Nope, not that rookie. Let’s talk about quarterbacks. It’s tough to be a rookie quarterback in the NFL. In the Thursday Night Football game a couple of weeks ago, unheralded and almost unknown Nick Mullens, who spent all of the 2017 season on the 49ers practice squad and had never played in a regular season NFL game, was the 49ers starting quarterback against the Raiders. The result: 16 of 22 passing, three touchdowns, zero interceptions, and a passer rating of 151.9 (the highest rating for a quarterback’s first start with at least 20 passing attempts since 1970). To say he was impressive is an enormous understatement. Teammates report he practiced hard and prepared zealously for every single game, despite not being on the active roster until this month. Newsflash: preparation pays off, sooner or later. I’m no 49ers fan, but it was a thrill to watch a rookie make the very most of his chance to get on the field.
Now let’s talk about prophets. It’s tough to be a rookie President of the Church. You don’t get your chance to lead in your prime, like quarterbacks do, but in your sunset years. Russell M. Nelson assumed office on January 14, 2018, at the age of 93. Nevertheless, the result: a surge of administrative changes to LDS practice, including two-hour church, a consolidated high elders quorum in all local units, and a commitment to end the LDS use of Scouting as its youth program as of 2020. He has traveled to Europe, Africa, and the Far East since taking office. He named an Asian-American and a Brazilian to the Twelve at his first General Conference. For the last few decades, change, even obvious and badly needed change, happened at a glacial pace within the LDS Church. Suddenly change is the order of the day. You may not like all of the changes, fellow members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but at least someone is driving the bus again.
Perhaps the pace of change for the Nelson-Oaks team seems so rushed only because the Hinckley-Monson team ran the Church for so many years (1995-2018, with Pres. Hinckley basically running the Church as a counselor as early as 1984) and pretty much sailed straight and steady at standard speed for most of two generations. “All is well in Zion” might have been their motto, whereas “buckle your seatbelts” is the new one.
There is no “prophet rating” that we can use to compare first-year performance of LDS Presidents, but I’ll at least offer a few quick observations:
- Preparation pays off: Pres. Nelson obviously had a lot of changes he wanted to make, a game plan if you will, and moved forward with little hesitation upon taking office.
- Change at the top: This isn’t the first time a change in who occupies the office of President has led to big changes. Three years after taking office, Wilford Woodruff announced the end of the practice of polygamy in 1890, which John Taylor (d. 1887) showed no indication of being willing to do. Five years after taking office in 1973, Spencer Kimball ended the priesthood and temple ban that had been in place since the 1850s, which his precessor Harold B. Lee would not have been inclined to consider, much less enact.
- Can anyone argue with two-hour church? After fiddling around with pilot programs for decades, Pres. Nelson stopped the fiddling and just made it happen.
- Retrenchment: It’s too early to make a definitive pronouncement, but it sure looks like Retrenchment 2.0. That sort of tempers my enthusiasm and may give some readers pause when the changes move from administrative changes to doctrinal changes. But Nixon went to China. Maybe Pres. Nelson will too.
Wheat & Tares 
I can’t disagree with any of your comments.
Having substituted this week with the young-ones in Primary – I worry even 2 hours is still too much for that age. But it is an improvement.
Nixon did more than go to China. Is there a subtext implied by your last two sentences?
JR, my thinking is that Nixon was the last person who would have been expected to establish relations with “Red China.” But he did. Pres. Nelson is the last person we would expect to reverse the Church’s course on the November Policy. …
One thing that didn’t make my list of rookie accomplishments is the new Come Follow Me curriculum to be applied to Sunday School and family home study. It will really be interesting to see how the execution phase of the program goes. I’m guessing there will be some short-term compliance with the home study thing, but within six months not one in five families will be doing an hour of study together at home.
Same with ministering, which is having trouble defining itself in practice. “We want you to really care about your fellow ward members” is way too general to actually work. Having the assigned “minister” visit the assigned “ministerees” once a month might work, but hey, that’s just home teaching, and they CANCELLED that program, so obviously that is not what they want us to do. So what exactly do they want us to do? Most members can’t really answer that question, so not much is getting done. But it’s nice that home teaching died a quiet death.
So they killed home teaching and they killed an hour of church each week. I think they underestimated the eagerness and willingness of the membership to replace that hour and that program with something else, especially undefined programs like home study and ministering.
I hate to be cynical but can’t help but feel that for the most part RMN’s changes are just his working down his list of hobby horses that had piled up over the years. His wife basically confirmed this to be true in her recent interview.
Yeah his hobby horse of 2hr church.