Oaks has revelation about adults thinking for themselves...

[_grindael]

Why did it take until now for them to figure all this out. Is the Mormon God that slow?

[_Sanctorian]

Why did it take until now for them to figure all this out. Is the Mormon God that slow?

[_I have a question]

Why did it take until now for them to figure all this out. Is the Mormon God that slow?

You raise an interesting point. The Apostles and General Authorities are a mixture of experienced lawyers, business professionals, financiers, doctors, health executives etc. Widely travelled and globally experienced. They've travelled the planet on Church business for decades and decades. That they have missed or ignored the different "safety, local culture, health, productivity and other circumstances" for this length of time leads me to conclude that they must be either incompetent, about to be sued, or are doing it in reaction to something other than missionaries finding their fixed routine out of step with local people.

Presenting this as a positive change is laughable. It's like crowing about a decision to allow women to wear pants at Church. It only serves to show the world how archaic in their thoughts and actions the 15 old white blokes in Utah really are.

Here is what I think is behind the decision to give Missionaries more independence on scheduling etc.

by the way, as a % of missionaries to members...the number of full time missionaries is dropping dramatically. In 1980 there were 150 members for ever missionary serving...today there are 220 members for every missionary...so that's a substantial reduction in missionaries numbers. If the ratio had held the same today as 1980 there would be well over 104,000 missionaries out today instead of only 71,000...so clearly fewer are serving. Even with the surge the church is producing a fewer percentage of full time missionaries to members than in past years. I expect this trend to continue well into the future...as more and more millennials reject full time missionary work.

http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/685 ... -dropping/

It kind of makes Hollands declaration of 100,000 missionaries by 2019 even more ridiculous - because he sees these trend numbers before we do!

First it was the iPads
Then the age change
Now the flexibility in decision making

What's the next initiative to stop the downward trend in missionaries serving/returned missionaries leaving?

[_sock puppet]

As per Elder Bednar. The thought of a church where one size doesn't fit all is intriguing. Where do such intriguing thoughts originate?

Maybe E and J have for the first time disagreed (J might be beginning his rebellious early adolescence), and it dawned on both of them that they each might have thoughts separate from the other.

[_sock puppet]

Interesting. In 1989-1990, Argentina Buenos Aires South already had rewritten the rules about daily schedules. The big wrench in the program there was the siesta--from noon to 3:30, everything closes down. During that time there is almost nobody on the streets. The retail stores are all closed. In that culture, knocking on somebody's door uninvited at 2:00 p.m. is just as unthinkably offensive as knocking on their door at 2:00 a.m.

So the mission rules were changed to respect that. From noon to 3:30 have lunch, hopefully with a member or investigator, and then go back to your pench and enjoy the siesta. To make up for that lost time, we were instructed to actively try to stay out on the streets until 10:30 p.m., but if we could stay busy with productive appointments after that, we could stay out even later. The normal dinner time there is about 10:00 p.m., so it wasn't weird to here somebody on a work night say, "come over for dinner at 10:00 p.m., and we can have the discussion after that." So it wasn't unheard of back then for the missionaries not to come home until after midnight. If we didn't have anything else to do we could go home at 9:30 p.m., but never earlier.

It's kind of funny. That mission president was a very strict by-the-book kind of guy. The white Bible said don't call home and made no exceptions for Christmas or Mothers' Day or whatever. So we were told to read it as-is--never call home. So rewriting this rule there wasn't something he'd do just for kicks--he did it because it was absolutely necessariy in that culture. He was nearly 30 years ahead of his time in terms of making practical decisions about how to go about being a missionary. It's amazing how slow the guys in SLC are to figure out the most obvious things.

Well that's what sort of makes an announcement like this look like it is just for PR effect and purposes. Having worked in the mission office the last 4 months of my time, I witnessed the MP having asked and received permission from the Missionary Dept in SLC to vary (albeit slightly) from the White Book for our mission. That was more than 4 decades ago now. So why all the public ballywho now? I think that the perception is growing inside the church that it has too rigid of rules so some RMs are not as encouraging of their children going on missions as they were in the past. So, gotta have a public announcement that the church is no longer going to insist on rigidity, even though they've allowed variances at MP's requests all along.

[_Mormonicious]

I doesn't matter when the Mormoronic sales force is out and about, GOOGLE GOD is kicking their asses!

Fighting a forest fire with a squirt gun is useless.

[_TrashcanMan79]

Added Elder David A. Bednar of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles: “I think one other thing that’s intriguing about this is that this is a worldwide church and one size doesn’t fit all. So to be able to make that adjustment in areas and missions I think is very significant.”

I think that's an intriguing use of the word intriguing.

[_candygal]

Why did it take until now for them to figure all this out. Is the Mormon God that slow?

You raise an interesting point. The Apostles and General Authorities are a mixture of experienced lawyers, business professionals, financiers, doctors, health executives etc. Widely travelled and globally experienced. They've travelled the planet on Church business for decades and decades. That they have missed or ignored the different "safety, local culture, health, productivity and other circumstances" for this length of time leads me to conclude that they must be either incompetent, about to be sued, or are doing it in reaction to something other than missionaries finding their fixed routine out of step with local people.

Presenting this as a positive change is laughable. It's like crowing about a decision to allow women to wear pants at Church. It only serves to show the world how archaic in their thoughts and actions the 15 old white blokes in Utah really are.

Here is what I think is behind the decision to give Missionaries more independence on scheduling etc.

by the way, as a % of missionaries to members...the number of full time missionaries is dropping dramatically. In 1980 there were 150 members for ever missionary serving...today there are 220 members for every missionary...so that's a substantial reduction in missionaries numbers. If the ratio had held the same today as 1980 there would be well over 104,000 missionaries out today instead of only 71,000...so clearly fewer are serving. Even with the surge the church is producing a fewer percentage of full time missionaries to members than in past years. I expect this trend to continue well into the future...as more and more millennials reject full time missionary work.

http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/685 ... -dropping/

It kind of makes Hollands declaration of 100,000 missionaries by 2019 even more ridiculous - because he sees these trend numbers before we do!

First it was the iPads
Then the age change
Now the flexibility in decision making

What's the next initiative to stop the downward trend in missionaries serving/returned missionaries leaving?

When the church finally says...go if you want..but you don't have to. I believe I will live to see that day.

[_Mormonicious]

Added Elder David A. Bednar of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles: “I think one other thing that’s intriguing about this is that this is a worldwide church and one size doesn’t fit all. So to be able to make that adjustment in areas and missions I think is very significant.”

I think that's an intriguing use of the word intriguing.

WHAT A damned MORMORON! Individualism in the Morg, means the Morg is not the Morg.

[_Everybody Wang Chung]

Why did it take until now for them to figure all this out. Is the Mormon God that slow?

Daniel Peterson responds: