One of our commenters had some things to say that I’m not competent to comment on other to say that they were interesting and that the comments are really the start of a conversation that I would love to hear more about from people who know more than I do.
If I had the background or knowledge I’d have titled this something like “what could we do about …”
Without more, here is the comment (shared with permission). I invite your thoughts and feedback.
@chadwick and @bigsky, those are both really great reasons that explain *why* eliminating YM presidencies was such a disaster. It’s not just a bandwidth issue but a structural and hierarchy issue between both the YW Pres and bishopric and the YM advisors and bishopric. So interesting. An organizational and ownership nightmare. We have a really excellent ward, deep leadership bench in our ward (like, half the YM advisors are former mission presidents) and the program is still shambles. And I was super frustrated in the YW presidency trying to figure out who I was supposed to work with too.
BigSky, your comment made me think of another “disaster” – one lurking under the surface, hidden, so a great disaster movie! The problem of ADULTS. In the church we seem to have this idea that our lives are make it or break it as teenagers. And yes, the teen years can be predictive of church activity as young adults and young adulthood historically as been when we’ve seen activity drop off. And yes, teens can do some dumb stuff that has lifelong implications. They are important years.
But you’ve hit on something so important. Guess what. Being a teenager feels hard. But being an adult is so freaking hard too. And I’ve heard adult after adult say that parenting adult children is harder than parenting teenaged children ever was. And that problems just get more and more complicated and stakes get higher and higher. But we as a church seem to utterly ignore adulthood. We ignore it as a developmental stage. We act as thought once you’ve served your mission and married in the temple, poof, you’re done! You’re fully grown and developed and all that’s left to do is “endure to the end” and raise a bunch of kids to go do the exact same thing you did.
But it turns out that being an adult is hard, that we don’t stop changing or having problems, that a lot of mental illness and physical and emotional problems just get worse not better as we get older, etc. But I feel like we focus SO much on children and youth at Church to the detriment of adults and so perhaps one lurking disaster is “adults.”
And even when being an adult isn’t super hard, guess what? Many healthy adults grow out of “for the strength of the youth”. Pretending that it’s a useful set of “principles” (except it’s rules not principles) for a 40 yr old woman is insulting and stupid and vapid and spiritually stunted. Pretending that general conference talks are engaging for the millionth time is useless. We don’t offer any mature spiritual models for mature faith stages at all, and curious and inquiring minds will eventually go elsewhere for spiritual sustenance.
So for all those teens leaving (who we are failing anyway) I know a whole boatload of middle aged women checking out and guess what happens to their kids?
So yes we should totally do a disaster movie where everyone was so focused on the teens (but doing all the wrong things) that they didn’t realize that the REAL problem was the mothers (who were bored, angry, and underutilized in a sexist church) until it was too late and all the mothers had left, along with all the people of color and feminist men and proLGBT folks and then all that was left was a church full of old white conservative men. And then they turned into zombies and ate each other.
Please share your thoughts and comments.
Wheat & Tares 
You are right that being an adult is difficult in the Church. In my opinion, it is more difficult than being a teen. And here is why:
When you’re a teenager, you blame 1/2 your problems on someone else and that includes parents. But when you are an adult, you can’t blame anyone else but yourself for your predicament. You are in charge of yourself. I think many of us have looked around and we realize that we were perpetuating an unhealthy culture (purity, virtual signaling, judgement) and we had no one else to blame now that we are adults. At least when I was a teenager, I could blame my parents for forcing this on me. Furthermore, when you hit your 40s, you realize that many of your life’s options have closed and major decisions have been made and you start questioning your previous decisions (a.k.a. midlife crisis). At least when you’re a teenager you can countdown to 18 or 21 when you’re an adult and can take control.
There’s something else very powerful going on too as an adult if you have kids. You don’t want your kids to make the same mistakes you made. I’m not talking just about sex, drugs, and rock and roll. I’m talking about the downside of high-demand religion. I’m at a point where I don’t want my young adult kids to have to go through what I had to on that front.
Elisa, during different times I have felt similar things and think it is a great question/concern and appreciate you sharing. I do not have any grate answers. One of the things which has helped me with a better focus can be summarized by what Kevin J Worthen said yesterday. Here is the link: https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/kevin-j-worthen/choose-to-be-humble/
Some references:
Jennifer Finlayson-Fife on how obedience culture is infantilizing:
Click to access dialjmormthou.47.4.0103.pdf
Richard Rohr, two halves of life (this is just a summary I found, lots of other material):
https://dominiccogan.com/the-two-halves-of-life/
Thomas McConkie, stages of faith (specifically applied to Mormonism) – I’ve only read the book not listened but here’s a podcast for an overview:
https://mormondiscussionpodcast.org/2015/10/thomas-wirthlin-mcconkie-developmental-map/
“We don’t offer any mature spiritual models for mature faith stages at all, and curious and inquiring minds will eventually go elsewhere for spiritual sustenance.”
I think it goes beyond not having any offerings for mature faith stages. I think church culture actively discourages adults from maturing through faith stages. Sometimes people go elsewhere, sometimes we run them off.
Fred VII is correct: The church actively discourages all of the things that could lead to growth and maturity: questioning, paying attention to our own needs/desires, educating ourselves about not only the church but also history, culture and the world at large, etc. The church tries to keep us busy so that we don’t realize how much we’re not paying attention to, both internally and externally. It’s also the reason for all of the social pressures that confront us as church members, many of which are unspoken, yet unmistakeable: Don’t have non-member friends, do make the church the center of your social life, don’t have any friends of the opposite sex (because of, you know, the church’s automatic assumption that you’ll want to be physically intimate with them), don’t marry outside your faith, etc. There are many, many social/community prohibitions that lead to, IMHO, incredibly stunted growth and continued naïveté about things/people/the world in general. Of course, that’s exactly what the church wants.
When I was in the Bishopric I was over primary and the other counsellor was over the youth. Our Bishop’s focus was definitely the youth. Once the primary president, frustrated at once again being treated like a second class citizen, told the bishop “You won’t have any youth to take care of if you blow it in Primary.” That really got me thinking.
Primary is horrible. Little children were not meant to sit and sing for an hour, after they sat and did nothing the previous hour in sacrament meeting. My two primary age kids are always bummed the weeks we go to church because primary just doesn’t cut it for them.
Back on the topic of adults, for me the issue is one of authenticity. Looking back at my youth program days, we spoke our minds and the leaders listened to us. But somewhere along the path to adulthood we took a sharp left to a land where you cannot speak your truth if it doesn’t fit the narrative. I can’t share that most of the D&C makes me uncomfortable because the organization would treat me as the problem. I can’t share that I wish women could share in priesthood responsibility because that’s speaking ill of leadership. I can’t even share that most days I don’t want to go to church and most days when I do go, I feel worse when I leave than when I arrived because the Holy Ghost is afraid of negativity.
If we could actually discuss the problems, perhaps we could actually turn the organization into something worth participating in. But as of now, I Marie Kondo-d the church and found that it does not bring me joy.
In addition to punctuating Fred VII comments, I will throw an exclamation point on Brother Sky’s comments.
Jim W. Fowler’s, a theologian at Emory University (until his passing), articulation of the stages of faith development are particularly enlightening here. A few OP’s back, I cited Kohlberg’s stages of moral development and where we are stuck as a church, in my opinion. Likewise, as a church we seem to be stuck at Fowler’s second stage of faith development, victims of a church culture which does not help or encourage its members to develop beyond this stage. As previously mentioned, members thirsting for more will look elsewhere if the church can’t transcend its current myopia.
@Mark A. Marsh, am I reading your comment correctly? In response to Elisa’s concern(s) about how the Church-in her view-infantilizes adults you suggest she watch a video of the BYU President speaking to young adults who, according to President Worthen, can’t even be trusted to dress themselves or maintain proper grooming without being told how to do it by BYU (honor code)?
Thanks for proving her point. It’s hard to imagine a better example of how the Church infantilizes adults than the way BYU treats (distrusts) its adult students. On top of that, there’s the condescending and patronizing tone of Worthen. He talks like he’s speaking to children. Maybe in his mind he is speaking to children.
Worthen’s larger point about humility may be good to hear, but in many respects BYU perfectly illustrates how the Church infantilizes people from the employees, professors all the way down to students (many of whom are actual adults).
In the Church outside of BYU, there is such an emphasis on process and rules, that we don’t spend much time considering alternatives. We are on a constantly running treadmill/hamster wheel focused on process (CHI) that, as individuals, we get submerged or lost within the larger organization. We rotate around callings following the prescribed handbook section for the calling du jour over and over and over. There is little allowance for creativity or flexibility within the system so we end repeating what everyone else does ad nauseum, or until we stop. By then, however, a decade or two has gone by and we find ourselves spiritually in the same, damn infantilized position where we started.
I agree with the comments about the church not facilitating growth through the developmental stages of faith and moral development. The church is set up in a way that tells people “the fulness of the gospel is found in the church”, which gets misconstrued as, “all truth is found in the church”. And that is simply not true. Adults’ needs are not being met by re-hashing the same limited lessons over and over.
I always go back to Brigham Young’s statements ““Mormonism,” so-called, embraces every principle pertaining to life and salvation, for time and eternity. No matter who has it. If the infidel has got truth it belongs to “Mormonism.” The truth and sound doctrine possessed by the sectarian world, and they have a great deal, all belong to this Church. As for their morality, many of them are, morally, just as good as we are. All that is good, lovely, and praiseworthy belongs to this Church and Kingdom. “Mormonism” includes all truth. There is no truth but what belongs to the Gospel.”
If the leaders and members embraced this idea and lived by it, I believe church would be much more uplifting, interesting, and beneficial. There is so much truth in the world that we ignore (even though according to Brigham Young it belongs to us), because it was said by The Buddha, or the Dalai Lama, found in the Quran, or othe non-correlated resources. If there’s something I would change, it would be to replace “Keep the commandments” with “Seek out and find as much truth as you can from all sources, and live by it.”
I agree with the comments that the Church is actually designed to only cater to early faith stages, and that supporting other stages would actually be problematic for its institutional goals / viability. (Whether there’s actually *real* intent to stunt growth, I don’t know, because the research on adult development is pretty new – it may be more just that we haven’t adapted to that research and old habits die hard – but most certainly the Church is *designed* in a way that stunts adult development for many people, and also it’s pretty clear that the Brethren don’t trust the general membership with facts or autonomy and so treat us like children. They do this with good intent thinking they know what will bring us happiness, but that’s infantilizing and IMO immoral.)
But the second piece of the problem hasn’t gotten a lot of air time yet (it did in some comments on the other post) – which is that the church doesn’t seem to recognize that adults actually have real, difficult problems. Emotional. Physical. Financial. Etc. Bro Jones gave a good example on the other post:
“ As for church: I remember when I was executive secretary my bishop once said in Ward Council, with utmost gravity —“Brothers and Sisters, our youth are UNDER ATTACK. They must be the primary focus of our ward.” I said nothing, but thought to myself: “I am suffering on a daily basis under crushing stress and anxiety from work and family issues. I suspect others my age are feeling this as well. And your primary concern is that we need to get the youth into early morning seminary and keep them away from porn—noble, I guess, but how exactly does that meet my own pastoral needs in any way? Or that of my other brothers and sisters?” Sigh.”
Let alone the problems that older adults have with their adult (not teen) children.
I can’t imagine that *this* failure to acknowledge or meet adult needs is intentional, but it’s very real.
I think Mark A Marsh is most likely well intentioned, but it doesn’t work (except for the church broke) to suggest more church when the church is the primary source of exasperation. Maybe Worthen’s comments will be helpful to BYU student. Maybe they are just condescending.
Having found the WaPo article on humility by Ashley Merryman that he references, I do believe he is extrapolating wildly. In particular, Merryman describes arrogant leadership thusly: “When our leaders act arrogantly–when they dismiss the value of learning and development, when they only pay attention to information that confirms their views, when they refuse to apologize–they encourage us to think narrowly. They teach us that the most important thing we need do is protect our ego. They encourage us to be selfish.”
Sound like an organization you know?
Also, quoting ETB liberally, certainly not the most humble of leaders, may have been an error in judgment. My parents still adore GBH in part because he presented the persona of a spiritual giant in the body of small, humble human. It’s not a coincidence that the church seemed to be at it’s most likeable and most effective under his leadership.
Finally, I can’t help but replace any mention of humility by Worthen with ‘obedience,’ particularly when he says the best representation of humility is subsuming one’s will to that of the lord, which in this case means the church.
Yes, the academic research demonstrates that humility is a desirable attribute and effective leadership skill. I think the church should find some.
A couple of conflicting comments. When I was bishop my experience was that adults with problems rarely listened to me anyways. Money problems? Nah budgeting isn’t important. Need a counselor, unless I made the appointment and paid for it, half the time they wouldn’t see a counselor. Motivate an adult to go to college part time to get a degree in 6 years and get a better job – impossible. My stake president once told the bishops that adults won’t listen anyways, and that teenagers “just might” so spend time with the youth. I found that to be true in many cases.
That said, it may be because we don’t have the right framework set up for adults. Perhaps each ward or each stake needs a dedicated counselor (or dozen) for members. Perhaps we mandate that bishops cannot see members for anything more complicated than money issues (that is to say no emotional, mental, or marital counseling whatsoever). I don’t know enough about how other churches handle adult issues but I doubt that anyone can truly help with adult issues unless they are professionally trained and the adult has skin in the game.
About the YM president issue. Total disaster movie in the making. I was released as bishop the month after YM presidents were removed and my biased point of view is that not only has it hurt YM but it’s hurt YW and parents of youth. Parents don’t want to complain to the bishop because bless their hearts they are trying really hard, but there simply isn’t the infrastructure support or time for the bishop to plan a super activity 6 months in advance or a camp out 4 weeks in advance.
Also a 35 year old EQ president with credibility, experience, or even empathy to handle single mom issues? Not going to happen. RS Pres *maybe* but that’s not how we roll (refer to women’s lack of authority).
Toad brings up a good point – many adults aren’t going to take advice. I ran into that with a couple of sisters whom I visit taught. They wanted to talk about how hard things were and complain they weren’t getting more support, but didn’t want to do anything to change their situation or to make them easier to help.
But then again, as an adult, I didn’t need advice. I needed a framework for my life. I was a teenager several decades ago, and I was not in any danger of falling into inactivity. I read scriptures and prayed daily, went to weekly Church activities, bore my testimony, wrote in my journal, avoided everything I was supposed to avoid. Super faithful. Great example. I was sure my obedience would bear fruit and I would be blessed. Life was simple (faith stage one in the Fowler stages).
Then things didn’t go so well. When I tried to talk about it, and find some sort of way to digest what was happening in my life, people would say really dismissive things like ‘nothing’s perfect.’ Like the problem was that I was expecting perfection. Of course I wasn’t. I was expecting things to *make sense.* Like, I expected trials that would be like stories I heard in Sac Mtg or Gen Conf – health problems, financial challenges, infidelity/divorce, even the death of a loved one. You know, all those stories that can be addressed by Church doctrine and practices. I’m not minimizing those trials – they can be crushing – but other people have them too and sometimes they even strengthen your faith. Instead, I had trials like you NEVER read about in the Ensign/Liahona. Nothing made sense. And the more I tried to be obedient, the worse things got. Letting go of Church saved me.
Church teaches too many expectations. Church leaders preach the ideal, and that leaves them with nothing when someone doesn’t have an ideal life. (Other than to pray and yearn for life to be different and that just feels pathetic after a couple decades.) They can’t fix that issue without abandoning all the pressure to reach Church milestones like missions, temple marriage, children, and focusing your life on being obedient enough to go to the Celestial Kingdom.
I left. Middle-aged mom quit church in her 40s and took 3 sons out the door with her. When I’m feeling most cynical, I think that the Church likely regrets the loss of those three potential priesthood holders more than the loss of a divorced woman.
@toad, to be clear I don’t think the church should be trying to solve everyone’s adult problems. I guess what I mean is that I don’t think the church even *acknowledges* adult problems. We act like if we can get people to the temple it’s happily ever after and that the battle is all waged over teenagers. And we focus so much effort and class discussion on teenagers as if no one else in the room is or could be suffering. I think that sets people up for disappointment and failure and we don’t even give people skills, foundation, or warning about what’s ahead. We just act like it’ll all work out if you keep the commandments.
That’s really more of what I mean. A lack of awareness of and preparation for adult issues and development.
Toad, that sounds like an exasperating experience. I think adults in our society (myself included) are culturally conditioned to become defensive in response to the suggestion that we’re not adulting well. In reality, there’s no shame in it. Life in the 21st century is extremely complicated and often overwhelming. Filing taxes, purchasing health insurance, buying a home, applying for college or jobs, applying for loans, investing—any one of these things is tedious at best, a bureaucratic nightmare at worst (depending on which state/institution you’re dealing with, your level of financial education, and/or the severity of any ADHD or executive distinction you might suffer from). We all have too many username/password combos and not enough counseling.
Speaking of which, I once asked my bishop for assistance with finding/paying for therapy for my wife and me after our son was born. She was suffering from PPD, we were both suffering from sleep deprivation, and we were damn near broke (and my testimony was disintegrating but that’s another story). It’s the only time I’ve ever asked for financial assistance from the church. And he did basically nothing to help us out. We muddled through on our own and left the church a few months later.
