On Sunday afternoon, Elder Gong of the Twelve led an online Face to Face broadcast that was directed to parents, teachers, auxiliary leaders, and local leaders, as well as children and youth. So pretty much everyone in the Church. The topic was the new LDS youth program that kicks in starting January 2020, replacing Scouting for young men and redirecting the LDS program for young women. Let’s talk about it. I’ll just throw out some bullet points and invite further comment and discussion from readers.
It’s the next generation. There appears to be a lot of understandable concern among the senior leadership about doubts and faith crisis and keeping LDS youth active in the Church. It’s reasonable to think the content and focus of the new youth program responds to those concerns. This is a key part of their plan to address faith crisis, doubts, and youth retention in the upcoming post-Millennial generation, aka Gen Z.
It’s still not very clear what the new program is. It is church-supported and home-centered. Local units have a fair amount of choice in how to set up the new program. Individual youth have a lot of choice in what goals they want to pursue. But there wasn’t much additional detail in the broadcast and there doesn’t seem to be much additional detail at the Church website. I’m thinking youth leaders and local leaders are a little uncertain exactly what’s going to happen starting in January. My sense is that, at least for LDS young men, things will be a lot “churchier” than Scouting.
Let’s do service and let’s have activities. There will be service projects and there will be activities and youth are supposed to take the lead in identifying, organizing, and leading these projects and activities. Sounds good so far, as long as the youth step up and put some effort into planning all this, with some assistance and direction from adult leaders. The broadcast showed a group of LDS young women doing a rock climbing and rappelling activity, which sort of expands the range of activities the young women might do. Sounds good.
We’ve got an app for that. There are some online tools that will be made available to identify service projects and for youth to set goals and monitor progress. The broadcast referred to some in-house social media apps that LDS youth can use to chat with peers. That sounds like the right approach for smartphone-focused youth.
Thumbs up or thumbs down? I’m not pushing either way on this. With so much choice and control delegated to local units and the youth themselves individually, how things actually work in the boots-on-the-ground sense at the many wards and stakes in the Church will only become clear as we move into 2020. There are a lot of great LDS youth out there in our wards and stakes. I hope this new approach works well for them.
Wheat & Tares 
1. Watching beloved Elder Gong speak on a noisy talk show set was a nice juxtaposition of sacred and profane, but I’m not sure that was the intent.
2. I don’t think there is any program. Seems like the institution is trying to fill the void of Boy Scouts with an updated LDS 2.0 version, and expand it to both young men and women for efficient economy.
3. Offering badges and trophies to my children for their spiritual pursuits is a little offensive to me—I don’t teach my children that way.
4. The institution seems off-track. The whole presentation—the use of digital props, the MTV-like editing, the loud colors—felt like secular evangelical Christianity. I was waiting for the announcement: “We’ve invited special guest Pastor Joel Osteen…!”
5. I am not excited that the institution has offered my children a social media app. It takes so much energy to get kids away from the digital world, the last thing I need to compete with is an institutional policy—a stupid one—that puts my children’s heads into a device.
I had high hopes and low expectations, one of those was realized…
The mantra of “home centered and church supported” was chanted several times which made the response to I think the last question even more troubling for me. It was the question that said a girl and her grandmother were the only members in her family so how could this new program work for her? Instead of seriously talking about the implications of the mantra for those who don’t have home support, instead of admonishing local leaders to make sure that children without home support don’t slip through the cracks, and instead of outlining several official ways to address that issue that would indicate the general leaders are well aware of the pitfalls that may exist with this model, we instead got a feel good story about a girl in the Philippines who made a goal to read the Book of Mormon and her non member family read it with her and they all got baptized and went to the temple, so, no problem here at all.
All of the ward and youth changes carry the possibility that the rich will get richer while the poor get poorer. Strong wards, strong families and strong children will probably thrive. But the ones most vulnerable that don’t have that strength to fall back on, the ones who most need a strong church organization to make up for a weak or non existent family structure, seem to not be much of a concern.
Travis, I’m not sure where your “badges and trophies” comment comes from. They mentioned a ring at age 8 (to replace the traditional CTR ring?) a necklace or second ring at age 12 (similar to the current YW necklace) and a third item at 18 (consecrated oil vial for YM, a second medallion for YW. Compared to the old program, this is nothing.
In general, I think these are all good changes. Here’s a list of why
1) Budget equalization between YM and YW, and boys/girls in primary.
2) Focus on personally meaningful goals. (With the old program, YM that didn’t like scouting and/or basketball had nothing.)
3) Primary activities 2-4x a month for both genders, rather than cub scouts weekly and girls activity days monthly.
