Take chasing a pretty girl for example. If she likes you, then it isn’t stalking. You can dress up like a flowering plant and follow her around and play pranks on her for days and sneak into her dorm room in the middle of the night to deliver an invitation to a dance and run away with the sheets and commit a variety of petty criminal acts in the process and if she likes you she thinks it’s cute. It only becomes stalking when she doesn’t like it. When she feels threatened by it.

I think it is more the way we do things than the details of exactly what we do. If we are genuinely friendly and not arrogant with people and honest and try to inject a little humor, they will not percieve it as stalking. This is suppose to be service and what people perceive it to be is more important than what our motives are, even if they are pure. If the best thing for them is to leave them alone then without rancor we should be able to figure that out and give them what they need if we really cared about them. We have a long history of obnoxious uncharitable visits in the past in most wards .

The inactives have two words for most of our visits -”LOVE BOMB.” This is an act of apparent kindness on the surface but with strings of manipulation attached. (Love bombs are inconsistent with 1 Cor. 13). People can often tell if we are doing it because we care about them as a person; or whether we are doing it to satisfy some institutional requirement, and thereby hope to get some reward from the institution down the line. We all have to look within ourselves and ask: Why am I visiting this person? Do I really care and how do I communicate that? Have I dropped any love bombs?

Another part of this problem that just kills me is this: My ward spends so much time and energy on these long lists of people who really need to just be left alone for a while, that they NEGLECT THEIR DUTY TO THOSE WHO SHOW UP AT CHURCH EVERY WEEK. They treat the members of the ward with the same sweet arrogance and desire to manipulate and control them that leads those who are not with us to resent them and call them stalkers and hallucinate mafia style harassment. But the faithful at church seem willing to forgive and ignore it.

Recently one of my teenagers made the perplexing discovery, that she is treated much better at church when she drags one of her non-LDS friends along with her. Our ward treats non-LDS visitors noticely better than we treat our own youth. My DD calls it “protection.” These women working with the youth are supposedly among the best women in our ward and a few of them have to “shape up” when a non-LDS girl is present? Is it these same well-meaning people who are unloading the love bombs on those not with us and who are also requiring our youth to bring “protection” to church?

I believe in a “field of dreams” approach to church. Build a really warm friendly spiritual Christ-centered and genuinely charitable ward and many of these so called inactives and dissenters (and whatever mean little label you might put on them) will eventually come back. Stop the focus on things you can not control, and start to focus on the people who are there and listening and willing. Specifically, shift the focus away from HT/VT and away from lists and assignments to go stalking. Focus on better music, better lessons, better talks and better prepared teachers, more activities and service projects that really benefit.All of these are within the walls of the church and do not require stalking.

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Recently I was reading one of the gospels in the Nag Hamadi. (For the few who might not know, the Nag is a collection of sleep inducing 4th century gnostic works considered heresy). A version of the parable of the lost sheep had one additional word in it that completely flips the meaning of the parable. The shepard left the 99 faithful obedient sheep to go out and find the one lost BIG sheep. The shepard is no longer the Lord, but an imposter and he cares more about his pride in having this one big sheep than about 99 good normal sheep. Two average good sheep provide more wool than one big sheep. But not more pride. So he exposes the rest of the flock to danger and when he gets the big sheep back he has more joy over it than over the fact that he got lucky and didn’t loose the entire flock to wolves.

What is the Big Sheep for the modern LDS church? Is it the “fact” that we grew from 1 million to 12 million? Is not this the reason we are all out chasing the big sheep when the reality is that most of that growth was not sustainable and it came at a steep price. We are left with the soul of the church in worse shape in many ways than when we numbered only 1 million members.

Parables are not historical events but stories told to teach a lesson. I agree with the parable of the lost sheep as preserved in the cannon of scriptures and that there are times we need to put extra effort forward for those who are lost. But I also think this other heretic version has much wisdom. We can not neglect the 99 as a matter of routine or soon we will be leaving one sheep to search for 99 lost sheep. My ward is about 80-90% of the way there.

The things I keep emphasizing with the ward and branch clerks boil down to 1) having a real physical address for each family; 2) having a telephone number for each family (or putting “unlisted”, “unknown”, etc.); 3) respecting members’ privacy by putting only the common first name in the preferred name field (so that their full names aren’t out there for everyone to see), and especially 4) separating adults 18 or over (in most circumstances) from their parents’ household, even if they’re still living there, and find out where they really are. Some wards are gradually catching on – if I’ve learned anything with this calling it’s patience. Others I have to get in their face, either over those things or getting the quarterly report in on time. (And I really don’t like having to do that – it’s not exactly spiritually uplifting.)

