Several years ago, while we were waiting for the church to build a building in downtown Chicago, my ward met in a rented public school on Sundays. And honestly, it was a great location–the nursery was in the gym, with its basketball hoops and plenty of space to run (and/or toddle) around. Primary and adult classes met in classrooms, some with class pets you could watch if the lesson was less-than-completely interesting. And kids could play on the playground out back once church was over (and—shhh!—sometimes when their primary class took them out).
But, like many Chicago public schools, this school didn’t have air conditioning. Now for real, that’s not a big deal in Chicago. It doesn’t get super-hot here, and, when it does, the heat only lasts a few weeks. (Also, those few weeks of heat tend to be in the summer, when school’s not in session.) But it could be uncomfortable, especially in the gym.
And one day, the gym was air conditioned. How? What I’m told is that a member of our ward who was related to a general authority in Salt Lake mentioned the heat and, because of that personal connection, the church provided air conditioning.
While it was great for the kids and nursery leaders, this story highlights a failure in church structure: if you’re an ordinary member of the church, there’s no way to provide feedback to church leaders. But the problem is, this isn’t an accidental design failure; this is the design. Church policy expressly discourages members from contacting General Authorities about “doctrinal questions, personal challenges, or requests.” In most cases, any correspondence to church leaders will be sent on to a person’s local leaders.
And I get it! With almost 17 million church members worldwide, church leaders don’t have the bandwidth to engage with all member questions and concerns. But ignoring members’ concerns is harmful, both to the church and to the members.
For members, it means that they have no clear way to solve problems they’re facing, especially when the problems involve local leadership. If a person’s stake president is exercising some type of unrighteous dominion but any letter complaining of that will be sent right back to that person’s stake president, they’re not going to get their problem solved and potentially will face negative repercussions (social or ecclesiastical).
But the harms to the church are equally grave. By limiting communication, it means that church leaders don’t know the problems the church is facing at the ground level. They only hear from people they know and people with some degree of ecclesiastical authority (because it’s possible for stake presidents to write to General Authorities and not have their letters bounced back). That means the church can’t resolve very real problems it has because leaders are unaware of those problems until they explode into something worse.
It also means that the most effective way to communicate problems is to do it very publicly, through blogs or Twitter or media. (I’ll note here that, on occasion, commenters accuse us at BCC of being fake or unfaithful Mormons because we sometimes blog about missteps the church makes. But for many of us, that’s the only way we can bring problems to the church’s attention.)
And it also means that there’s a baked-in elitism in the church. If you’re related to or friends with the right people, you can elevate your concerns. If not? You’re out of luck. And that kind of elitism is bad not just for members but for the church.
So what to do? There are all sorts of options, but I want to suggest that the church would be well-served by creating an ombudsman office.
An ombudsman is basically a person within an institution whose job is to help resolve problems with the organization. And the ombudsman office I’m most familiar with is the Taxpayer Advocate Service. The Taxpayer Advocate is appointed by the Secretary of the Treasury and, while they are located within the IRS, they have significant institutional autonomy. Among other things, they cannot work for the IRS for a certain number of years before or after their term as Taxpayer Advocate.
The TAS motto is “Your Voice at the IRS” and frankly, it’s a pretty good model for what I’m thinking. The Taxpayer Advocate has two main roles. First, it helps taxpayers who have problems. It helps them navigate the tax system, it helps them resolve their problems, and it even advocates for them in the IRS. Second, it releases an annual report to Congress listing, among other things, the 10 biggest/most common challenges taxpayers have faced in the prior year.
Both of these would be valuable roles for a church ombudsman. First, they could help members navigate thorny issues they’re facing. Outside of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, members wouldn’t have to worry about ecclesiastical repercussions. And because they would be outside of the hierarchy, they also wouldn’t be the ones causing the problems. (And it’s not just problems: it could be things like the need for air conditioning. Or more bike parking. Or the stake or ward is teaching incorrect things, or is politicking, how to appeal church discipline or get rebaptized, etc.)
And second, because the ombudsman would be regularly interacting with members, it would be well-positioned to know what problems members are facing, whether it’s big things like priesthood access for women or losing a generation because of regressive LGBTQ policies or little things like social isolation. Like the Taxpayer Advocate, the church ombudsman could issue an annual report to the General Authorities, giving them a sense of actual issues church members are facing, unfiltered by hesitancy or layers of homogenous bureaucracy. Of course, what they did with that information would be up to them; the ombudsman’s office couldn’t and wouldn’t force any kind of change.
If the church were to adopt an ombudsman model, there would be plenty of issues to figure out. Like, how many people would be in the office? (The Taxpayer Advocate has at least one office per state; it would make sense to maybe have one or two per Area?) How would the church ensure the independence of the ombudsman? What exactly would its mandate be? But an ombudsman’s office would allow General Authorities to not be overwhelmed by individual feedback (a thing the current policy seems designed to ensure) while, at the same time, getting real feedback and allowing members to have their voices heard. Having this type of feedback-and-information structure would improve outcomes both for members of the church and for the church itself.
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash