A Bishop's Time

[_harmony]

Your animosity is showing. This thread started out in the abstract, with an interesting premise. Now you've narrowed the subject to focus on an individual. I'm not understanding why you made that switch.I suggest you move back to the abstract.

[_Ray A]

On one hand we hear how super busy a Mormon bishop is with his ward. Yet we also see some spend an incredulous amount of time from sun up to well past midnight posting like a shotgun blast on message boards.

I'm just trying to separate the myth from the reality.

There's an old saying that an efficient bishop doesn't do the work of ten men, but motivates ten men to get to work. Interviews are mainly conducted on Sundays, and in a ward with Young men/Young women, he can even get counselor to take turns in attendance. Theoretically, it's possible to do everything on the Sunday, except for emergencies during the week, or home-teaching, leadership meetings. It's not a 24/7 calling, except in the sense that a bishop has to be available 24/7.

[_Jason Bourne]

Depending on the bishop and the ward it can vary. An average ward with an efficient bishop might take 15 maybe 20 hours a week of time including the 3 hours at church services in that. Some weeks my spike up when emergencies arise such as death, personal crisis of members that need to see the bishop, illnesses and so on. A poor delegating bishop may take 30 plus hours a week. My experience was about 15-20 hours on average but I am a pretty good at delegating and did do with most anything I did not have to do. I could have spent more time visiting people in their homes. I did that some and I always liked it but I could have done it more.

As for tithing records, the bishop sees them every year at tithing settlement and could pull them at any point in time and review them in a matter of no more than 30 minutes or so.

[_cj1388]

I served as a 1st Counselor in the bishopric for five years, also as a financial clerk. Any bishop could find out how much tithing any family paid in his ward in less than one hour. Especially if they felt they were inspired/directed to do so.
Whether or not this actually happened, it certainly is possible.