Now you might say, “Boo hoo. Poor millennials need their hand held through every little thing. Man up and deal with it.” Or you could say, “Gee, our society is set up to make finding help very difficult when you need it most.” And, depending on your ward, I think the church could do a better job of easing that burden.
Hopefully adding to this excellent discussion, is my observation that our top leaders do next to nothing to assist adults in the church through their talks/writings, or personal examples. I am spitballing here, but it sure feels like over 90% of general conference talks, regional conference addresses, etc. do not speak to real adult issues. When they do (for example when Holland admitted his own depression and sympathized with those who endure those trials related to mental health) it is like a fresh, cool drink after walking all day in the desert.
The top leaders are usually not relatable as humans, stick to the same boring, primary-level topics, and give such simple platitudes as solutions to otherwise complicated life issues.
Most of these leaders have impressive resumes and life experience. But they seem to oversimplify their talks and advice to the point of looking out of touch, overly privileged, or like they cannot talk about anything that might challenge their worthiness for the calling they hold. Maybe speaking to a worldwide audience is the reason for this.
And these are the adult role models for our membership. We praise their lives of achievement. And they get up and don’t really feed the hungry souls that often. I’m mean really, this is their primary job, isn’t it. They aren’t in Calcutta like Mother Teresa. They are mostly meant as motivational speakers. Compared to the TED Talk stuff you can watch, they are so below average in their presentation of God’s own truth.
So members think that when it’s their turn to give a talk or pray, they have to emulate the GAs in style, cadence, enunciation, ridiculous phrases, and pious volumes. And you have to get emotional and get that voice cracking at the right moment of emphasis. We get infantile talks all around. Gee, I wonder why I stopped going to meetings?
@kirkstall, that’s awful. I think we often have a fear that people will take advantage and “abuse the system.” And that may happen sometimes. But I find that for a lot of people, it’s actually the opposite problem – it’s VERY hard for us to ask for help. I can’t imagine how hard it was for you to be vulnerable enough to ask for that help and then for your plea to fall on deaf ears. Devastating.
@counselor, the best large church meeting I heard recently was the byu women’s conference last year. I originally only tuned in to hear what everyone was talking about with a queer woman speaking but I actually listened to a bunch of it because it was actually good. It was more real, vulnerable, and relatable than anything I’ve heard in general conference lately by light years. They talked about mental health and burnout and self care and kids and a bunch of other like actual adult stuff. Then guess what? It’s canceled now. And not because of Covid. No virtual event either. I don’t know why but I have speculations.
Interesting post. Fundamentalist religions need to stick with the vision and perspectives of their founder. Because Joseph Smith died young he never had time to integrate wisdom related to later stages of life into his teachings. Not sure he would have ever done that, but readers can disagree about that and still agree that he never had the chance given his age. Because we are fundamentalist in a way, we study the Book of Mormon which was produced by a young man, and the D&C & PoGP which were almost entirely produced by a young man, and we interpret the Bible according to the BoM, D&C, and Pearl of Great Price. So in a way it entirely makes sense that the developmental richness of the later stages of life may be lacking in the church experience.
Having seen the post this morning, I then read this. I wish we could hear things like this over the pulpit. A good example of how to address adults.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/07/world-fragile-recover-science-art-religion-rowan-williams
There. Is. So. Much. That. We. Could. Do. To. Support. Adults. And the kids would benefit from it all. We could focus Sunday lessons on research-supported discussions about how to build healthy relationships. We could have lessons on healthy parenting practices. Lessons on suicide prevention. Lessons on how we might respond to crisis situations. We could study child development. Adolescent development. What we can do to build and sustain healthy relationships. I’m sure others reading this could add so many topics to the list.
There is a precedent. Decades ago church lessons often focused on more practical topics. There was a teaching that everything temporal was also spiritual. Now it seems up be reversed, with the idea that if we are spiritually strong temporal things will take care of themselves. That just isn’t true and the church is missing an enormous opportunity to benefit the members in real and important ways.
Yes to the teaching, and how about just an infrastructure for adults to get involved in meaningful service to the world and community? We have an enormous untapped mine of competent, trained adults with good will and energy who would find it so fulfilling and enlarging to get involved with humanitarian projects beyond ministering to their neighbor and preparing lessons. When we try to come up with service projects for our youth, for example, we are starting at ground zero with no resources, expertise, or organization to plug into. And when we do the research to find an organization to work with, who do we find is sponsoring it? A different church!
Not sure if this adds to the conversation or not, but reading these comments has brought a couple of painful things to my mind. Elisa said “We just act like it’ll all work out if you keep the commandments.” I came of age in the early 1970s and fully believed with all my heart exactly that very thing. Everything in the New Era (magazine for teens) told me that if I remained faithful and married a Returned Missionary in the temple, everything would work out. Sure we would probably be poor while he was in school, but in the end we would have a wonderful life with children and enduring eternal love. Never was there any mention problems of any kind. You see where this is going.
My second example was attending Single Adult dances as a divorced 40 year old woman. We had folks there ranging in age from their thirties to their eighties. And yet we were treated as children because there had to be a married couple chaperone at the dances. These dances were held in several towns every week in southeast Idaho. One particular chaperone couple insisted that the gym lights be kept on in full blaze because obviously we were all not to be trusted. Believe me, if we had wanted to go off and have sex we would surely do it, blazing lights be damned. The good part of these dances though is that I met my now-husband there.
We have not attended church for several years now. My final straw was the 2015 LGBTQ debacle. I feel much better about my relationship with Jesus and God when I stopped taking the church so literally. I think everyone has to find their own way. All three of my adult children have left the church and I have no issues with that at all. We all need to do what works for us. Thank you all for your insight.
What an interesting discussion. So often posts and comments are rehashing topics that have been addressed many times before — which can be enlightening if there are new developments or a new angle on an old topic, but this whole “adult challenges and development” in the LDS context seems new. How refreshing. And how relevant — because it does seem like adults are taken for granted by the Church and not really given much attention.
