The LDS Church is a data-collecting machine. Hundreds of minions in the bowels of the Church office building are constantly poring over quarterly reports from wards and stakes around the world. How well are particular wards and stakes doing? The inquiring minds of the General Authorities want to know!
The Ward Quarterly Report is the main source of metrics the church looks at. It’s the usual stuff: how many MP holders, how many active MP holders, how many women, how many full tithe-payers, average church attendance, etc. Pretty mundane, bureaucratic kinds of metrics. Totally uninspiring.
The Church is clearly interested in how well wards and stakes function. Are all the Church programs up and running? Are visits being made? Are new people being baptized?
I content that a ward could be fully functioning, but still be a lousy ward. That means we have to define what makes a great ward. I imagine we all have stories of great wards we have belonged to, and others maybe not so good. Wards where we felt embraced, and wards where we might have felt less at home. Personalities of ward leaders as well as members likely contribute to this. [Mormons like to paraphrase Will Rogers and say if you don’t like your bishop, just wait a bit – he will be changed. Just like the weather!]
Now maybe a great ward is like what a Supreme Court justice said of something else—hard to describe, but I know it when I see it.
During all of my years in bishopric service, all of the bishopric training meetings, all the personal interviews (ppi’s) with the SP, etc., have all revolved around the kinds of metrics discussed above. The General Handbook has always loomed much larger than the scriptures in these kinds of meetings. Rarely, if ever, did I hear anyone say anything about ministering in these meetings; it was always and forever about administering.
So that is what I propose here is a discussion about what kinds of wards and branches we really want. Are there metrics that might actually help us foment better wards everywhere, in spite of problematic leaders and members? I am not saying the old metrics should all be thrown out, but I contend they do us no good on center stage.
We might be inclined to say a good or great ward is one where we feel the spirit – at least some of the time, maybe most of the time. Something we can perhaps all agree up, but very difficult to measure.
I suggest our baptismal covenant may shine the best light on what makes a great ward. Mosiah 18: 8-9 lays it all out for us. A great ward is one where we keep that covenant by bearing each other’s burdens, by mourning with those that mourn, by comforting those that need comfort, and by standing as witnesses of God. By this description, a great ward is basically one where the pure love of Christ or lovingkindness abounds. Bearing burdens, mourning, and comforting –sounds like major involvement in peoples’ lives.
So is any of that measurable? Or is this one of those things that you can’t measure without changing what you are trying to measure? Maybe some kind of spiritual Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal at work here?
But lets say you were a Generally Authority who recognized that lovingkindness was the master variable, and you really wanted to have some kind of a metric, even if indirect, that gave you a feel for how much “charity is spreading itself abroad” in the unit of interest?
What could you look for? Where would you look? Probably the Relief Society would hold more answers than whatever the Elders Quorum is doing. But what kind of indicators or predictors would we be looking at?
From the point of view of individual members and families, friendship would have to be a key variable. Toward the end of his life, the prophet Joseph focused on the 2 grand fundamentals of the Restoration. Friendship was one of these. Friendship, not the degrees of glory, not Kolob, not even the priesthood. Not even the Temple, although Joseph likely viewed the sealing ordinances as a key part of an eternal network of friendship.
The ward my wife and I currently attend appears to be about the worst ward we have ever lived in. Hardly anyone said a word to us for several months after we moved in. We have been in the ward just about two years now, and so of course we can recognize that there are some find folks here. But how could an investigator survive this kind of reception? They answer is they don’t have very many baptisms.
I think Brother Joseph may have been trying to say there might be something more important than teaching gospel principles in our church meetings (not discounting the need for some instruction). Maybe friendship and fellowship are a bit more important. What would church meetings feel like if friendship were the guiding principle?
Picture from Pixabay
Wheat & Tares 
Organizations that have to compete for customers (members) tend to perform better because people vote with their feet. I wonder if our wards would perform better if members were free to join whatever congregation they wanted. As it is, we are basically stuck to the congregation that is associated with where we live. There’s no pressure to improve because the members aren’t going to attend a competing ward. Maybe we’d all be friendlier if we feared that our congregation was going to otherwise shrink.