4) Similarly, YM have been reduced to quarterly overnight camps, rather than monthly with BSA.
5) This will free up a ton of adult leadership, which was previously required for YM (2 per quorum) and Cubs (2 per den).
I still have questions, though.
A) How do the weeknight activities tie into goals? Also, all the activities shown would take a full day, not an hour in the evening.
B) What’s the summer camp schedule? My understanding is FSY on even-numbered years, with stake-wide youth conferences alternating with handcart treks on odd-numbered years (So once every four years). Girls camp every year for YW. A similar single multi-day camp for all YM. Is this on the ward level? Quorum level? stake level?
I’m all for local empowerment and decentralization. And I really like the “home-based” approach. But I don’t see what role the YM/YW Program plays in a child’s effort to make and accomplish non-spiritual goals. If my kid wants to be a great athlete or artist, she is going to pursue this with her parents’ help and the Church/YW Program plays no role in that. Should we report to the Bishopric on how my kids are progressing with their personal goals (sports, academics, social, etc.)? It has nothing to do with the Church.
Did anyone else think the presentation was too long for its intended audience? If you invite 8 year olds, you should keep it under an hour. This was almost double that, which felt too long.
Yeah. Way too long. 30 minutes of information crammed into two hours.
Couple of things…
The group activities like rock climbing look great. I live in CA and the options for outdoor recreation are vast. But where is the money coming from if we are going to load up on these? Or are these only for wealthier wards where parents pay the kids’ way?
The thing about doing a more high-tech, TV-talk-show setting is that the speakers have to match that, which is a skill on its own. It felt canned/scripted/staged to the point of it almost being humorous. Nothing about it was natural. The whole Face-to-Face idea is falling apart for me because to work it needs to be people being themselves. Otherwise, it’s not a real interaction. It’s a play.
Am I the only person who has a problem with the young men not having to say that they are sons of Heavenly Parents when they repeat their YM theme weekly? Why did the Church leaders do this? Is this just another attempt to show our teenage boys that the Priesthood is a good old boys club even when it comes to Heavenly Mother? My own feeling is that this is not only an affront to the females in the Church but it’s an even greater affront to our Heavenly Parents. I can’t help but feel that our Heavenly Parents grieve mightily when they see the male leadership of the Church set up toxic gender roles based on how things used to be in less enlightened times (when the ancient GAs grew up, married and had their families). I can’t help but feel that Heavenly Mother is co-equal to the Father and not just some drudge who lets Him boss Her around by giving her the old”I’m the Priesthood so you have to obey me” routine. I could be wrong. The other problem with the new YW theme is that all it really talks about is getting married and having babies. For many LDS women this is happening later in life, by marrying a widower or a divorced man, or not at all because of the mass exodus of men from the Church. Other women marry but are unable to have children. The theme sets girls up for guilt when everything doesn’t go according to all those lessons given in YW. Why can’t we focus instead on helping each individual child/youth develop their own personal relationship with the individual members of the Godhead (including HM!) as well as helping them to find out who they were sent here to earth to become. I’d also add lots of service outside of the ward and LDS community. I live along the “Mormon Corridor” that goes from Idaho to Arizona. One of the gripes I hear most from non-LDS friends is that the only time they see church members doing service for non-members is when there’s been an emergency. I’m sure that this is different the farther away church members live from here. We also need to teach our children to respect other religions too rather than look down on them because “they don’t have the truth”. At my son’s grade school there were at least 10 different religions practiced by the students. Unfortunately, the Mormon majority made the small minority feel left out. Our wise principal invited the leader or a representative of each faith to come and speak as a group to the students about what all of these faiths had in common. There was so much that these faiths had in common! It was a beautiful experience and fostered respect for the adherents of different beliefs. While I’m sure that such a thing would be frowned on by most ward leaders and parents it would be a wise use of the time that the YW/YM have each week. Sorry for the soapbox. I feel strongly about these issues.
I didn’t watch the broadcast, but from what I’ve seen so far Travis is right that there is no program.
Are we entering a period of de-correlation? The youth program is changing to individual goals, taking away the structure of the scouts? The YW classes don’t even have names anymore.
Sunday school manuals are becoming more the same for each class, but say the same thing. And by making half the lessons just draw from the latest general conference, they no longer have to produce lesson manuals that cover the whole year. Except they do, because the Family still has the Come Follow Me to read every week, and nobody apparently told the Sunday School manual writers that lessons would only be twice per month.
Okay what’s my point? I’m not trying to be critical. Perhaps having more flexibility will be an improvement. Perhaps local wards and stakes will innovate and trigger a re-correlation with new and improved programs.