Of course, to the extent leaders of the LDS Prosperity Gospel do give adult problems consideration, more than likely the response is going to be: well, if you’re having problems, you must be doing something wrong. Have you been paying your tithing? Attending your meetings? Reading your scriptures? Paying your tithing? Recall as well that the church has now moved into the business of exing LDS therapists. I think putting lessons and counsel directed to adults into the curriculum would have hit and miss results. Or maybe miss and miss results.
I too feel like the Church has dropped the ball on adults’ needs. Putting YM in the bishop’s portfolio was a mistake–he was already way too busy.
The adult “program” for the Church assumes that all active adults are in the same phase of spiritual development. Testimony meetings exist to reinforce the (false) idea that we are all on the same page spiritually, and that we all have the same affirming spiritual experiences (we do not). We are all assumed to be literal believers who love the Church/scriptures/gospel/temple for all the same reasons (also not true).
In fairness, though, they gutted the YM/YW programs and replaced them with…nothing. So kids AND adults are both being left behind by an organization that used to have a lot to offer for the whole family.
Janey my heart goes out to you. When I told my Bishop we were thinking of leaving church activity in March 2021 he didn’t really try to keep me either; but he did plead with me to let my kids keep coming. I sure felt like a million bucks that day. Though to be fair, later he did approach me and asked me what he could do for me.
Thank you Toad for raising an important point. When I was in the bishopric years ago, there was a sister whose non-member husband relapsed into his drug habit and ended up losing his job and going to jail. This family needed all the things, including the low-hanging fruit of financial support. I saw both sides to the battle. A Bishop that really wanted to help this family move beyond needing a paycheck to transforming their lives, but a family that was in the throes of such tragedy that these discussions were not helpful at that time because they didn’t have the emotional capacity to go there yet. Really what this family needed was not the help of a marketing executive playing Bishop; they needed professional help. And that’s where it falls apart. Most Bishops are simply not equipped with the tools to help in these situations. But this is the business model we use. I feel terrible for this poor sister having a Bishop make her grovel for assistance because he wanted her to move to a phase of self-sufficiency, but I do also feel a bit bad for a Bishop who was put into a position to fail. I’m not sure I could have done any better at the time. We can do better. I hope we will do better.
Because I’ve been in my current ward and stake for a decade now, I’ve gotten to know people pretty well. My experience is that even the most well-to-do, put-together family has struggles you can’t even imagine. But we don’t talk about hard things at church. And that’s a shame.
Part of the reason for the Brethren’s neglect of adults and adult problems is that they (largely) don’t have these problems. Church leaders are (mostly) white, educated, successful in their careers, married to the same woman they married in their 20s, have children and are neurotypical. None of them have been in a long-term abusive family relationship. None have been cheated on by a spouse. None have been divorced. None were unmarried clear into their 40s (occasional exceptions for the occasional never-married woman called into a Genera RS position). None have been through extended periods of unemployment. None have failed to provide for their families. None have had health challenges so severe they couldn’t work and then were driven into financial disaster by the medical bills. None have debilitating mental illness, or even issues like ADHD. I’d even guess that none (or very few) have been the victim of sexual trauma. They have good social skills, leadership ability, solid family relationships. Etc.
They attribute this life success to following the gospel, so of course they don’t have anything to say other than “follow the gospel.” There’s just no life experience to draw from, and revelation doesn’t cut it.
Addressing adult problems would mean calling adults with adult problems into leadership. I’m sure there are some in lower levels of leadership who have been through severe problems, but I’d guess that by the Area Authority level, there’s very few. The Church wants to teach that following the gospel blesses your life, so they aren’t going to call leaders who followed the gospel and had their lives implode.
I remember talking to a priesthood leader about a horrible life-destroying betrayal I’d been through, and he replied with a story about how when someone he knew professionally cheated him out of a few thousand dollars. Maybe that was the worst thing he’s ever been through. Sure, forgiveness fixes that. But what I’d been through had done severe damage – much more than just being angry at what had happened. He had nothing in his life that could connect with that, so his advice was useless.
Thanks Chadwick.
I am learning much by reading the comments. I’ll contribute a couple of more.
Toad brings up a challenge when it comes to helping adults solve problems related to living skills, like learning how to budget or obtaining more education. I actually have seen positive outcomes from those efforts and was assigned to work with a chronically underemployed brother once. We developed a wonderful relationship and he was open to creating a plan. I was more of a facilitator and told him from the beginning I there to support him than being one who had the answers because I didn’t. We have to be careful not to fall into a Messiah complex. But this is really beside the point I’m making. The issue Elisa describes, I think (not meaning to put words into her keyboard) is much deeper.
For example, right now our church is only designed, structurally and in its programming, to address half our adult members. From Elders Gong and Stevenson’s most recent conference talks we know half our adult members are single, divorced or widow/widower. We can start by acknowledging we ignore 50% of our adults by design (whether that is intentional or not, it’s true). What’s the plan? Maybe since those talks something is in the works, but since the church never sets expectations for itself or engaged in dialogue with its members, we just don’t know. I have to assume nothing is in the works to address this problem.
I’ll also ask the forum this question: Why can’t a man who has been divorced and remarried serve as a bishop? Why can’t a single man serve as a bishop? These are more ways we exclude caring for adults by excluding categories of members from meaningful church work. In policy and in culture, we exclude a lot of adults from the blessings of the church.
