As bishop you have had a hard month. Lots of problems, meetings, etc. that took you away from your wife and young family. Last Friday you had a date night planned with your wife, had a babysitter lined up and at the last second had to cancel due to bishop duties. Your wife was understandably upset, but did not complain. When you got home late Friday night you promised her that next Friday would be hers.
You arrange for your mother to watch the kids, and everything is going to be great. Your wife is just getting in the car, and you are walking around the car when you hear the phone ring. You both look at each other, and you stop walking. Your wife gives you that look.
You are the bishop, what do you do?
- Go back in the house and answer the phone, knowing that it could be something that might take you away from your planned date
- Ignore the phone
- Tell your wife you are going to answer the phone, but will not commit to anything that would stop your date
This very scenario was presented by a GA during a Bishop training meeting I attended. He said it really happened to a bishop he knew. I will post his answer in the comments in a few days.
Wheat & Tares 
According to church doctrine, I will not live sealed to my ward in the afterlife. I would go on the date.
I do wonder how cell phones have changed this equation where someone can text a bishop almost anytime. If you are on a date do you read the text (could be the sitter asking, “I can’t find the diapers”).
This series is turning into, “I am glad I am not a bishop!” (and will probably never be).
Do not go back to answer the phone.
The role of bishop is as an ecclesiastical leader. Bishops make assignments in a ward and they are available by appointment to discuss spiritual matters. They also do emergency handholding and lots of delegating. Anything else that they get pulled into is a problem with boundaries.
Too often, a bishop forgets that a trained police department exists. They forget about the nation’s entire system of services and professionals. Too often, a bishop wants a front seat for every bit of drama going on in someone’s marriage. Too often the ward members pull such a bishop into a role of referee.. The bishop’s capacity to cause harm is greater than they know.
Do not answer the phone. The person attempting to reach you can call the next person on their list.
Too often, bishops insert thrmselves too deeply in a ward. That is not healthy for them, their family or for the ward. Too often, a bishop forgets that his marriage is a long term commitment and the assignment as bishop is temporary.
Good grief. Boundaries.
Cell phones became a thing while I was bishop. The only people that had my cell number were my counselors, and the RS Pres. Nobody else in the ward had it. It worked out very well that way.
I remember this happening to my father my I was a kid. It was the second summer he was bishop and there had been a rash of suicides in the ward over the previous two months. The phone call came as he and my mom were leaving to celebrate the conclusion of a large project at work that had had him traveling to Australia and New Zealand every couple months for 3 weeks at a time. This time it was my of my best friends’ mom whose family had been over for dinner two nights before. Her husband had just eaten a .38 for literally no reason, no warning, no problems in his or his family of 4 kids lives. The family is still shattered and scattered 25 years on.
You take the damn phone call.
Don’t answer the phone. Let the answering machine get it and don’t listen to the message until you get back home. If the person on the other side has an emergency so critical that it has to be dealt with NOW, then there are organizations provided by the local, state, federal government (911, Domestic Abuse Hotline, etc.) and to be honest most of those are better qualified to deal with emergencies than bishops anyway.
I’ve heard of wards where ward members are trained to never call the bishop. They call the counselors, secretary, or RS Pres. Then those people vet the situation and decide if the bishop should be involved. Seems like a good way to go.
I’m 50/50 on whether the training meeting said to answer or flee with the wife. I could see the conversation going either way.
Elder Holland has told that story at least once in the General Conference.
I’ve heard a story like this before. Assuming it the same story, the call was from a woman who was preparing to commit suicide. The bishop was able to talk her down and get her the help she needed. The wife never knew until some time later when the lady told the wife in gratitude for her support for her husband. The intended message is fairly obvious, but some of the implied messages are problematic.
I would select option 3 with the added exception the if there was a real emergency then the date would need to be postponed, but NO fake emergencies. Sorry Bro. Jones, but I’m not going to approve your high aventure plan over the phone Friday night and I don’t care if the down payment is due tomorrow. You’ll just have to figure something else out.
