I had a friend who worked in the COB (usually this sentence leads to some bologna rumor or another, but in this case I trust it, but to you readers it’s a standard friend-of-a-friend rumor which may or may not be true) that mentioned how a new program would roll out and get hyped up by middle and upper management, and then it would eventually peter out only to get replaced by another one.
The Church’s growth is slowing down significantly in the developed world to the point to where at best you can say we’re treading water (but Stephen, what about the increasing number of stakes? For the umpteenth time, population momentum). When the numbers aren’t going in the right direction for fairly fundamental, demographic reasons, there’s a temptation to lash around trying to find a magical pill in some new program or another, but the factors feeding into these trends are deeper undercurrents that are often untouched by surface-level new programming.
We see this all the time in missions, where they can double baptisms if they do this One Weird Trick being promoted. And then missionaries misattribute success levels or lack thereof to the five steps of missionary success (or the lack of following through with it) more than, say, the mix of secularized versus secularizing populations, which probably explains 90% of the variation in missionary success around the world.
Maybe it’s the republican in me speaking, but I suspect policy particulars have less of an impact on the top line than we sometimes think. (With a few exceptions, the “all young men should serve a mission” being an obvious case, and I would be surprised if changing the missionary age didn’t meaningfully change 18-20 year old retention rates).
While policy changes may incur higher viewership and attention than a talk about the atonement, the details of the former are typically ephemeral and passing. For example, I suspect all of President Holland’s policy influences won’t be as meaningful in the end as his once-a-century talks he somehow managed to give every year or so.
That’s not to say that programs don’t work or shouldn’t be hyped up in rare cases, but for a program to work you need to settle on it for a while. It’s not enough to simply roll it out with an early bang. It requires follow-up, and discipline to sit on it for a while without having it be quickly replaced by the next flashy thing. On some level, most people want a legacy from their work, and I would be surprised if this wasn’t a temptation that affected people at all levels of the Church (or any) hierarchy. (I’ve talked about similar concerns in relation to overbuilding temples here). It’s human nature, and we’re all human. An easy way to have a legacy is to be the guy that comes up with program X, but there’s less renown that comes with the discipline of being the person who followed through with decisions that were made and connected to other people instead of scrapping it and redoing everything every time there’s a leadership shift.
This may seem like vague posting and readers may be trying to suss out a criticism I have of a particular policy or person or another, but I really don’t have strong opinion on ministering vs home teaching versus this or that particular. I really am speaking to a general principle here.
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