![\"\"](\"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/ChatGPT-Image-Sep-11-2025-at-07_38_31-AM-800x800.png\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n As I\u2019ve noted before, <\/span>I try to keep the \u201cI think this is what the Church should do\u201d 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 \u201cthe Church should be more like Mainline Protestants\u201d theme.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n However, one policy change I\u2019ve always thought was warranted is to routinize the promotion from elder to high priest at a certain age. Unlike every other standard priesthood office (\u201cstandard\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019d often have a conspicuously older person meeting with the younger elders while his older, wiser, more experienced counterparts were elsewhere.\u00a0 Of course, this matters less now that high priests and elders meet together, so it\u2019s 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).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n But even a long-time, long-serving Church elder can simply \u201cfall through the cracks\u201d in a sense. The bishop has a lot on his plate, I presume he doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s standing before God, the simple act of letting an otherwise worthy elder stay an elder often implies something weightier when it\u2019s really just because the bishop has a lot on his plate.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Also, I\u2019m going to be blunt here, I don\u2019t 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\u2019t served by pretending that it isn\u2019t.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019m 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\u2019t have a strong opinion about the particulars, but this seems like an easy fix with little downside to avoid spiritually otherizing loyal, older elders.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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.\u00a0 As I\u2019ve noted before, I try to keep the \u201cI think this is what the Church should do\u201d 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 \u201cthe Church should be more like Mainline Protestants\u201d theme.\u00a0 However, one policy change I\u2019ve always thought was warranted is to routinize the promotion from elder to high priest at a certain age. Unlike every other standard priesthood office (\u201cstandard\u201d 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.\u00a0 I understand that we need hierarchies for the church to run, but this strikes me […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":51249,"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-51246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-church-leadership-and-policies"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/ChatGPT-Image-Sep-11-2025-at-07_38_31-AM.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51246","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=51246"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51256,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51246\/revisions\/51256"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}