Lastly, I’ll add my own complaint. In my ward, it appears once you hit 50 you are released into green pastures. It’s really an odd phenomenon. None of us (50 and over) seem to be engage in meaningful callings. I as well as others are so under utilized it’s amazing. For about a year–back to the YM’s program–not one called into YM’s had a young man of age to be in the program. Us dad’s of teen boys could see the cracks and crumbling all over the program, yet nothing was changed. We were invited to come to activities, but since the planning was so poor we just watched the program fall apart. Another example, for a period of time, not one member of the high council was over 40. There is nothing wrong with being young and given significant responsibilities–I was. But the holes and immaturity on the high council was painfully evident. I have grown I look back and at times cringe because of the youthful hubris I brought to my callings, and I have found no amount of book learning or thoughtfulness replaces life’s experience. I didn’t understand the challenges adolescents face today until I had adolescents. I didn’t understand the utter pressure parents who are adulting kids find themselves under. I have also learned we should be far more generous financially with members who struggle rather than turn them away or humiliate them by making them feel they have failed. In fact, I’ve lost my patience so much for the church’s stinginess I will no longer pay fast offerings to the church–instead I give money directly to people I know who are in need. And I can say today I am far more concerned about people and less about programs or institutional goals when those come into conflict than I was when I was younger. Older members have much to offer but in our current church structure are often excluded unless they are “on track” and in a stake presidency. I simply have so much more to offer today as do so many I know in my stake who are my age, and I (and we) have been functionally retired. Today, church is frustrating and boring to me, with moments where I feel like I am watching a train wreck.
Thank you for the comments. I’ve learned a lot.
Locally, we had a number of lessons from https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/emotional-resilience-for-self-reliance?lang=eng — the one that stuck out was on seeking professional help. Much of it was on how to realize you should do it and how to get encouragement from friends and others to go seek professional help. The manual has been interesting.
I don’t really have much to add to the conversation otherwise, aside from wishing that in addition to a “thumbs up” button, we had the “I’m so sorry/I sympathize” one that Facebook has used from time to time.
Thank you again to everyone.
The “self-reliance” class of “Find a Better Job” was OK – I attended as part of a calling but a few months later actually used some of what I learned as I was seeking a promotion. Not giving the Church a free pass here but they do have a section of the website called Living Life>Life Help. But maybe this is a way of abdicating any pastoral responsibility…
@Janey – spot on comment regarding church leaders and their lack of experience with life’s real problems.
Good comments.
I wanted to share the two experiences that led to me thinking on this in the first place. One my own experience and one my observation of extended family. At the outset I want to note that I have a really great, privileged life. So, “first world problems” and all that. I think my point is if I struggled and the church was totally inadequate at noticing / addressing / helping, and seemed to make things worse, that’s an issue.
My extended family is the opposite end of the spectrum with very serious, tragic problems.
(1) Mine – in 2016 we moved from the ward in SoCal where we’d had and raised our four kids for a decade and had many good friends and a supportive network to a ward right by BYU. We moved for a job opportunity – Utah was not the plan but the job was something we couldn’t pass up.
Our ward was near campus and our stake was what they called a “training stake.” Although our neighborhood was full of families with kids and peers for us, they divided ward boundaries in extremely narrow east-west slices so that everyone in our neighborhood was separated from each other and instead lumped together with students (young marrieds). Our ward was about 80% students. Turnover was extremely high, the students generally weren’t very engaged (often attending other wards for mission homecomings and baby blessings etc), and if you were a semi-permanent adult you were immediately put in a leadership position. I was put in the RS presidency, my husband in a stake calling, and many of the few not-young-adults in our ward were also put into BYU student wards further depleting our wards. Our kids’ primary teachers rarely showed up. Sacrament talks were one newly married 19 yr old after another.
It was a really hard move on us. My new job was great but my kids had a very hard time adjusting, including facing some bullying problems at school which exacerbated some serious anxiety problems. My husband and I both missed our friends and were very lonely and couldn’t seem to make friends in Provo (still can’t). I was still reeling after the 2015 policy and not having any social network at church made things even worse.
Despite having a harder time at church than ever, we were basically just treated like workhorses made to serve the young single adults in the ward who were “at risk” of leaving. The home teachers and visiting teachers assigned to us were the ones everyone knew wouldn’t actually show up because of course we didn’t need anyone. The ones we got assigned to were the hard ones who needed a lot of help and support (and who, honestly, we were unlikely to connect with socially).
Anyway, it was just awful. I hated church, I hated my calling, I felt we were just expected to give and give and everyone assumed we were fine when really we’d never been lonelier and never struggled more and mental and emotional health. It was the first time I – someone who had been super active and all-in for my whole life, even as a young college student living on the east coast almost the only Mormon at my university where “worldly temptations” abounded – really looked at taking a total break from church and asking to be released from a calling. A temple married mom in Provo! Who’d have thought *that’s* when I’d be at most risk?
Eventually we left the area – as *many* other families did, largely because of the ridiculous way the stake was organized. (Seriously the neighborhood has almost completely turned over.). My new ward is a lot better. But I remember my first week in the new ward, we were having some kind of discussion in relief society and an older woman raised her hand and made a comment about how we as a Church must focus on “the youth” because we are “one generation away” from extinction as a Church. I was honestly so mad. I just thought – don’t I matter? Doesn’t my experience matter? Aren’t I a generation too? Because if I leave, guess what happens to my teens? I am so sick of the Church taking me for granted just because I’ve been active so far in my life and treating me like I’m there to serve it. Yes, I value service. But I’d just been through one of the hardest times in my life ever and no one, not one single person, from church took notice. They just kept asking more of me.
And I know so many people who’ve been in presidencies and leadership positions and the second they get released they are DONE. They leave. I think a lot of people who seem to be doing great are actually struggling a lot.
(2) extended family – I have a set of cousins we were very close with growing up but who have had a lot of mental health and other problems. Without going into a ton of detail, one of the kids was severely bipolar which tends to either get better or MUCH worse after 30 (and unfortunately hers went undiagnosed for a long time so she did not get interventions at a time it may have helped more). Hers got much worse and she either overdosed or committed suicide last year in her 40s, but there have been countless incredibly traumatic and challenging events for that entire family over the course of her lifetime that have reverberated across that family in really tragic ways. The church has offered zero support financial, emotional, social or otherwise – to say the least.
