{"id":42515,"date":"2022-02-10T08:00:28","date_gmt":"2022-02-10T13:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=42515"},"modified":"2025-05-26T07:07:59","modified_gmt":"2025-05-26T13:07:59","slug":"bishop-roulette-vs-one-size-fits-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2022\/02\/bishop-roulette-vs-one-size-fits-all\/","title":{"rendered":"“Bishop Roulette” vs “One Size Fits All”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cLeadership roulette\u201d (or \u201cbishop roulette\u201d) is a common term thrown around when there is some good or bad outcome that depends on the contingencies of who happens to be your local leader.\u00a0<\/span>This particular complaint is often aimed at some perceived authority figure in a bubble at Church Headquarters that is supposedly detached from the complexities of lived experiences of the Saints.\u00a0<\/span>Now, \u201cleadership roulette\u201d is real, and I don\u2019t mean to dismiss its occasional relevance, but there are also a lot of complaints about the \u201cone size fits all\u201d solutions, when the two are essentially tradeoffs of one another. <\/span><\/p>\n

Tying a bishop\u2019s hands essentially involves imposing mandates from above, while allowing bishops to use their judgment essentially allows for variation from case to case. God can think multiple things at once in a perfectly consistent way, so He can square that circle, but for us mortals we are required to essentially pick our poison here.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t a new idea. One of the founding fathers of sociology, Max Weber, coined the term \u201cthe iron cage of bureaucracy\u201d\u00a0 to describe the routinization of roles and decisions that is inevitable in a legal\/technical society. To some extent the benefits of bureaucracies outweigh the costs. We like the rules being codified and written down so that they protect us from arbitrary judgment. Also, as institutions become large enough it simply becomes impossible for the leaders to manage every detail, so they need to rely on rules and regulations. At the same time, codifying everything hurts flexibility and on-the-ground creativity and accommodations, so institutions have to decide the proper tradeoff between \u201cleadership roulette\u201d and \u201cone size fits all” solutions.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

To take one extreme example, if the Church was fully bureaucratized, we would have very precise details about what constitutes being a \u201cfull tithe payer.\u201d Like the government, recipients of Church aid would have to turn in pay stubs that would then be put into an equation deciding how much they get. Local widow needs emergency assistance moving from a predatory landlord? That would have to go up several layers of approval under the \u201cemergency exception\u201d clause. \u201cThe Line\u201d (you know what I\u2019m talking about) that high school priests try to deduce from an intensely close reading of the For the Strength of Youth pamphlet that would make any lawyer or rabbinical student proud\u00a0would be clearly delineated, with the length of sacramental restrictions tied to a matrix that inputs the specific state of undress, body parts, and activity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Hopefully I\u2019ve painted enough of a picture to show the problems that a world without any \u201cleadership roulette\u201d would have. The Judges in Israel would be operating at the higher levels of Church organization, because everything else would be routinized based on their general decisions.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

On the other extreme, a world without any bureaucracy or \u201cone size fits all\u201d solutions would be chaos. Each Bishop would essentially have their own fiefdom and be able to teach and do what they wanted. Even if we take the basic beliefs and authority structure as a given, the lack of a \u201cChurch Handbook\u201d would mean that each bishop would have to take their cues about what to do from their own interpretation of the rather large body of General Conference talks, devotionals, and face-to-face events. There would be no message control within the highest ranks either, so we\u2019d have the potential for Brigham Young and Orson Pratt style open theological conflicts while the local leaders are trying to figure out what to teach and how to operate. It\u2019s pretty clear that in such a situation we\u2019d have dozens if not hundreds of different theologies and institutions under the umbrella of the \u201cChurch of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.\u201d Part of being a \u201cHouse of Order\u201d is having a bureaucracy.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, these are two extremes, and religious institutions try to find the optimal mix given their theology, tradition, and history. A lot of Protestant denominations basically have a \u201ccongregational roulette\u201d situation, which is why church shopping is more of a thing for them. The Catholic Church is more bureaucratic with its priesthood-based structure, but still not as much as we are; they operate more on a \u201cfranchise\u201d type model (that\u2019s not a dig, there are good reasons for that given their own traditional, theological, organizational, and historical premises) and more decision making is held at the middle level; dioceses (groups of congregations) are their own financial entities, and are more independent of the Vatican than the Area President is of Salt Lake City (e.g. if the Area 70 in charge of Germany treated Salt Lake City the way the German Catholic leaders<\/a> treat the Vatican, he would be released immediately).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Whatever one\u2019s opinions about the optimal mix of these two options, the fact is that they are natural converses to one another, and you cannot gain the advantages of one without conceding the disadvantages of another to some extent, so how much decision making to give to local and mid-level leadership is a genuinely hard issue.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

However, just because local or global control has respective unavoidable disadvantages doesn\u2019t mean that those issues are any less real. The vast majority of bishops are solid disciples of Christ ministering according to the whisperings of the spirit, and I do think my own experience of winning of bishop roulette every time (I doubt any of them read Latter-day Saint blogs, so this isn\u2019t sycophantic) is more typical than we might think given that their stories are less sensational, and therefore get told less, than the alternatives.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cLeadership roulette\u201d (or \u201cbishop roulette\u201d) is a common term thrown around when there is some good or bad outcome that depends on the contingencies of who happens to be your local leader.\u00a0This particular complaint is often aimed at some perceived authority figure in a bubble at Church Headquarters that is supposedly detached from the complexities of lived experiences of the Saints.\u00a0Now, \u201cleadership roulette\u201d is real, and I don\u2019t mean to dismiss its occasional relevance, but there are also a lot of complaints about the \u201cone size fits all\u201d solutions, when the two are essentially tradeoffs of one another. Tying a bishop\u2019s hands essentially involves imposing mandates from above, while allowing bishops to use their judgment essentially allows for variation from case to case. God can think multiple things at once in a perfectly consistent way, so He can square that circle, but for us mortals we are required to essentially pick our poison here.\u00a0 This isn\u2019t a new idea. One of the founding fathers of sociology, Max Weber, coined the term \u201cthe iron cage of bureaucracy\u201d\u00a0 to describe the routinization of roles and decisions that is inevitable in a legal\/technical society. To some extent the benefits of bureaucracies outweigh the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2970],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-church-leadership-and-policies"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42515"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50095,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42515\/revisions\/50095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}