By now, I’d guess most readers of this blog have seen the Salt Lake Tribune story, but in case you haven’t a quick summary: for at least the last decade, some Bay Area wards had members of the ward Relief Society presidencies sit on the stand. Then last month, the North America West Area President (Mark Bragg, according to the church’s Area Leadership chart) told them to stop it. Why? It seems to be entirely based on unwritten tradition, since scripture doesn’t include seating charts and the church’s spokesperson didn’t cite scripture or the church’s handbook.
I’ve spent the last couple days thinking about how to address this. And I’m going to do it in as measured and productive manner as I can, but I need to lead with this: it’s a terrible move, an unforced error that not only hurts real people, but hurts people who are already sacrificing significantly for the church. There is no reason that President Bragg should have done this, and no reason that the church should have defended his actions.
That said, this move illustrates at least three things, things that I think need to be said and that church leadership needs to hear:
The Church Is Not, and Should Not Be, the Same Everywhere
Do Relief Society leaders regularly sit on the stand in your ward? I suspect that, unless you were in the Bay Area, the answer is generally no.
And you know what? That’s fine. Because the church really isn’t the same everywhere you go. And that’s also fine!
See, there are at least two connotations when we say “the church.” One is the corporate entity.[fn1] But there’s another one, one far more salient to most members most of the time. When Paul talks about the church, he’s talking about the ekklesia, basically, the assembly of believers who join together for worship.
And every ward is going to have a different assembly of believers, who bring different experiences and challenges and strengths. And yes, I get the the whole point of, say, chain stores and restaurants is so that you get the same experience whether you’re in Utah or Florida. But that experience is, as often as not, mediocre. And also, it’s not the same experience. Even chains take into account local tastes and hire local workers.
Yes, we want some kind of consistency. As an institution founded on revelation, the church faces the risk of schism if there’s no quality control, if there’s no consistency. And big-C Correlation allowed the rapid expansion of the church without facing that schism.
But it’s worth measuring the benefits of sameness against the benefits of individualism. We all need the Atonement, but the emphasis on the Atonement, and everything that swirls around it, may differ from place to place. Which is to say, maybe the RS presidency on the stand in your ward or in mine doesn’t work. But maybe in San Francisco or Boise it does. And, since church seating charts aren’t addressed in scripture, maybe that’s the kind of space where we can allow for variation and innovation.
Which leads us to:
Patriarchal Traditions
Under President Nelson, the church has shed a number of traditions, ranging from the 3-hour block to the names of home and visiting teaching. In fact, in Conference last year, Elder Pino offered a framework for dealing with tradition. Traditions can be helpful in helping us follow God’s plan, he said, but “we ought to reject” those traditions that get in our way.
But the church seems remarkably uninterested in shedding those traditions that give women a little more visibility and recognition. (The notable exception: allowing women and girls to be witnesses for baptisms. But that also extended to allowing boys to do the same thing.)
I’ve blogged several times about the church’s refusal to allow girls to pass the sacrament, a tradition similarly ungrounded in (and honestly, antithetical to) scripture. Why doesn’t the church allow women and girls to pass and prepare the sacrament? Tradition, I guess. Why can’t women sit on the stand when they’re not actively participating in the sacrament meeting? According to the church spokesperson, because the church “has a long-established practice when it comes to worship services,” and that long-established practice is that only the bishopric is up there unless the person is actively participating in that meeting.
Another word for “long-established practice”? Tradition.
I said I was going to try to be measured, but for just a minute I want to be frank: nobody is going to mistake our church for one that provides women with broad authority, even if they see women sitting on the stand and girls passing the sacrament. And it is great to hear church leaders say that Mormon women are incredible and that they have key roles in the church.
But that rhetoric can be drowned out by denying them the opportunity to be treated as though they are incredible and key to the progress and success of the church.
Should the church extend the priesthood to women? Whatever I think about that, it’s an important enough issue that it probably calls for revelation to church leaders (and I sincerely hope that they’re asking for that revelation).
But should the church allow women to pass the sacrament? or to sit on the stand in sacrament meeting? I see no doctrinal reason to prevent it, and there are plenty of benefits.
Which leads me to my final takeaway:
What’s the Deal With Area Presidencies, Anyway?
Seriously. Maybe they do good and productive things—I suspect, honestly, that they do important managerial things. But between this and the Utah Area Presidency’s recommending weird ahistorical right-wing propaganda for Utah’s American Founders Month, this hasn’t been a great year for big pronouncements by Area Presidencies.[fn2]
And honestly, they’re in a strange position: they can announce policy (I guess?) within a particular area, and maybe they have some autonomy (or maybe a lot?), but most members don’t really know who they are or what they do or why they even are.
The solution? Honestly, I don’t know. Again, in a large world-wide church, it makes sense for the church leadership to have more-local intermediaries who can respond more quickly to local questions and, where they don’t know the response, can elevate questions and issues. But I’m not sure that they’re the right people to make big policy pronouncements.
Now, should Relief Society presidencies sit on the stand? In my personal opinion, no. But also, bishoprics shouldn’t sit on the stand. The only people on the stand any given Sunday should be the person conducting the meeting, maybe the organist and the conductor, and, if they don’t have small children (or they want to escape their small children), the people speaking.
But that’s not how we do it anywhere that I’m aware of. And putting more people on the stand isn’t inherently worse than my preference of putting fewer. We have no divinely-appointed seating chart, and pretending otherwise here sends a message that’s not consonant with the church’s claims about the place of women in its ranks.
[fn1] And before anyone gets worked up about the church being a corporation, let me interrupt: the legal personhood of a church (generally as a nonprofit corporation) is critical if it wants to, among other things, own property, enter into contracts, or employ people. I’m sure there are exceptions, but every religious body I’m familiar with has some sort of legal personhood, again, generally as a nonprofit corporation. And, as Nate Oman has exhaustively shown, the church has been interested in its corporate status basically since its formation.
[fn2] I should point out that I don’t think for a second that Area Presidencies are filled with bad people. One of the members of the North America West presidency was a member of my ward growing up. I like him, and think he’s both a good and a capable person.