the last class i taught i challenged the sisters to think about something. the lesson got hijacked ten mins in because one sister wanted to talk about the dirty dishes in her sink and how on earth was she going to get them clean with everything going on with her life. it derailed my lesson and i couldn’t get back on track. it annoyed me to heck. but that’s what our lessons are like in relief society. sisters don’t want to be challenged to think about hard issues, they want to go feel the spirit and watch each other cry. they are too busy trying to keep up with their callings, and being mothers and it makes it harder when leaders in the stake are pushing our sisters to attend the temple and do family history work etc and these are women with children still at home.

having said that, the church as a whole needs to rethink its classes and its teaching materials and teachers.

There simply are many truths including religious truths inappropriate for certain forums including religious forums. This is explicit in the Book of Mormon. Alma 12:9 among many other places in scripture. (I think Matt 13 goes in that direction as well)

Clark Goble, I think that’s an unfortunate position to take, wanting people to be released even if they speak the truth. I think the mindset you describe is the exact cultural problem that holds so many members back from making substantive changes in their communities, and creates the feeling of powerlessness that Brad L. has expressed so clearly.

Athena, I’d be interested to hear about your experience being called in for what you taught. Like I said, I have honestly never heard of it happening, so I am curious to hear about someone who has had that happen.

also, it is unfortunate that technology is changing the church. it’s more likely the church is forced to compete with it (internet). it’s not so for the catholic and protestant churches (the classic churches). what has changed their teaching is science and i think the lds church is woefully behind the times.

i wrote a blog post on the plight of the religious teacher here which i think is fitting to this discussion too.

I think it’d be a great time to shake up the curriculum a bit.

mirrorrorrim (34) I think the members perhaps have in the collective a bit of spiritual wisdom. I’d just note that active members seem much more in the mainstream and quite far away from the Dehlins of the world. I can’t speak for any Bishop, but I’d hope that if there was a teacher saying things far out of the mainstream that they’d be counseled and released. That’d be true even if some of the things were true. For instance I don’t think talking about Second Endowments has any place in Sunday School. With all apologies to the person in the interview you mentioned I don’t think Sunday School is the place to have out the gender issues either.

I think you also presuppose a kind of privileging of Church doctrine by social norms. Sometimes that’s correct as with blacks and the priesthood. Sometimes it’s not. I don’t think we can say how the church ought to change independent of clear revelation. And of course if it’s real revelation we won’t share it.

Ben S., Dehlin is an example, and a perfect example of someone who wanted to appear Mormon in spite of hardly sharing any of Mormonism’s core beliefs (have his Mormonism and eat it too). And all I need to refute the idea that “the church is what you make of it” is one example.

By myself, I don’t think I can change much beyond my specific calling. But I believe every member has that same ability. If I encounter pushback, it is because other members have just as much say in creating the church as I do. The church with all its successes, with all its failures, is the way it is because that’s how we want it to be—not me individually, but all of us collectively, as a shared community. If it’s sexist, it’s because we as a community are sexist, women and men alike. If it’s anti-historical, it’s because we as a community don’t value history. If it’s anti-gay, it’s because we as a people devalue the lives of people who are homosexual. If we don’t allow one another to be our authentic selves in church, that’s all on us.

Do I think all of these things will change in my lifetime? I honestly don’t know. But within the next decade, I sincerely believe we can and will change some of them. And within a hundred years, yes, I feel almost all, if not all, of these things will change, even to the point that we will have homosexual sealings.

And for me, there’s enough good in the church and its people that I’m willing to wait for that. And while I can’t say everything in my class without offending someone, I can say a lot, and hopefully everyone there feels he or she can, too. That’s what I want to create with my calling. If you’re ever a teacher, and feel it’s important to recommend the things you talk about to the people you teach, I hope you are able to, so you can make of it what you want.