Defining good metrics isn’t easy. Businesses try to measure abstract concepts such as engagement through easy to measure things such as overtime hours. The problem is many (if not most) metrics don’t correlate well to the actual information sought. Periodic surveys tend to be better at capturing these squishy metrics, but they are expensive to conduct and can be easily biased by the framing of the questions. Even then, it is extremely difficult to extrapolate a root cause for negative feedback, often because there isn’t one root cause but a combination of effects at multiple levels that create a negative corporate culture. Also, when the negative feedback either directly implicate senior leadership or their sacred cows, the data is dismissed. This cheap, low value metric rule the day because leaders are satisfied that they are “doing something “ even if it might not give them the actual insight they need for effective change.
This is an important issue. People have moved and joined new wards during the pandemic. The majority of these people has felt unwelcome and isolated, like the author here. Old and new members alike.
But this is in no way the fault of the way the Church measures statistics. The irrefutable fact is that it is a result of the pandemic. Members were scared by authorities into a fear-based bubble. They were afraid to go to the home of any new move ins, and were scared to talk to anyone in person at sacrament meeting, much less anyone new.
Zoom is not warm or welcoming. It is not a mechanism for building personal friendships, either at church or elsewhere. It is a poor excuse for any kind of interaction.
If the Church wants members to feel welcome, it must lead the charge in returning to pre-pandemic human interaction. All the measurements in the world won’t matter unless it does so.
I suppose the metrics we want to measure are those that a a loving God might ask ward members and leaders, but these would have little or nothing to do with the metrics we currently record.
We could ask simple questions of each member, rated on a scale of 1 (not much) to 5 (very much):
Do you feel loved and supported by the members of your congregation?
If you have had a family or personal crisis in the past year, did you receive meaningful support from the members of your congregation?
When you go to church meetings, do you leave feeling spiritually uplifted and closer to God?
When you go to church meetings, do you feel a greater resolve to love others?
Does your service in your congregation give you an opportunity to use your God-given talents in a meaningful way?
Are you regularly given opportunities to provide meaningful service to the sick and the needy through your church activities?
Are you regularly challenged to put away your biases and live more unconditionally?
Do you feel that ward members treat everyone with respect and dignity regardless of race, gender identity, age, political persuasion, education, or wealth?
Do you feel like you have at least one or more friends that you can confide in within your congregation?
If you give suggestions to your local leaders, do they listen and consider your suggestions carefully?
Do you feel like you are needed and important to other members of the congregation?
I would say that regular anonymous surveys of this sort would provide most of the information that I suspect would give us a sense of how good a ward or branch or stake was doing in terms of the thungs that matter to God.
We would need to be sure to poll not just active members but anyone who in some way remained associated with the church.
JCS, This was an issue long before Covid, and will be long after. Also, surprising to see you so critical of church leadership (who have continually cautioned us against taking covid with laxity and have modeled social distancing even while masked), but there it is! And speaking of bubbles,, your comment reveals that you are also in your own bubble of right-wing talking points even to the point of not seeing clearly the actions of church leadership and instead placing the blame on ‘scared’ members, who, I might add, are actually taking care of their neighbors.
“Zoom is not warm or welcoming. It is not a mechanism for building personal friendships, either at church or elsewhere. It is a poor excuse for any kind of interaction.”
Got to take exception with this statement.
I met a friend over 15 years ago on a cooking blog. No, it wasn’t Zoom. It was an ordinary online forum of even less dimension lacking the visual and the forum dissolved a long time ago. Nevertheless, it was an opportunity to meet and explore how one common interest was just the tip of an iceberg.
She has become my very best friend even though we see one another physically a few times a year owning to the fact that she lives about a 6 hour drive away. We’ve managed, however, to support one another’s kids when my daughter enrolled in college close to her and her son entered my husband’s profession and enrich one another’s lives in countless ways. Seriously, countless. I’d be better off enumerating the ways she isn’t part of my life than the ways she is.
We still text daily, phone frequently, exchange books by mail, send recipes and actual food items regularly, and look forward to her visits here or mind there. She sustained me through my husband’s health crisis. We were ready to give them indefinite shelter when a major fire threatened their area. No statistics or records or assignments required. What makes it work is that it’s genuine. It meets our needs and our friendship enriches our lives even though much of it is still conducted via computer. Only my husband and kids are closer to me!
That aside, I’m part of a couple social groups of people who live within a handful of miles of my home. We could get together at the drop of a hat if we choose to but, because of virus protocols, we’ve met monthly via Zoom in the last year. It was frustrating at first but we’ve all become old hands at it. We’ve managed to broaden our computer skills via Zoom at the same time we protect one another’s health and keep our communities vibrant and up to date. Again, we’re highly motivated to maintain relationships that are valuable to us and thatnenrich our lives.
