Note: I tried to delay this post because of the Charlie Kirk shooting, but it’s somehow not shifting it for mobile devices and I don’t know how to fix that, so I’m leaving it up. On the shooting, I really don’t have anything to say that isn’t already being said all over the Internet.
As I’ve noted before, I try to keep the “I think this is what the Church should do” genre of post to a minimum, because I think the gospel is so much grander than this or that policy from North Temple Street, that song gets overplayed on the Latter-day Saint thought space radio, and because most suggestions are boringly predictable derivations of the same “the Church should be more like Mainline Protestants” theme.
However, one policy change I’ve always thought was warranted is to routinize the promotion from elder to high priest at a certain age. Unlike every other standard priesthood office (“standard” in this case being an office that the average priesthood holder is likely to hold in their life), the elder-to-high priest transition is not pegged to an age.
I understand that we need hierarchies for the church to run, but this strikes me as being an unnecessary one. Back when they would meet separately, you’d often have a conspicuously older person meeting with the younger elders while his older, wiser, more experienced counterparts were elsewhere. Of course, this matters less now that high priests and elders meet together, so it’s not nearly as clear now as it was before who is a high priest and who is an elder (I actually wonder if some of the motivation for the Church to collapse the meetings was to flatten the kind of spiritual hierarchy that separate high priests group meetings might engender).
But even a long-time, long-serving Church elder can simply “fall through the cracks” in a sense. The bishop has a lot on his plate, I presume he doesn’t have a lot of time to check up on the priesthood ordinations of the older men in his ward and think about forwarding them for high priest ordination. And in a church where position is often conflated with one’s standing before God, the simple act of letting an otherwise worthy elder stay an elder often implies something weightier when it’s really just because the bishop has a lot on his plate.
Also, I’m going to be blunt here, I don’t have a huge amount of confidence that after a certain threshold (long time service in the church, temple recommend worthy, doing their callings, etc.), local, human Church leaders have the ability to accurately rank order the relative spirituality of each older member on some kind of a fine-grained level. Again, I realize that they have to make those kinds of calls when it comes to callings to leadership positions, but we see enough about how the sausage gets made to preclude holding to a framework that assumes that kind of high precision. The glass we see through is darker than that, and people aren’t served by pretending that it isn’t.
I’m not saying that ordination to the high priesthood should be a routinized step right after elder like elder is after priest. I like the idea of having an office set apart for the older, grizzled and/or experienced priesthood holders, so it could be anchored to some age/experience level. For example, all elders older than the age of 50 with, say, 10 or more years in the Church unless they are called to a leadership calling before then. I don’t have a strong opinion about the particulars, but this seems like an easy fix with little downside to avoid spiritually otherizing loyal, older elders.
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