If I were in your class, I certainly wouldn’t be offended or try to get you released. :)

Brad L., I don’t have any particular clout in my ward, and I’m given extensive freedom in my teaching. And it’s not like the bishopric are somehow unaware of what I’m doing: they and/or their wives attend on a regular basis. So, even if what you say is true for 99% of teachers, it isn’t true for me, and anecdotal evidence is all I have to go off of. I would be interested to know if anyone here has ever been released from a teaching calling because of something she said in one of her lessons. It would still be anecdotal, but I have just personally never heard of it happening. As more anecdotal evidence of support in the church for honest discussions, I knew a member of my bishopric who said publicly that he didn’t know whether the church was true or not, but he knew it was good for his family, and that was enough for him. He wasn’t released early.

I think culturally people have a fear of going near the limits of what is accepted, and so we tend to raise harsh barriers for our own behavior, and that of others.

I think we can get scared or angry or vindictive because of stories of excommunications. I think much of that emotion can be justified. But I also think it can sometimes lead us to superimpose their experiences on our own, which may be unrelated.

Just my own thoughts, though; sorry to disagree.

Also, one last note: sustaining/common consent/voting on offices is a real thing. If we wanted to, we could refuse to sustain any level of leadership, and they would have to be released. Now, culturally that is very unlikely to happen in most places, but it’s a structural mechanism that is there for us. Historically, it was used to determine the second President of our church. The Nauvoo saints, and no one else, determined that Brigham Young would succeed Joseph Smith.

One second last note (do people still use PPS?): I’m not saying that you can’t be released from a calling or excommunicated because of the views you have and express. Clearly, that happens. But my guess, since I don’t know from personal experience what causes censorship or discipline, is that if a person words things carefully, she can say a lot more than when she speaks straightforwardly and bluntly.

Can I teach a lesson in my ward culture about ancient sexism and how church traditions change? Yes. If I flat-out say as a Gospel Doctrine teacher what I do online: that the church is sexist against women in regard to the priesthood, and it has no explicit scriptural rationale for doing so, would a lot of people get upset? In my ward’s culture, yes. But I can and do include every scripture about women prophesying that’s included in the lesson’s chapters, and no one has a problem with it.

But more broadly than just trying to communicate my own beliefs, when you create a climate of open discussion and not skipping past the hard parts of the gospel, or having set right and wrong answers, anyone, not just the teacher, can bring up things they have questions or beliefs about, without having to feel like they have to worry about being immediately silenced. And while I have NO regard for statements from members of the Public Affairs team, and am only referencing this because it is self-serving to my argument, a member of the department said in a radio interview that Sunday School and Relief Society are the perfect place to have conversations about different beliefs in the gospel:

Interviewer: “[W]hat if you believe—as some women do—that it’s time for the church to give women the priesthood? Where do you express that?”

. . .

Representative: “No one’s questioning your ability to discuss it in a congregation, in a Sunday school class, in Relief Society class.”

Interviewer: “In a congregation? In a congregation a woman can stand up [and] say that?”

Representative: “She can certainly have the conversation. In my Relief Society we can. . . . The conversation is welcome. We’ve had a similar conversation in my Relief Society in Kaysville, Utah. We had a similar conversation about gay marriage in our Relief Society. My daughter in Palo Alto just had a very interesting conversation this very last Sunday. We have those conversations. It is a safe place.”

(the full transcript, which is where my quotations came from, is here )

Not quite. We have the ‘small’ church and the ‘big’ church. For a long time, most of my life in fact, we have lived in branches and districts (the small church) in relative anonymity, scarcely noticed and seldom visited even by MPs. The big church arrived in the mail through magazines or later on DVDs. These days technology has brought the big church and much direction now comes direct from SLC or Area, often leapfrogging PH levels in between. So small leadership and inspired direction is now to be more tightly aligned with big leadership and inspired direction, notwithstanding the capacities, needs and nuances of the ‘local’, new technological structures require compliance or things don’t work anymore.