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If there’s one thing that I admire about you, it’s that you are a master at spinning things in the worst possible light. You never disappoint in your ability to lambast the church for both doing and also not doing something. It’s definitely your superpower.

Yep … of course that is something that can be blamed completely on the members for not reading all the policy manuals. Heaven forbid the church train the bishops in anything except how to count money and to not report child molesters. Those two categories they are expert at.

Ok… I was wondering . Thx

They are still doing a sign-up list on the bishop’s door in my current Ward so it could be a policy that all stakes aren’t enforcing or maybe it was just from that one Stake. It’s really hard to tell sometimes where these directives come from.

I have been called ("diagnosed as"?) a narcissist. I'm not sure what credentials the person who "diagnosed" me has, if any. To the best of my knowledge, I've never even met this person, let alone interacted with him or her in any way beyond a brief on-line exchange. But, I'm sure this person has more than sufficient credentials to enable one to make such a diagnosis, reliably and validly. I'm sure even that brief, not-in-person interaction told this "therapist" everything one needed to know. Q.E.D. [?????]

No one is using circles? I thought the church was really pushing that.

Oh well. Almost 50 years old and no one ever said a thing about it. The church really sucks at embracing their own secret agenda. 😉

They were probably invited but if we didn’t bring them unless we had to because we didn’t have a babysitter.

No, I don't, and I am not seeing it with an easy search, though I am seeing some people talk about it. It's not a priority to find it, so I am happy to retract that, according to board rules, as being a churchwide thing unless someone else does find it. I just know that when it happened when my husband was in, it came down from at least a stake level. The rule was that the list with names couldn't be shown to others. So what I have seen in the wards I have been in was: 1. calling everyone (my husband was specifically asked to do this). 2. Sit in the foyer, announce the exec will be out there, and then people come up to him to make appointments, and he then contacts those who didn't. 3. Email everyone or text. 4. The exec sec just approached people at church and then maybe called others. This year we might have been emailed? I'm not sure, as I have taken my email off the site and only my husband's is there. The bishop and I have talked about my beliefs about the church so only my husband would be approached on that, and I just don't remember how this year.

Looks like I misunderstood something you said. Also, though, I didn’t assume something happened to you personally. Nevertheless, I erased my post.

Do you have an official church source that says signup lists or using signup genius and similar tools are prohibited? Are you saying church policy is for the executive secretary to literally call or corner each ward member in the hallway to set up appointments? If that’s the policy it’s freakin dumb.

Honestly, it has been that way for some time. It has been 20+ years since my husband was exec secretary and he hated the change because he has always hated the phone even in chorded days. But being in 4 different wards and multiple bishops since then, I've noticed they didn't all follow the practice. You can tell, though when someone has been told from higher above them or they read the handbook or they decide it is important because they change and stop having signups.

No idea. Our ward hasn't sent out emails in forever. Everything we do gets posted on our ward website, which has since been taken offline and now merely redirects to our "official" ward website (which every ward now has). Our Elder's quorum has switched all our announcements over to a WhatsApp channel; youth groups are all using GroupMe; and I can't remember what the RS does - maybe they're still on Facebook? Point being, were you in my ward, the only way you would be getting almost anything is if you were participating in Church and got plugged into one of those communication channels, or if you were to actively go seeking information out on the ward website. Times they are a changing...

Just saw this: Perspective: 7 signs your counselor may be undermining your faith Some excerpts: I have been wondering about what seems to be "a proliferation of therapy." From the Amazon blurb for Alpert's book: I've been wondering about this for a while. Jodi Hildebrandt and Barbara Snow, call your office. I've seen many people who have clearly benefitted from therapy. I've also seen people for whom therapy seems to be creating more problems than it solves. Mental health and its varying causes and influences can be hard to pin down and sort out. And it may be tempting for a therapist, when trying to sort out all that complexity, to tell himself that he is being objective and clinical in his assessments and recommendations, and that his therapeutic efforts are detached from his personal opinions about marriage, family, sex, religious, politics, and so on. Lawyers face a daily task of fulfilling our fiduciary duties to clients. These folks come to the lawyer with legal issues to sort out, and he does so for payment, fairly often a lot of payment. That payment stops when the legal problem is fixed, so there can arise a perverse financial incentive for the lawyer to extend or perpetuate those problems. Do therapists encounter similar perverse incentives? And not just financial, but emotional? I wonder if this is particularly important in places like Utah, where no small number of people have distanced themselves from religion, and may be lacking in impartiality when it comes to religious considerations in therapy. I would not want to seek counseling from a therapist who is hostile to my faith, or to faith in general. And perhaps the "pretend{ing} to be neutral" thing should sound a warning bell. I've wondered about this. Concepts like "my authentic self" and "my truth" seem to be unfalsifiable rhetorical cover and justification for the individual doing what he wants, detached from any external moral barometer. This one also carries particularized resonance for me. Having spent many years on this board, I have seen numerous instances of some disaffected/former Latter-day Saints, or else opponents of our faith, work hard to characterizing the Church's emphasis both on faith and and behavior, and self-denial and self-regimentation, to be "oppressive." Fortunately, these are just random and anonymous voices on a message board. I am free to heed or ignore what they have to say. A therapist, on the other hand, is going to be in a position of intentional and particularized influence and access to the individual. As an attorney, I have had effectively no need, or even opportunity, to address the role of religion/faith in a client's life. It's just not in my job to assess those things. Must be hard sometimes for therapists, particularly those hostile to religious faith, to perform such assessments. There is something to this, I think. "Trauma" is in there with "authentic self" and "my truth." Labels susceptible to being used to obscure more than to define or clarify. And then there's "mission creep." "Trauma" gets extended to non-traumatic or not-quite-that-bad sorts of challenges in everyday life. "{D}ifferentiate religious struggle from religious harm." If religious imposes on an individual an expectation to change one's behavior, or to refrain from a behavior, or to maintain a behavior, these can be challenging things to do. They can be a "struggle." But the struggle may nevertheless be appropriate and good. This is most acute when there are implicit or explicit expectations of maladaptive perfectionism in play. See here: What 18 years of research tells us about the mental health of Latter-day Saints A therapist who sees the Church as bad, and its behavioral standards as "oppressive," may have a hard time with this differentiation. I hadn't heard of this one. "Boundaries," like "trauma" and "authentic self" and "my truth," seems to be a concept susceptible to therapeutic misuse. Safeguards are appropriate. Good closing comments. Thoughts? Thanks, -Smac