In addition, I think in part because of the chaos that this kid caused in the home, several other of the kids got into a fair bit of trouble as teens. Well, as I mentioned on the other thread, that teen trouble seemed troubling at the time because they weren’t keeping to the straight and narrow. And I know that the parents and church leaders were doing their best and I’m not judging them. But I think that the responses at the time were shaming and shunning from the community – because people were so concerned about the teens not choosing the right – and while the teens did get back onto the “straight and narrow” for a time – the problems they are facing as adults make their teen issues seem like, well, childs play. Meth and heroin addiction. Prison. Homelessness. Other serious mental illness.
Anyway, it’s all really complicated and I’m not doing it justice. I’m not blaming the church or parents and there is some generational trauma and mental illness at play too. But I still have seen how the church was so quick to pounce on what was pretty ordinary teen experimentation (and for the girls actually some were probably being taken advantage of moreso than “sinning” and the last thing they should have faced was church discipline, but that’s a whole other topic …) and yet is so ill equipped to deal with the adult fallout of the shame game and the mental illness that went unaddressed that probably undergirded that experimentation. And no one in that ward will touch that family now – a family with serious, complicated, messy, ugly needs – with a ten foot pole, even though that family served that ward for decades. Makes me pretty sick.
Elisa, you are so right about the way the church sees its active adults. As workhorses. Big dumb workhorses, you know like the big dumb work horse in Animal Farm, who just kept plodding away, doing the pig’s bidding just as he had always worked for the humans.
@Elisa thank you for sharing your experiences while in the Provo ward. It rang true One of the things that helped me realize the church was not working for my family was when I finally appreciated what my wife had been trying to communicate to me for years. Despite having served a full time mission, no matter the thousands of hours she served in presidency callings, no thought to the decades of work raising our children basically alone as I was a full time professional by day and full time church leader by night and weekend for 25 years …she personally DID NOT MATTER. Her only value that she could discern through church and temple attendance was to make sure everyone around her was taken care of. And she was right. The guilt I carry for what I and the church put her through. Dang. We are trying to make the last half of lives more meaningful and enriching for both of us.
BigSky I appreciate your comments about “youthful hubris” – to the YW president in my ward with no teens at home but whose Primary kids monopolize every testimony meeting, I want to say – just you wait – pitfalls ahead !!
Leadership roulette is alive and well – a decade ago we got a new Bishop and it seemed like the Stake Pres chose the only guy in the ward he really knew at all – well, Bishop K who worked for a defense contractor had no soft skills and must have warned the RS Pres about her shrinking budget because this comment somehow made it into the ward RS newsletter – true story. I want a church of God, not a church of budget people or accountants or software engineers or leaders with no real training…sigh…
I agree that the church largely leaves adults on their own. The strong focus on the youth can sometimes cause resentment in other groups that get less attention. One area the church helped me as an adult was at an employment center. I was able to take a class from a volunteer (called) professional career coach that helped me revise my resume and improve my interview skills. They video taped me during mock interviews so we could identify ways for me to better present my strengths. I am grateful to the church for helping me land a job several years ago. The church tries to provide some programs for adults to help themselves. Many of the programs are subpar compared to professional programs. I have not had very positive experiences with the church’s counseling services or addiction recovery programs. For me, counseling needs to be separate from church or religious expectations because so often the narrative creeps in that unhappiness in life is directly linked to disobedience or sin. Sometimes the church seems to limp along with some type of program it likely knows is not effective because they want to have something available or have been unable to commit to changing to methods that are proven to work better. I think the church has a hard time making changes because black and white thinking dominates leadership and hinders change.
@elisa, I am so sorry for what you have been through and I deeply appreciate your depth of personal disclosure. It’s helped me to adjust some of my thinking and I’ll work to be more watchful for those trying to push through painful times in silence.
It’s been 25 years now, but I too lived in the very stake in Provo you reference, the “training stake” in Provo. My children were little at the time and it was our first starter home. The ward was chaos and as you mentioned the handful of “anchor” members were so over taxed that the moment the housing market shifted and we had equity to work with, we moved. I was deeply conflicted because the ward needed so. much. help. We were quickly outgrowing our little home and had to move, but never thought once about looking for a home in that stake. I felt a bit guilty, and do even today, that we left some really good people behind to cope with the chaos. At that time it never entered my mind to stand up and scream stop, we need to rethink everything here. It’s like everyone accepted the pain and suffering and just trudged on masking their exhaustion and pain. But that is kind of how it is in our church. We never stop and challenge the status quo. Twenty-five years later I am convinced there could have been structural changes to those wards which would have helped everyone: the elderly, the student married couples and the minority of families who were tasked with carrying so much on their backs.
It’s amazing to me that just a handful of years ago your description of those wards is no different than what we experienced. It’s discouraging that as a church it’s not cranked into our DNA to be change agents and move to act when something obviously isn’t working. The one-size-fits-all mentality creates a hegemony so strong it feels like its impossible to break out of that mindset.
@bigsky,
“ At that time it never entered my mind to stand up and scream stop, we need to rethink everything here.”
When I was there, people did speak up. My friend’s husband was in the stake presidency and she was in the stake YW presidency and she spoke up all the time. We and others did too. The stake presidency and area presidency was well aware of how the families felt and didn’t care. Even though actually the youth programs in the stake really suffered.
She moved out the minute her husband was released. I have wondered if now that the neighborhood has turned over and longtime families have literally fled if the area presidency will rethink their position.
It can’t have been the exact stake bc my old neighborhood was only built about 15 years ago but I’m guessing a similar area and focus. I think there are a couple of “training stakes” near campus. All of us fled to Edgemont and Sherwood Hills and Riverbottoms where we aren’t responsible for training BYU students anymore unless we are put into BYU wards for a season …
Could someone enlighten me as to what a “training stake” is?
I’m envisioning an intensive yearlong program in which newly-called stake presidents from around the world are trained and screened under careful supervision before they can lead in their home stakes, but who am I kidding? We simply don’t do things that way.
@jack Hughes hahaha!