It depends, doesn’t it? Damascene shares a very valuable insight. Of special note: “The bishop’s capacity to cause harm is greater than they know. Please be very afraid when a bishop’s counsel goes beyond reviewing the scriptures and starts approaching therapy.
But anyone will want to follow the prompting of the Spirit. Instead of a ward member, it might be an attorney from Turkey calling to say that the bishop’s mother is dead and his father is under arrest.
It can go too far to another extreme. I know of a bishop who will not allow his phone number or e-mail address to be shared with ward members, not even the ward Young Men president. He never comes to the building on Mutual night and never goes on any activity with the priests quorum, never goes to a stake dance, and so forth. He cites his love for his own family as his rationale for avoiding the duties of his office.
Ignore the phone
My last bishop had an answering machine and filtered EVERY call 24/7. He also only shared his “family” email which was used by his wife and kids. He and his wife were extremely protective of their time.
If a bishop or RS president were to follow the GAs, all letters, all calls, all issues and contacts would be vetted and 99% returned unopened or “delegated”.
At some point, if everything gets filtered down to visiting/home teachers and quorum leaders, then THEY ought to be given the mantle to deal with it all. But, they don’t have the mantle, don’t have specific spiritual blessings given in calling to deal with most of life’s messes. Neither do they have the status or the respect to hold ecclesiastical authorit. Until we have a flatter organization structure, “tag” bishop, you are it. Want less? Then delegate more power and autonomy.
Btw, I’m sure the answer to the phone question is for the bishop to use his spidey-sense and discern whether it was a something he was needed for or not. If he felt the answer was to ignore it, he’s right, if he felt te answer was to pick up, he’s right. Get it?
The sad truth is that most bishops answer the phone and the family becomes second to the calling. One of my best friends did this type of behavior as routine during his call. He was released one year ago.I would tell him to make his family first but to no avail.
I still remember the cartoon with a guy asleep in a recliner. The phone is ringing and an answering machine says “you’ve reached Bishop (whoever). I can’t come to the phone but read two chapters of the Book of Mormon and call me in the morning.”
I called a home teacher one Monday evening when I was in desperate need of a blessing and in excruciating pain. I am forever grateful to this man for answering his phone on family home evening night then finding a companion that could come and help me. I know that’s not the same as the bishop being on call. Maybe that’s the point we need to rely more on the home teachers.
If he has been delegating as he should, and teaching his ward members that if they are suicidal, there is the suicide hot line with caring people who are better trained than he is, teaching the ward that there are times they should call police, times they need professional counseling, when to call home or visiting teachers, when to call the RSP, and that if they really need him, but he isn’t available, there are bishopric counselors the person can call, so, if he has delegated there should not be a problem and he can ignore the call.
So, I agree with Damascene above. Bishops often get themselves too embedded in the ward, wanting to be in on everything that happened to every ward member. They need to learn to delegate and teach ward members that they are not the best/only person in the world to solve whatever problem the person is faced with.
As a mental health professional, I was taught not to give out my home phone number, or now it would be my cell phone. There were places where my clients could call if they were having any kind of bad time. I worked with rape victims and they are much more likely to be suicidal than ward members. So, if professionals have boundaries about when clients simply cannot get ahold of their therapist, they why shouldn’t bishops.
If two weeks in a row he has a date canceling emergency, he has failed to delegate to his counselors and others who are also qualified to handle emergencies.
Answer the call. Tell the person to get a life. Maybe go to hell. Hang up.
Celebrate release on the next date night which might be less than a week.
Problem solved.
The answer the 70 gave us bishops was to NOT answer the phone, and go on the date; somebody else could take care of the problem. He went on saying that after we serve our 5-6 years, the church wants us to still be married and to have a job, and that the brethren were seeing that this was not always the case. He further delineated the duties a bishop could not delegate, like approving welfare payments, and determining worthiness. But everything else could be done by counselors, EQP, RSP, or HPGL. That included marital counseling, financial planning, etc.