But it does seem like these things are happening without a lot of thought. The PoX was so bad it had to be changed, er, “clarified” within days off leaking, and then rescinded in a few years.
Even changes that I hoped for are turning out kinda weird. 2 hour church is great, but I’m still not used to every-other-week classes, and people just mill around forever in the 10 minutes between sacrament and Sunday school. And the teachers have trouble filling the Sunday School time.
I think it’s great that women can witness baptisms. But interestingly, an elderly sister I know works in the temple baptistry. She hated it because all she could do was hand out towels. She was bored out of her mind and felt useless. She could be replaced by a shelf. Now that women can witness baptisms, well, it’s no different I think, because they’ll have the youth do it. She’s still going to be handing out towels.
So I guess my point is that change often has side effects that we don’t anticipate, maybe not for years. We may not really know what the new youth program is going to be for a long, long time.
I agree with the comments on length. All three presentations I’ve seen on the new program have been mostly sales pitches. But I’m a temple recommend holding member, I’m pre-sold on anything the church officially sponsors. I don’t need a sales brochure, as a parent and leader I need an owner’s manual.
I guess I should add that I started my first comment by saying that I had high hopes and low expectations because I had high hopes that the initial sales approach would be replaced with some detail and down to earth instruction on how the program would work week to week in a ward, but I had low expectations because after the 5th Sunday presentation it was becoming obvious that, like Travis said, there really is no program.
The new youth program seems to be a shell company designed to hold our youth’s goals, which they may or may not share with church leaders (and I think that is fine and the way it should be) but not much else. So I wonder how long it will be before parents and youth ask themselves why they need the shell if it adds no value and just proceed doing their goals without it. I wonder if this might be an unanticipated change that Rockwell mentioned. I have always had allegiance to programs the church officially sponsors because I have allegiance to the church. I certainly didn’t like everything about scouts but since it was the “official activity arm of the Aaronic Priesthood” I did what needed to be done, my wife and daughter didn’t like everything about Personal Progress but since they had allegiance to the church they did what the program asked. We now have a program that really isn’t a program, how strong will our allegiance be to it as the years go by?
I took some time to try to imagine what our Church leaders see as the ideal YM/YW’s program. The promotional messaging, intentionally or not, seems to suggest you need plenty of money (those rappelling trips don’t pay for themselves) and adults with significant free time willing to spend it with the youth (and they seem to assume that youth will regularly step up to lead and plan – that’s not generally been my experience – kids are good at brainstorming, not logistics). I simply don’t think that’s going to be anything close to reality for the vast majority of wards and branches in the first world (let alone third world members). I also get the feeling that Church leadership want the church experience to be much more all-encompassing (similar to what I’m told it was like before the three-hour block was implemented with more frequent work-week interaction), but I don’t see how they are going get members to commit to such a model. I suppose I’m part of the problem seeing as I’m extremely reticent to spend my very limited vacation time on either Scout or Girls’ Camp (I don’t have kids that age).
Back when I was in YM about 25 years ago, we had a mediocre adult leader who lacked imagination and initiative. About half the time, our weekly Mutual activity consisted of him throwing us a basketball and turning us boys loose in the cultural hall, nothing more. He was a nice enough guy, but he had a busy career and his heart wasn’t really in the calling; he showed up, but that was about it. Eventually he was released and the quality and variety of activities improved significantly under his replacement. We eventually did go rock climbing, but meanwhile my sister, who also wanted to go rock climbing, was stuck back at the ward meetinghouse, sewing pillowcases and writing letters to her future husband.
The new youth program, with no clearly defined structure and relying heavily upon local leader motivation and initiative, has the potential to bring about more phoned-in “basketball” activities. Not every youth leader has the personality, energy or initiative to come up with a well-planned, worthwhile activity every week, and not every bishop has the foresight or knowledge to call the right people to the job.
I’m in favor of allowing more local innovation, but after generations of having our independence beaten out of us with correlation, I don’t see it working well in practice.
Similar to Come Follow Me, I think the new youth “program” will be what you make of it. For youth with energetic leaders, it will be great. For youth with busy leaders, things may regress. At least for the YM, I think it will be an improvement over the futile time-suck that was Duty to God and (for those who did so involuntarily) Scouting.
And while calling this venture a “program” may be a misnomer, it does seem to be a response to what I have heard members say for years: the church needs to stop monopolizing the time of already-busy members, adults and youth alike, with unnecessary box-checking. As with every unpopular church initiative, I try to put myself in our leaders’ shoes and come up with a more reasonable alternative. Despite my quibbles, I’m having a hard time doing so here.