If you think online communication isn’t warm or welcoming, John Charity Spring, I think you’re doing it wrong.
JSC – I gotta say, I put this not at the feet of the authorities (who are attempting to keep people healthy/not dead) but at the feet of members who are unwilling to think outside of the box. Is Zoom impersonal? Yep. But so is not receiving ANY communication from our boys’ youth leaders for over SIX months. Covid restrictions weren’t keeping them from texting, calling or emailing. Is not talking to people at sacrament meeting impersonal? Yep. So is not getting any contact from our ministering brothers or ministering sisters for over THREE years (wait…the pandemic has only been a year….) Are people afraid to go inside of each other’s homes? (And are probably not particularly welcome in some cases – we’re following stay-at-home guidelines over here) Yep. But there are other options like old school letters, phone calls, and even dropping something a little something to leave on the porch. Or drop by for a masked from a good distance porch chat. If we can only make people feel welcome and connected when we get to talk at sacrament meeting or when we help them move in, then I have to ask who made that fear-based bubble that you’re worried about?
I’m also going to have to take exception to the “zoom is impersonal” idea. It can be, but it doesn’t have to be.
Since covid I joined a different church’s zoom social group. We meet once a week and chat, half the time general socializing and half the time on a spiritual thought of the day. One week the host was going to be away. The rest of the group met up anyway as we would miss each other and we chatted and shared faith and asked questions about our lives. They miss me on the Tuesday I end up working.
I also joined a book club on zoom. The host gives the meeting structure but it quickly becomes a special friendly place where I become friends and share with people who live hours away from me. I am looking forward to the next book we will read together
My local congregation only talked to me before covid when they needed a sub in primary. I mean that quite literally. I would hang around the primary door after sacrament incase people were absent. And they haven’t needed in me over a year. So no one from the ward has spoken to me since last year March. (Only once exception-the bishopric asked if I would play organ for in person meetings. I told him I would not play if there would be singing or people speaking without masks. Since that was going to happen I became useless to the ward and he never talked to me again) I could not tell you if I have a ministering sister assigned to me. But I didn’t know before covid so that didn’t really change.
Even when we’ve done a RS activity over zoom it has been “here is the activity (watch this video, listen to this missionary message, attend this tour of the Sacred Grove) and then Boom, Done”. There is no socializing before the activity. There is none during the activity. The meeting ends immediately after the activity. So if this is how the church does zoom, then yes, it will be cold and impersonal.
But it doesn’t have to be.
Josh H hit the nail on the head. The true way to measure a good ward would be to open membership without boarders. Then people could vote with their feet, and the ward with the most members would be the best ward in all metrics: spirituality, friendship, activities, etc.
“I suggest our baptismal covenant may shine the best light on what makes a great ward. Mosiah 18: 8-9 lays it all out for us. A great ward is one where we keep that covenant by bearing each other’s burdens, by mourning with those that mourn, by comforting those that need comfort, and by standing as witnesses of God. By this description, a great ward is basically one where the pure love of Christ or loving kindness abounds. Bearing burdens, mourning, and comforting –sounds like major involvement in peoples’ lives.”
Bit of a thread jack here but it is interesting that you opine here that keeping our baptismal covenant results in a place where the pure love of Christ abounds (with which I agree) whereas in your last post on the covenant path your view was that focusing on keeping our covenants (which would obviously include our baptismal covenant) is not the same as obtaining the love of Christ (with which I would disagree).
“my sense is that it [the church] has been much more focused on obedience and the keeping of covenants, than it is on obtaining the love of Christ”
Interesting inconsistency.
I would like to join Alice and others and say that I met a friend online in a discussion group. No visuals or anything. We just got chatting back and forth, and found we had a lot in common. The group forbid any giving out identifying information but we found a way to contact each other, exchanged email addresses and have been chatting for 18 years now. I live in Utah and she lives in Australia. My husband and I flew down under to meet her once, but we can’t exactly do that very often. We are still good friends.
So, it isn’t the way you meet that makes friendship possible or not. I think it is an openness and willingness to be vulnerable to share to see if you have enough interests to want to be friends. Now at church, I have been hurt often enough that that vulnerability is not there and I just don’t let people close. If you happen to be Mormon, then I have good reason to not trust you. Sad, but I don’t know how to get past it. So, I have no good reason to attend church because I don’t fit in and don’t trust people.