I took his advice to heart, and anytime somebody asked for welfare assistance, I told them they would have to meet with the HPGL who was a financial planner, who would work out the details and get back to me. This worked out very well. I’d usually help with the immediate needs, but the HPGL would then let me know what long term help they would need, and after shedding Cable TV, cell phones for all the kids, etc, the church would then step in and help.
That is a different answer than in the story that Elder Holland told in the October 2002 General Conference: https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2002/10/called-to-serve
However, Holland was talking about following the promptings of Spirit. He was NOT giving an advice to bishops to always answer the phone. He makes it very clear right after the story:
“Brothers and sisters, please understand that I am one who preaches emphatically a more manageable, more realistic expectation of what our bishops and other leaders can do. I especially feel that a wide range of civic, professional, and other demands which take parents, including and especially mothers, out of homes where children are being raised is among the most serious problems in contemporary society. And because I am adamant about spouses and children deserving sacred, committed time with a husband and father, nine times out of ten I would have been right alongside that wife telling her husband not to answer that telephone. But I am as grateful in my own way as that young woman was in hers that in this instance this good man followed the prompting of the Spirit and responded to his “call”—in this case, literally—his “call to serve.” “
Perhaps the bishop’s answering machine could say something similar to what physician’s answering machines say:
“Bishop so-and-so isn’t available to answer your call. If this is an emergency, hang up and dial 911, or contact your home teacher or my counselors, HPGL, EQP, or RS president. If this is not an emergency please leave a message and I will get back to you as soon as I can.”
Who can the counselors delegate to? Answer-usually no one. Honestly, when one of the counselors is out of town, why does the bishop get to delegate to the remaining one?
Bishops are given many blessings and the ward circles around the bishop and his wife. She gets sympathy, he and the church approach his employer to communicate his upcoming time obligations. Bishopric members? Nothing of the sort.
I don’t know how historic SLC wards in rich areas with 600+ Pioneer family members function, but in most small branches and wards where there are maybe 75 active members (men, women, children) , there are between 5-10 families that do everything. Flag news: everyone misses Friday night date night. There aren’t enough people, certainly not enough PH holders to routinely delegate weekday assignments and calls as this training might imply. Bishops have to take their turn too. Just because you can delegate doesn’t mean that the people under you aren’t as burned out as you are. Good leaders don’t ask their troops to do any more than they aren’t willing to do themselves.
Of course ordaining women would double your potential delegation pool… Double the blessings, double the ecclesiastical authority. But, no one is holding their breath for that to happen anytime soon.
Don’t answer it (unless you truly feel prompted by the spirit in that moment, and I mean a voice actually telling you–against your own inclinations–or perhaps a lightning bolt or some such). Bishops have to have a life too, and given that the bishop has already accepted the calling, it’s likely he’s got issues with balance. 😉
I read the Holland talk from 2002. So much of the talk was about how families were in dire circumstances when men went off to serve the church but those families somehow managed to survive.
When it moved to modern times, a bishop’s sacrifice led to a woman being saved from sexual sin and preserving her marriage.
The talk is taking starvation, illness and abandonment in a family and kind of comparing those sacrifices to preventing sexual sin of a young wife. It was easy to read this possible sexual sin of a wife as the ultimate evil that only a call to a worthy bishop could stop.
Through most of my life, I would’ve agreed.
Once I realized that many of those men who were sent off on missions for the church eventually returned to Utah with another wife, it has changed how I see all those old stories. The original families suffered greatly while those men maintained a high enough lifestyle while in the mission field to be able to convince women from significant socioeconomic backgrounds that they were worthy of marriage.
The woman Pratt brought back wasn’t even truly divorced.
Such stories put all the family sacrifices in a different light — and not a good one.