My fantasy was for each ward or branch to get the Individual Ordinance Summary out to each and every member in the unit. Either they’d hand them out on Sunday, or mail them in an envelope with “Return Service Requested” on it, so if they’ve moved the ward has a new address for them. One ward with chronic record accuracy problems, lots of self-declared DNCs, but eager clerks, actually took me up on it. (And they were even planning to send envelopes out to the DNCs!)

I was hoping they could then share their experience with the rest of the stake, but the stake president put the kibbosh on mailing IOSes out. (At least that’s the last I heard about the project. I did send the stake president an email defending it, but I don’t know what he worked out with that bishop.)

The other thing I’d like to see is for Salt Lake to send us a list of records sent from the stake to Address Unknown at least a year ago, that are still there. We just might be able to track some of those people down.

The LDS Church does in fact have a department that does nothing but locate people and trying to make sure the correct record is in the correct stake/ward. Many people move out without ever saying a word of “Hey we are moving and this is out new address”. The truth is about 25-40% of members let us know what’s going on, the rest of them I will power search the internet and locate where they have moved too. I move the records out asap though, whether I know where they went or not. If not, it goes to Church headquarters and they do the searching. The records that have been moved will notify the bishop that they have a new member in their ward and please visit them asap, give them a greeting. Many times missionaries will be sent out to work not just non-members, but new members and existing members as well.

Stalker you say? Well depending on how well organized your past ward is with records will depend on how much “Stalking” you think is occuring, not to mention a bishop who is on top of things.

One last note, many stakes don’t want bad track records with their records, home teaching/visiting teaching numbers being low. Many of those poor numbers are due to members not even living in their bounds. Sadly, if you don’t want a record at all that follows you then I guess you better make an appointment with the bishop/stake president and have that taken care of.

If perhaps you just don’t want visits, well that is taken care of on the MSL computer system and no one will bother you, we have such a list and there are many members we don’t bother. Just an FYI.

Isn’t that the definition of inactive?

“When people exercise that free will by putting “Do Not Contactâ€? in church records, then that should be repsected.”

There’s no such thing as putting yourself on a DNC list. If it exists at all, it was made by someone at the ward level who’s keeping tabs with a steno pad or word file. Usually, though, it’s just in the Bishop’s head. Thus, there’s no “reasonable expectation” of being put on a DNC list.

I’m not inactive or anything, I’m just staying away from church itself for a while for personal reasons. I asked not to be contacted by anyone for a while, it’s even on church records that I’m not to be contacted for any reason. My parents have kindly informed the Bishopric, Relief Society Presidency, and the Home & Visiting Teaching people in my ward about this. And yet still, people think I’m another “lost sheep”, and they think that if they reach out and try to be nice, the Spirit will touch me and bring me back. Unfortunately that has nothing to do with the situation, and in most cases when I get contacted, even though I try to remember they’re just being nice, it just doesn’t do any good.

I think the root of the problem is, people in the Church get so into the idea that they individually have the power to invoke the Spirit and convert anyone back to the church. That if they send that cassarole, if they bake those cookies, if they keep sending cards and invitations to ward events, the other person will be so touched and blessed by the Spirit they have imparted, how could they possibly remain inactive? Sadly, it’s not that simple – that’s forgetting that people have free will. Yes, the Spirit is amazingly powerful, but not always by such simple means. Cassaroles & kindness don’t always address complex doubts or concerns about disagreements over doctrine. When people exercise that free will by putting “Do Not Contact” in church records, then that should be repsected. Individual members – no matter what their calling or stewardship – have to realize that by disrespecting the individual’s free will, they’re most likely just stepping on toes and worsening the divide between the inactive and the Church. Let the Lord figure it out and set a plan in motion for that person. By all means, pray for them, but don’t disrespect their God-given free will. Then I think that does approach the border of stalking, or at the very least spiritual harrassment.

I’m careful in the way I contact people and if they say they don’t want any church contact, I totally respect that. But I remain friendly and we are friends otherwise. I can get away with it where others might not because of my history.

I agree that we need to be cautious, but it’s not fair to characterize families as expecting the church to do what they couldn’t. It’s heartbreaking to have your child in a distant place and we all turn to the church to keep an eye out. I’m okay with it. It’s not stalking, it’s the essence of the gospel.