PLM, I agree that it reduces the amount of box-checking, but I’d argue it does nothing to unburden parents. If anything, it puts more burdens on them. Of course, there are other solutions the Church simply isn’t willing to look at like paid youth ministers (though FSY conferences kinda replicate that feel on some level), but that would come with its own set of complications (and I have no idea whether it would be any more effective).
Thanks for the comments, everyone.
Travis (and others) said, “I don’t think there is any program.” There is sort of a plan and sort of a hope that something good happens, but it’s a stretch to call it a program without more details.
The Other Clark mentions budget equalization between YM and YW programs. That seems like a good thing.
anitawells notes the program was too long for young children (who were invited to watch the broadcast). Agree. As The Other Clark noted, it was like 30 minutes of material crammed into 2 hours.
Rockwell coins the term “de-correlation.” You heard it first here.
KLC: “I don’t need a sales brochure, … I need an owner’s manual.” Great way to say it.
Jack Hughes notes this non-program will succeed or fail based on if a ward has a handful of motivated, enthusiastic youth leaders with lots of time on their hands. So it will be sort of hit or miss.
I also see the new program as the Church conceding that it can no longer be a reliable cornerstone of a young person’s social/recreational development–something us parents have already known for years. When I was growing up, mutual night activities took precedence over anything else going on in our lives, whether that was homework, sports, extra-curriculars, etc. We didn’t even question it. Nowadays, with kids being so overprogrammed (that’s a whole other conversation), parents are realizing that a weeknight Church activity is often one thing too many, and that they get much more character-building value out of being in a school musical, team sports or dance practice than they do with vapid semi-spiritual craft projects and silly games. We came to that conclusion with our kids years ago, and it seems like the Church is finally catching up.
Y’know, I’m an old scooter, and raise three sons and a daughter with the results of 3 eagles and three Venturing Silvers (all my kids were Boy Scouts). I was and am sad that the left Scouting. I’m also a liberal leaning quasi-feminist pragmatist.
BUT let me tell you I was moved and thrilled to my core for the new program, its aims, its purposes, and its methods. I am excited for this opportunity for our youth, and I think we adults need to catch the vision and potential here.
By the way, we’ve had Gen-Z in the YSA program for more than 3 years now. I am amazed and honored by their faith, vulnerability, and growing resilience. I just finished a 3+ year senior mission with them. And now I’m teaching senior high Sunday school. The range of possibilities in the new Children and Youth program, like the range of possibilities in a Sunday school lesson from the Come Follow Me guidebook is only as limited as our spiritual vision. Let’s jump in, show up, and bravely act for good here, folks. So excited!
I wish the end goal wasn’t to keep youth in the church as much as it was to help them foster skills and attitudes that will give them the best chance to thrive, and to give them meaningful opportunities to serve in the community. Some of the youth will best thrive outside of the church, while others will best thrive inside of it. Obviously I am biased as a non-believer who still has family (including children) in the church. My aim is not to have them follow me or anyone else’s path, but to help them develop the skills that will best serve them in this life with whatever path they choose for themselves. I wish the church’s goal was the same rather than staying in equaling success while any other path equals failure.
That said, I think this new program has potential but seems like it will be very location and leader dependent on how meaningful it is for the youth involved.
What popped in my mind on seeing the title was Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. So now that’s what’s on my mind.
“My sense is that, at least for LDS young men, things will be a lot “churchier” than Scouting.”
That has been my friction point with Scouting vs Church for many years. They aren’t the same thing but church was treating Scouting as simply a branch of the Aaronic priesthood, with the Deacon’s Quorum president automatically the senior patrol leader and consequently hardly anyone invested in either program.
DoubtingTom nailed it: if we have an awesome leader who puts together activities that teach the youth responsibility and community within a safe, fun, and faith-affirming context–great! If we have people who phone it in, I’m not going to pretend that my children’s salvation depends entirely on their youth leaders, but I’m also not going to waste time and resources having my kids participate in underwhelming activities just because it has the stamp of church approval.
Needed to mention a few positives:
1. No more Boy Scouts
2. No more Boy Scouts.
3. There is a new focus on spirituality-centered activities.
4. Even though there may not be a “program,” the direction of change is refreshing and more inclusive.
5. The lack of a program leaves for room to grow and evolve.
6. No more Boy Scouts!
I had great hopes for the Elder Gong led broadcast last week. It felt so artificial and unnatural that I just couldn’t continue to watch more than about half of it. It honestly felt like they were reading from teleprompters. I know that couldn’t have been possible….but that’s what it felt like to me.
Fred, they were reading off of teleprompters. There were large ones you could see in some of the shots from the stage to the audience.
They use them to help the motab/tabcats remember the words to their music, too.