss if anyone else feels like me right now.

Steven