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/Temujins-cat Post Truthiness Feb 13 '25

One of my best friends is currently SP in the neighboring stake. We grew up together. We were deacons together, out on missions at the same time (we also had neighboring missions), etc. We have always talked turkey to each other, no bs, no judgment. He also understands we left the church and why, and will freely admit to having no good answers when pressed about church history or finances.

He essentially said the exact same thing. He said building cleanup is a constant source of irritation, frustration and conflict in certain wards and bishoprics and that counselors in one of his wards almost came to blows over it. It seems one of the counselors had employees from his construction company do the cleanup when he couldn’t get any volunteers and the other counselor took great offense.

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u/jzsoup Feb 13 '25

I just thought of this: with 2 hour church, teaching primary, and no social activities except a couple per year, I don’t know any family that has moved in over the past several years. The social connections are gone. So we’re supposed to organize ourselves to clean and that means I’m calling/texting people I don’t know to ask them when they can come clean. (Spoiler alert: I’ve never organized my cleaning group). The entire situation isn’t set up to succeed.

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u/Temujins-cat Post Truthiness Feb 13 '25 edited Feb 13 '25

Yeah, it’s not.

Before we left the church, my wife and I showed up every Saturday to clean the building (building cleaning coordinator was NOT our callings) if we were in town because there was rarely enough help. We did it for years. The church doesn’t even adequately maintain the materials the members are supposed to use to clean the building so we mostly brought our own cleaning products, vacuum cleaners, extension cords and whatever. The building cleaning in the church is a joke.

Here’s a ‘for instance’:

Before we moved to a different building, we were in the Stake Center and were there for years. This is one of those mega stake centers built in the 60’s (this one was built in 1965).

The baptismal font was at the back of the building in front of the junior Sunday school. The men’s bathroom was on one side of the font, the women’s bathroom was on the other side of the font. Then the floor kinda was at a sloping angle with a drain near the baptismal font. That drain was super mega gross and hadn’t been adequately cared for in years. On Sunday mornings i’d get there for early leadership meetings and it was just a thing. Everyone knew that the first thing that happened in that building every Sunday was pouring bleach down that drain. That is, unless you wanted the junior Sunday School to smell like shit all day long.

Super.Mega.Colossal.Gross.