About suicides and calls to bishops .. My favorite suicide story was a patient who called her insurance company, gave all her policy info and then asked if suicide attempts were covered by her policy. When the answer was yes, she said “thank you” and hung up. Her insurance rep then called 911 in her area.
People either commit suicide in a real way or they “attempt” suicide as a cry for help. The ones who are looking for help know how to call multiple people. The bishop isn’t the only call they make.
And yes, working in healthcare has jaded me.
KJV Luke 14:26 If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.
Mosiah 2:17 And behold, I tell you these things that ye may learn wisdom; that ye may learn that when ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God.
Mortimer, I don’t know if it was this same 70, but I was also told as bishop to wear out my counselors, and change them every 18-24 months. The 70 said you are in for the long haul (5-6 years, and sometimes more) so you need to pace yourselves, but the counselors can be worked hard and then replaced. I had 6 counselors in 5 years. Longest was 3 years, shortest was 6 months.
Bishop Bill, just a comment about the pattern of wearing out the counselors. My husband was 1st C to a bishop with this attitude, and the one year he spent in that position changed his attitude toward the church. We both realized that the church uses people up, then spits them out. Since that time, neither one of us has been willing to take any leadership calling at all. Being “used up” that way brought us closer to divorce that any thing else in 44 years of marriage. It was the turning point for me to pull away from the church, because I started to see that the church can be abusive to individuals and seeing as I grew up in an abusive family, I need to protect myself from potential abusers. To put someone in the impossible position that the bishop put our family in is abusive because no one can live up to expectations. Callings should never make you hate God.
Anna, I’m so sorry to hear about your husband. I can say that I never abused or “wore out” my counselors. They all remain good friends, two have been bishops, and a 3rd is most likely being called as bishop in a few weeks. All are still active and call me bishop when they see me.
What I liked about Holland’s talk was he gave a rule (don’t take the call) and then he explained that sometimes you should break the rule.
Given the percentage of adult men who were polygamists, the number who brought home extra wives would have been a small outlier.
A small minority is not the same thing as an outlier.
As aside on Pratt, from the Wiki entry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parley_P._Pratt
Quote:
“Pratt was acquitted because of a lack of evidence and Judge Ogden’s own feelings after interviewing Eleanor.[38] Judge Ogden sympathized with Eleanor and Pratt, because he was so disgusted by Hector’s drinking and wife-beating.[39] Shortly after being secretly released, on May 13, 1857, Pratt was shot and stabbed by Hector on a farm northeast of Van Buren, Arkansas.[38] He died two and a half hours later from loss of blood.[38]”
I would not take Pratt’s story as common or usual.
Not to mention they were married after she came to Utah, not before.
One of my wife’s ancestors met her polygamous husband while he was serving a mission in England (he didn’t come home with her, but he later helped rescue her handcart company, and then married her very soon after she arrived in Salt Lake). I don’t think that kind of thing was unusual.
As far as divorce went, back then, my understanding is that quite frequently divorces weren’t formalized. A wife would leave her husband and would consider herself to be divorced, even if no court had formalized the divorce. One of my ancestor’s sisters apparently unofficially divorced her abusive husband and then married Joseph Smith. That seems to be the case with Pratt’s marriage as well.
Don’t take the call, duh. Unless the Holy Spirit is screaming otherwise.
Question: What do you personally need a bishop for anyway?
I haven’t talked to my bishop except causally for more than 10 years.
I guess if you find the temple inspiring then that is a once every 2 years, 5 minute interview. Questions of doctrine? They are middle managers too busy for much intellectual depth . Better off asking just about anyone on the internet. If you need financial assistance, are we not to go to family then gov’t sources first? In the US the gov’t has it about covered.
Bishops might have the broadest perspective of the psycho-social picture of the whole ward. So what? I honestly cannot think of a single personal scenario when the bishop is the BEST person to call. Any suggestions?