I have lived in some 18 or so wards because we moved around a lot with 20 years of military service. The one biggest thing I found, (back before getting hurt once too often) was what I will call the ward Mama. This is one or more women who are kind of the social center, and they may or may not have an important calling. It can be the ward RSP, or just a social butterfly. But she will take newcomers under her wing and get them socially integrated into a ward. This is the person most likely to know who just had a baby, who is sick, who is moving and whether or not they need help. Some people think she is the ward gossip, because she knows what is going on. But it is never unkind gossip. Back when church worked for me, I often ended up best friends with this person.
The thing that I have found that kills ward community is cliques. When we were military, the cliques may be the locals, and exclude the frequently moving military. Once we had an army clique that shut out ward members who were Air Force. Sometimes a ward splits along economic lines, or the working mothers shut out the stay at home mothers. In my last ward, there was a group of golf buddies and all the big calling always went to those 10 guys and their wives, for some 15 years.
I would love to be in a ward or branch that used 10ac’s metrics. That would be transformative.
Niki-La and Anna have experiences that are far too common. It is a loss for us all when we lose caring and thoughtful members.
I suspect that most commenters on this blog deplore the polarization of the country, where everybody retreats into their own self-reinforcing bubbles of like-minded people. Why, then, would you (looking at josh h and Bishop Bill) think it a good idea to encourage members of the church to segregate themselves into bubbles of like-minded people? It would be the institutionalization of social cliques, with each stake stuck with a residual ward (or two) of misfits who are not welcome elsewhere. Zion indeed.
This is not just conjecture. This is reality for the rest of the Christian world where Sunday is still the most segregated day of the week.
(And of course church members are doing plenty of self-segregating already. But the goal should be to eliminate that, not institutionalize it.)
Voting with your feet is exactly what happened with the YSA wards. Youth went where they felt accepted
The church now is shutting all the YSA movement down and enforcing their boundaries.
I agree, open ward boundaries does solve some problems and creates new problems. However. the church current policy is NOT working.
If the Q15 are leaders and prophets, where is the leadership and vision? Even being the corporate managers they really are……they are failing at new ideas. They double down on old ideas and not allow any flexibility, until the pressure from members forces change.
They cause so much harm by their stubbornness. This is spiritual abuse!!!
There are solutions, but the Q15 is not the answer……..
I personally found that most LDS wards are cliques and the same 10 families control all decisions and power. If you are not part of the 10 families, why even bother ?
As a recently returned missionary, I can tell you that the church leadership loves numbers. Honestly though, I don’t really blame them.
Obviously numbers aren’t nearly as important as the other things mentioned in the post, but I don’t know how to measure charity or friendship or the spirit. Maybe counting the number of people who find it worthwhile to show up to church gives an idea. Maybe an area has a high number of inactives because the ward just sucks.
I don’t have a problem with numbers, but I feel too often we focus on fixing the numbers rather than fixing the root problem. Instead of dragging people to church, make it worthwhile to come.
I got thinking about 10ac’s list of metrics we should try to measure and remembered back before the men took over Relief Society under correlation, and the RS did measure kind deeds done for others. It was counted in “service hours.” If you had taken in a meal for the Jones family who just had a death, you put down the approximate number of hours you spent doing it. If you babysat the Smith kids so they could attend the temple, you put down how many hours. If you helped the Douglases move, then you put in your hours. But shortly after the men took charge and started telling the women how to do things, a new rule came about. Suddenly you were only supposed to report your service hours if the RSP had assigned you to do it. It was no longer good enough if you just saw a need and gave the service. Then later it was discontinued. And then you couldn’t find anyone to babysit while you went to the temple. I honestly think service went down when it was no longer reported, because people didn’t think to look for opportunities to do things for others.
100% what 10ac said. Amen. 1000x over, amen.
Wards are too small. Perhaps wards continue to be modeled after the “captains of 50 or 100” crossing the plains. Today, to have better leaders, better programs, you need a bigger pool. More muscle. And, some of the issues with cliques would be lessened in a bigger pool as a clique here or there wouldn’t spoil an entire mega-ward, there would be others to turn to. In small wards, one clique can include the majority of the ward and feel absolute and suffocating.
