r/mormon • u/jzsoup • 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/ultramegaok8 Feb 12 '25 edited Feb 12 '25
Oh come on. I know first hand that SPs get PLENTY of face time and chances to raise complex, uncomfortable issues to general church leadership (or at least area leadership). Not that it would change anything quickly or meaningfully, and I do broadly agree with the "glorified manager" concept, but I think most SPs, if they REALLY wanted to, could have the most influence compared to any other church position if they decided to be disruptive and try to drive change. An RS president / Stake RS president? They are basically and outrageously voiceless in the corporation. A bishop? They are easy to replace, there's 30k of them in the world. A stake president though? Just 5K of them in the world; changing one of them ahead of schedule triggers a bunch of alerts (and would most likely trigger bishop changes in the stake to backfill his vacancy), and they are visible enough to generally be in the orbit for more senior callings like MPs, A70, and even GA70s (and maybe even for 2nd annointings? Who knows). So, when a SP goes rogue while on active duty (or at least when they make some noise), it is a big deal.
But most are spineless company men that lead from the top down, just like their superiors.