I had a friend who wanted to be a doctor but he didn’t want any emergencies. He was told to go into dermatology since there are no emergencies in that field. The emergency doctors could deal with all the skin emergencies. Isn’t the job of a bishop even less emergency-prone?
Just what the heck is a spiritual emergency? I’ve got to talk to you in the next 5 minutes or I’m going to…. lose my testimony? That might not be much of testimony worth saving. Same goes for moral fortitude and almost losing sexual virtue.
We have been trained to think we need to be constantly spoon-fed by important people. Trained co-dependency; boundary issues. The bishop is close enough that we see him every week, but is really really important. Maybe not.
If we collectively left the bishop and the ward leadership alone, maybe they could do a better job running the ward and with better managed wards maybe more of these problems would melt away.
I was tongue-in-cheek when I gave my harsh suggestion above. (Tell them to go to hell.) But it is true; it just needs to be sugar-coated for our sacchrine-day saints.
Bishop Bill, I was not meaning to imply that you were unfairly “using your counselors up,” because you sound like a decent and fair guy. I was just objecting to the idea that the bishop should consider his counselor’s expendable, and the teminology of “using them up,” because my husband was quite literally used up. He was used until it damaged his testimony and willingness to serve. The bishop didn’t care that he was overloading his counselors because his demanding job made him a poor choice for a bishop to begin with. He was out of town half the time, expecting his 1st counselor to cover everything, from confessions of adultery to funerals, to marriage counseling. So, my husband ended up with 1/2 the bishop’s stuff, plus all the 1st counselor is supposed to do.
I just think we need to pay more attention to the mental well being of EVERY ONE in the big callings in the ward, not just the bishop.
So, should the RSP pick up the phone when she is just going out to take her child to the park? No, whatever the bishop needs from her can wait. It should be the same answer, but I bet people are less willing to say, no she should not pick up the phone, because most likely it is the bishop who is going to tell her to go grocery shopping for a family who is out of food, or that arrangements need to be made for a funeral, or, or, or, but it is most likely the bishop on the phone.
The church claims that family comes first, but in practice one is never supposed to say no to a calling, or to set limits on the amount of time they spend on church callings. The church is working at teaching bishops to put their family somewhere around the bottom of the priority list, but at least for bishops they are trying to teach them family comes first.
Back in Brigham’s day the term “use ’em up” had a somewhat different coded meaning. The Danites were supposed to slit their throats and bury the bodies in the desert where they would never be found. (This according to the ever-reliable yellow press of that era).
Times have changed, somewhat. Personally, being descended from Danites and aware that some of those “gifts” were hereditary, I have never used anyone up and would discourage others from doing so. But if you want to follow the prophet instead of me, go on ahead.
Kullervo:
Does the Holy Spirit scream? Something rattling around my rusty bucket of a head about the still small voice. Help me out here. Maybe substitute common sense is screaming…
Mike, i think you, and the church and many members are conflating the roles of bishops and stake presidents. Bishops are supposed to be supporting more temporal needs, but we seem to be experiencing a strange type of GA-wanna-be-inflation where everyone wants to act like a ASAP or GA and focus on the higher things. Bishops are day-to-day guys with spiritual keys to shepherd the flock and serve.
Bishop Bill,
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh! I’m speechless. Wait. I found a word or two. I’ll muster the strength.
Like Anna, I’m disgusted by the fact that there is such a hierarchy and that the higher up you are, the more protected you are. I reiterate that a good leader Wouldn’t ask anyone else to do anything that he/she wouldn’t ask of themselves. Thank you for sharing the training advice though. We normally wouldn’t have that perspective and it could potentially blindside someone (as Anna describes). I suppose it would be a lot easier to accept if the bishop were upfront when calling counselors and told them to anticipate a fast and hard experience. Can you imagine thinking you are going to go 5-8+ years at that unrelenting and heavily burdened pace? Sounds like a recipe for bad outcomes.