Perhaps some of our frustrations with a lack of functioning community in our wards stems from the fact that our wards are just too small, causing isolation, S.T.O.P. (Same ten old people) leadership, never a corpus to gain impactful traction, dearth of spiritual pillars, and burnout.
I think the question of how to measure ward or branch quality is such an interesting one. Sadly, in the end, I think from the general level what the GAs really care about is tithing. I mean, when people are really engaged, they put their money in. Don’t they use metrics like number of tithe-paying Melchizedek-priesthood-holding men when deciding how to split wards?
I do like the idea of letting people go to whatever ward they want, as I can imagine it might push ward leadership to make church more welcoming. I think last lemming makes such a fascinating point, though, about how (in the US, anyway) people largely self-select into churches by their politics, so the same thing could happen with Mormon wards. I do think, though, that we can’t kid ourselves about how this is already happening in Mormon wards, whether we think it is or not. Mostly people are selecting other denominations or no church at all when their ward isn’t welcoming. And to get to the political angle, mostly Republicans select Mormonism and Democrats select something else, like a mainline Protestant church or something.
I like 10ac’s list of survey questions. I wish the Church would go even beyond that and maybe have reviewers come and interview a few randomly selected ward members every year or two. I mean, there’s certainly enough money to do this, and it would really give them some color around how wards really look on the ground. I know that’s the type of data that’s super hard to aggregate up and give to top leaders in a digestible form, which is of course why nobody wants to go to the trouble to collect it.
Super discussion!
Too many to respond to, but thanks to all for participating!
Several folks (Josh H, Bishop Bill, Ziff, and perhaps others) suggest that a quick fix would be to allow members to go to whatever ward they want. I am afraid that I vehemently disagree. This really strikes at the heart of what our church work should be all about: building communities. This is what we do, or at least what we should be doing if we are to be true to our mandate. This means working with people you might not like. This means working ” across the aisle.” The work of the Church cannot be a popularity contest. We definitely need to fix what ails our work, but we have to do it in the context of building communities. Remember Joseph’s grand fundamental of friendship. Building community is very hard work.
One or two folks (Mortimer at least) suggested our wards are too small. I beg to differ here as well. 150-200 active folks is just about right. Any bigger and you really start to lose the sense of community. These is actually plenty of research on this topic- and the 150 or so active members is just about right for active group dynamics.
A great many of you enjoyed riffing on zoom and the like. Zoom etc is not the issue. Several of you demonstrated that great relationships could be had online. But strong communities need face to face interaction, and that may be returning soon!
10ac–you seem to have touched a nerve. I agree with your list, at least preliminarily. We tend to measure what is most important to us. Clearly some folks in the big building on Temple Square do not consider charity and fellowship to be key indicators worthy of measurement. Measuring charity and the like is admittedly a very difficult affair. Are 10ac’s questions the appropriate ones? Hard to say, but if we at least started using these kinds of indicators, perhaps local leaders and members might also consider charity and service to be the prime indicators, and might use their time in ward council and elsewhere to focus on these kinds of issues.
We dont even ask about charity in the TR interview. We ask about honesty, and we ask about chastity. But not a word on charity, the prime characteristic of a bodhisattva or true follower of Christ. If we asked about that in the TR interview, we could pretty much guarantee greater weight would be given to this individually and and at the ward and higher levels.
Thanks again to all–whether we agree or disagree with each other!
Due to family health issues, I had not been in a ward council for about 10 years. As a ward missionary, the ward mission leader asked me to fill in for him when he was out of town. It happened to be during ward conference so the SP lead the ward council meeting.
He said that the council needed to focus on “measurable outcomes”. I was startled for two reasons: 1 – it felt like a business meeting and not a ward council and 2 – it seemed completely out of character for the SP, a neighbor, dear friend, compassionate minister, and a composer.
He went around the circle asking each member of the council what would be their “measurable outcome”. Of course, everyone struggled with it. I got a pass because wasn’t in charge of my department. Then he got to the young men’s president (a sports attorney and fantastic youth leader).
He said something like, “I can’t give you a measurable outcome. We have a plan for each boy based on their situation and needs. I can’t give you a number for that.”
My impression was that the SP had been given this as an assignment from the Area Presidency, which I assume would be in line with GA direction.
Not a fan of metrics in a pastoral setting. The focus on metrics reveals, I think, an emphasis on management over ministry.