A “training stake” is a stake full of young adults but who are in family wards not young adult wards. The idea is they learn how wards and stakes are run and then eventually they leave and run wards and stakes elsewhere throughout the country / ward. So basically this is mostly around highly-concentrated LDS student areas like BYU.
It’s not like, an “official” thing, but our stake and area presidency did expressly refer to our stake as a “training” stake and to our responsibility as mature experienced adults to “train” the younger generation so that they can go out and lead when they graduate from BYU and move across the country. So they would call really young people into leadership positions so they could learn how to do things, etc.
I didn’t care about that (inexperienced leaders). I just didn’t like having no peers in my ward and having my own neighborhood split into 6 different wards with illogical ward boundaries. Like, people who lived three houses away on either side were In different wards. It meant I didn’t get to know my neighbors even though we tried to have a sense of neighborhood community because people were too busy with their wards to do anything as a neighborhood. (This was exacerbated by some school issues that meant that people sent kids to lots of different schools but that’s a different issue …).
Elisa, I am still in that stake. My husband taught at BYU until recently and because of vision challenges it has been a blessing to live so close to campus. The ward we lived in until the stake presidency was commanded from on high to change all of the ward boundaries was the best ward I’d ever lived in period. There was such love, unity and Christ like love plus we always had excellent bishops who genuinely cared about all of the members.
After the change to the long, skinny one block wide boundaries happened all that changed. It didn’t help that we got a nut job for a bishop who is a big believer in wild church conspiracy theories and esoterica and believed that the ward was his personal fiefdom and we were all his serfs to rule over and punish at will. We have an ultra wealthy gated mini subdivision that was built long after the rest of our neighborhood was built. The people who live there have never deigned to associate with the rest of us (even before the boundary changes) or with the huge number of newlyweds that make up over 50% of the ward and yet, the leaders of our ward are only chosen from this small neighborhood over and over again. None of the rest of us are ever called. Ever. Because of our Uber rich leaders the Prosperity Gospel is on full display in word, deed and dress every Sunday. For the first time in my life I can actually empathize with the poor Zoramites. Our pulpit isn’t that far off from being a modern day Rameumptom. Complaints to the stake president, area president and the Q12 about how the change in the ward boundaries has so negatively impacted our ward and stake (other wards are having similar problems) have gone unanswered.
In the meantime, at least in my ward, attendance is very low except for the “beautiful people” from the gated community; even many of the formerly faithful refuse to attend because they no longer feel welcome; our current bishop refuses to do anything about masking or blocking off pews; the YW, YM and other programs are in shambles; so many youth and adults have outright left the church and the ward is the 180 degree opposite of what it was before the ill judged and uninspired decree from church headquarters to change things around. And all of this fallout was the result of trying to train young adults to become leaders in the future. What a terrible price to pay for little to no results!
@poor wayfaring stranger, I can’t think of a ward in that stake that matches that description (no gated subdivisions). It sounds like there must be a couple of stakes right around campus with a similar setup, but it’s weird because my friends in adjacent stakes (like Oak Hills area) had very different experiences. So I don’t know why some people drew the short end of the stick and others not.
Your situation sounds particularly awful. We didn’t have the “beautiful people” problem at least! Lots of nice people. Just stretched too thin.
We thought moving to Provo we’d have amazing wards full of BYU professors. Well – our neighborhood was but the ward was terrible and I think that’s true of a lot of areas immediately surrounding campus.
I want to thank Elisa and numerous others for putting their lives and struggles on open display so that I can learn and be more informed about how the church/world works. It makes me a better, hopefully more kind and sympathetic person.
To any who author or comment on this blog, know that you are appreciated and contributing greatly to a sense of community. This blog does very well at being informative, mind-expanding, and nearly always charitable and civil.
Elisa, the gated area I mentioned is in fact a street with a circle attached to the middle of the longish street. The “beautiful people” who live there call it a mini subdivision, not what it really is. You pass by part of my ward and the Kiwanis Park if you go the most common way to the Y Mtn. parking lot. Does that help you figure out where I live? Seven Peaks serves as a southern boundary for our stake on the eastern end.
@poor wayfaring stranger wow! Yes, I think I do know that street now & when I was there I think the stake RSP lived on that street if I’m thinking of the right one. I don’t remember the gate but do remember the circle.
DB is your SP? It seems weird to me he wouldn’t see that ward as an issue or that he would call a loony bishop. I really do like him & the people in that seven peaks neighborhood (which is where we lived, where the golf course used to be), and I also liked many of the families who lived near campus and were in our ward. And there were a lot of really great students who contributed too, many of whom I’m still in contact with. I just struggled so much with the turnover and student ratios which should have been more balanced in favor of families IMO. We didn’t have the haves and haves nots problem in our ward that you do.
Elisa, it was the SP before DB. DB hadn’t moved into the stake when the big change took place. He is a breath of fresh air after what we had previously.
@Elisa
I hope this doesn’t come across as being petty, but using the phrase, “committed suicide” is largely being replaced by more gentle and accurate language, such as, “died by suicide”, or “she ended her life”.
I think it matters.
@sasso – you’re right, that’s a language habit I need to change. Thx for the reminder.
I once heard a description of “doubling your speed and losing your direction.” Is that what we are doing in our work with our youth?
If we are so concerned about them (and certainly we should be) we may want to reconsider the approach we are taking.
Some mainstream churches incorporate curriculum that teaches healthy sexuality, something we could do.
We could focus on teaching principles of healthy relationships to children, youth, and adults.
If we want the youth to thrive, what happens in their homes matters. Supporting their parents through life trials matters. And we could introduce research-based parenting courses into our curriculum.
We could focus more on career skills and exploration with our adolescent girls, since the vast majority of them will be working a good portion of their lives.
We could have open and frank discussions about consent with both the young men and the young women.
Meanwhile, we might also want to open up discussions about our practice of endogamy (marrying within an in group) which is going to result in large numbers of our adult women never marrying. The ramifications of this practice are going to be catching up with us in coming generations if we don’t address it.