Y’all are doing it wrong if ur not taking your kids. Jesus wants them to be subjected to the audit too: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/general-handbook/34-finances-and-audits?lang=eng “34.3.1.2 Tithing Declaration The bishop meets with each member during the last few months of each year to receive his or her tithing declaration. In rare circumstances when the bishop is absent, the stake president may authorize one of the bishop’s counselors to fulfill this responsibility. All members are invited to meet with the bishop to: Declare to the bishop their status as tithe payers. Ensure their contribution records are accurate. Whenever possible, all members of a family, including children, should attend together.”

Where did I suggest something abusive happened? To me?

We never took our kids. Never were told to in any of the wards we attended. I will have to ask my son if he had his own as a minor once he got a job. He never wanted an allowance for chores. Same with daughter. I tried.

Look it sounds like you have really been deeply affected by something negative and what I do know is when we know more about someone we become more compassionate and we are less abrasive. Rain just reminded me of this. I am not one who gets negative feelings for those who leave the church, nor do I try to convince people to “come back” - but I have been known to hang with folks and genuinely befriend because I trust we will both benefit. if your ward experiences you like I do, I can understand their distancing, only because you come across as though you prefer (I) stay far away and your distain is abrasive. That said, you suggesting that something physically abusive occurred and hurt pokes at my compassion and I’m going to say this: in this moment I can understand not wanting to be a part of something at all but still feel abandoned. I’m sorry.

so now the ward clerks are supposed to spend four months chasing people like the old days. If that’s the case I see ward clerks/ exec secretaries quitting a masse. Lol I don’t care they are not including us in anything, I was just mystified why no comm at all and after two plus years we get a tithing settlement invite.

I’m not trying to unsubscribe. Was just trying to see what the setting is. We r on full visibility it would seem as we don’t have any of the orange shields applied to anything. Ur right it does.. what doesn’t is why we haven’t got any correspondence of any kind for two years but all of a sudden we get the tithing one.

Every ward I have been in the entire family was invited. Growing up we went as a family.

I've started just clicking on stuff that I think might be right and about 98% of the time it works. I used to low key stress about it but now I don't care enough.

I guess we never got the memo as we never took our kids with us until they were old enough to have a job and were paying consistent tithing themselves.

I think there are some pragmatic reasons for keeping it separate. Temple recommends are good for two years and can be renewed at any point in the year, so they don't provide a consistent annual declaration. Tithing also differs from WoW or chastity in that there's an annual financial record associated with it. The Church has to prepare annual contribution statements anyway, so having an annual declaration gives everyone a regular opportunity to make sure those records are correct. I agree that online access makes the record-review part less important than it used to be, but I can still see why the Church would have one annual process for everyone rather than tying it to the recommend cycle.

You can change the visibility settings under your profile. ChatGPT can give you instructions. If you really want to ensure nobody emails you anymore, then just change your email to be invalid. I keep a separate account to use on anything that requires an email as part of a signup; helps manage where all of those spam messages end up going (thanks Hotmail). Or maybe he has an AI agent linked to his email that is also linked to a shared calendar. Seriously, there are a million ways to do this kind of stuff now that these kinds of integrations are more widely available. But yes, it's certainly possible that they sent you a personal email to attend Tithing Declaration...you know, because it's that time of year. Yes. It does figure. And it will figure next year...and the year after that...and the year after that. So long as you remain on the rolls of the Church, you should expect to be invited to attend Tithing Declaration. Some years you might get a personal invite; some years you might not. If you don't want to attend, simply reply back to the email you received and tell them you aren't interested in attending, and then just report your status in the same email. Or don't. You're free to do whatever you want. It's your life after all.