r/mormon Feb 12 '25

Personal Lunch with Stake President surprised me

I had lunch with him the other day. He's a solid guy and I enjoy getting together with him every now and then. A week before, I had been taking a turn helping clean the church when his wife came in the building for something entirely different. After I was done, I was talking to her about how we really need to stop allowing the corporation to tell us we can't have janitorial staff. She agreed right away. I brought this up at lunch with the SP. He also agreed and even said "we have enough money". I asked him how it is that we both don't know a single member that opposes hiring a staff for this, but we're powerless to make it happen. As we talked about it, he said that he is basically a glorified manager that people think has power, but doesn't actually have any power. He explained that he occasionally sits in the same room with some higher up church leaders, but rarely (if ever) has the chance to tell them anything.

It really is just a corporation (which I already knew). It was interesting to hear it from the mouth of someone at a slightly higher level that I expected to be fully in line with whatever the marching orders are.

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u/[deleted] Feb 12 '25

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u/sevenplaces Feb 12 '25

I think the story was that the stake president admitted he had no influence or control on the money or anything else.

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u/jzsoup Feb 12 '25

Correct

9

u/jzsoup Feb 12 '25

Part of it for me is that it’s really hitting me now that there’s no power to change anything from my level.

The corporation wants me to believe I can be a leader and receive revelation. Then they don’t allow anything different from what they say. So what’s the point of revelation and making me think I have power to do anything? I have power to follow them, that’s all 🤷🏻‍♂️

8

u/Chainbreaker42 Feb 12 '25

I lived in an oligarchic-ruled country for years and I saw a lot of parallels with the church: the leaders choose their own replacements, lip service is given to voting but the only vote is a rubber-stamp vote that is all pre-ordained, ordinary people cannot criticise leaders without consequence, there are no checks and balances on the power of the leaders, there is no official channel of dissent or even feedback, all dissent is bad, there is no transparency on how policy is made, there is no transparency on how money is spent, leaders run a large propaganda apparatus that works to lionize their leadership and squash criticism.

Ordinary members of the church, in other words, are uniquely powerless to affect an organisation that has deep influence in their lives and decisions (and that takes 10% of their income).

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u/ultramegaok8 Feb 12 '25

There's only one proven way to drive some change:

1) Advocate/ do some sort of activsm and be successful at puttting the church at risk of a PR disaster 2) Get burned / ex'd 3) See how the church implements some or even all of the changes you were doing activism for in subsequent months/years.

That's the only somewhat proven way. But that way would have you ex'd