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General Conference Predictions and Rumors


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9 hours ago, bluebell said:

This is not always true.  I know that each of the quorums in our YMs has an advisor and multiple specialists. In one quorum the adult leaders outnumber the young men.  But the adult leaders hardly ever show up or do their calling, leaving the bulk of the responsibility upon the bishopric.

Agree. A Bishop depends heavily on the other leaders serving in his ward to step up and do their job. If that’s not happening, it’s a real struggle. And it’s not always as easy as release-and-replace. Sometimes the people in there are the best (or only) people who are even willing to fill a calling of that size.  Our last ward had a huge apathy problem. Dozens of people who wanted to show up to a fully functioning ward every week without having to contribute. And large, faithful families who were shouldering the workload were moving away in droves (including ours . . . which I felt bad about, but the prompting we got to move was very, very clear). 

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14 hours ago, Hamba Tuhan said:

I work as an adviser to a member of our local parliament. I wouldn't be worth my pay if I allowed her to fail. Good advisers follow-up with those whom they advise to whatever degree necessary to help them succeed, and when that doesn't work, they help them pick up the pieces and never repeat those same mistakes.

 

I think this is where some of the problem is. 

The church has had so many ways to help teachers be better teachers.  There are some really good resources out their, but if you don't know about them or take the time to learn from them you can't use them to become better.  So what ends up happening is that people learn from prior teachers how to become a teacher and if the first teacher didn't know then that meant the second teacher didn't either.

My husband has been in YM several times. When I first started talking to him about what you were doing he grabbed hold of that.  He worked his best to do that way.  Then later we saw other advisors not do it with our oldest and how damaging that was for him.  Then my husband was put in again and my youngest was in for part of it.

The second run of ym callings was so much better for my husband and the boys because he understood much better how to do it.  It is rare that people get put into callings knowing just how to do it. Like your boys need to be trained and get experience as quorum leaders, adults need to be trained and get experience as quorums advisors.

And like you said, this is really a group effort, because if the bishop doesn't agree to let it be led that way, or the advisor, or the parent it is going to be harder to get it to work.

And like you've shared it takes time.  Wasn't it a year before it finally clicked with your first deacons quorum president?  I know it took a long time for some of my husband's ym to catch on.  Meanwhile everyone is dealing with the fallout.  Your young man was the only active deacon.  If there are 6 in the quorum and it takes that long for the leader to catch on then some of the other 5 may be lost.

That isn't to say that I think it shouldn't be done the way you say.  It absolutely should. I'm just saying your experience will be different that others so they may have struggles trying to do it that way you didn't have. 

14 hours ago, Hamba Tuhan said:

The analogy that the counsellor from the YM General Presidency used with us was that of coach and player. Good coaches go wake their players up and drag them out of bed if necessary. (I think I've seen that in more than a few movies ...) They spend time with them one-on-one. They gain their trust. I could go on, but I suspect most of us know what this looks like: genuine investment.

I'm doing fine. Thank you for checking. But you are right that I have grown bone-weary of watching people seeking to sabotage the Church and its divine mission from within or making excuses for those who do. I know it's probably been overused in a 'pandemic' context lately, but I've had a gutful of people sowing doubt in the efficacy of brass serpents.

I have been in elders quorums where the home teaching was in the single digits, and I have been in elders quorums where the home teaching was in the 90s. I have been in wards where attendance was stagnant or even in decline, and I have been in wards where there was a sustained increase in attendance literally three out of every four quarters, year after year. I have seen boys fail at leadership opportunities and fall away from the Church, and I have seen boys grow into their roles and then become unstoppable in their capacity to minister to other boys, the ward at large, and then to dozens of non-members as effective missionaries. I have seen local missionary work surge, and I have seen it contract.

In many cases, these have been the same quorums or wards across a change in leadership.

In every single instance, the clear and obvious difference was a cheerful determination to embrace and faithfully implement the current guidance of the living prophets -- what our past area president called 'prophetic priorities'.

Without this, the modern-day Children of Israel are doomed to spend their 40 years wandering in the wilderness, griping and white-anting on internet message boards like 21st-century Lamans and Lemuels, constructing self-fulfilling prophecies of failure and decline. Like I said, I'm bone-weary of it.

 

Edited by Rain
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1 hour ago, Ginger Snaps said:

Agree. A Bishop depends heavily on the other leaders serving in his ward to step up and do their job. If that’s not happening, it’s a real struggle. And it’s not always as easy as release-and-replace. Sometimes the people in there are the best (or only) people who are even willing to fill a calling of that size.  Our last ward had a huge apathy problem. Dozens of people who wanted to show up to a fully functioning ward every week without having to contribute. And large, faithful families who were shouldering the workload were moving away in droves (including ours . . . which I felt bad about, but the prompting we got to move was very, very clear). 

This has been our experience with the YM organization.  Luckily we live in a ward that just put in two new subdivisions (so we've gotten over 300 new members in the last year) and so there is hope that the newest people called with actually show up on wednesday nights.

The young men who are serving in the quorum presidencies are good kids from good families but they struggle too because there are so few of them (despite our large ward size, we have very few youth.  Of the new members that have moved in we've only gotten about 3 new youth-aged kids).  The active kids are also the presidency members and they are tired of doing everything, especially with adults (other than the bishopric) that won't show up presidency meetings.

The teachers quorum had a really fun activity planned last month (going to a hot spring) that they kept putting off each wednesday because no boys showed up for it even though the boys planned it.  Three weeks in a row they had no activity.  It's killing my husband that the quorum is doing so badly considering all of the boys in the presidency are active.

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2 hours ago, Ginger Snaps said:

Agree. A Bishop depends heavily on the other leaders serving in his ward to step up and do their job. If that’s not happening, it’s a real struggle. And it’s not always as easy as release-and-replace. Sometimes the people in there are the best (or only) people who are even willing to fill a calling of that size.  Our last ward had a huge apathy problem. Dozens of people who wanted to show up to a fully functioning ward every week without having to contribute. And large, faithful families who were shouldering the workload were moving away in droves (including ours . . . which I felt bad about, but the prompting we got to move was very, very clear). 

 

59 minutes ago, bluebell said:

This has been our experience with the YM organization.  Luckily we live in a ward that just put in two new subdivisions (so we've gotten over 300 new members in the last year) and so there is hope that the newest people called with actually show up on wednesday nights.

The young men who are serving in the quorum presidencies are good kids from good families but they struggle too because there are so few of them (despite our large ward size, we have very few youth.  Of the new members that have moved in we've only gotten about 3 new youth-aged kids).  The active kids are also the presidency members and they are tired of doing everything, especially with adults (other than the bishopric) that won't show up presidency meetings.

The teachers quorum had a really fun activity planned last month (going to a hot spring) that they kept putting off each wednesday because no boys showed up for it even though the boys planned it.  Three weeks in a row they had no activity.  It's killing my husband that the quorum is doing so badly considering all of the boys in the presidency are active.

 

12 minutes ago, Ginger Snaps said:

I hear that. My oldest was First Assistant  in his Priest Quorum and had a seat on the stake youth council and was basically serving as an uncalled tech assistant to the ward, all while my husband was Bishop, so he had the added “Bishop’s kid” pressure on top of it all. He was super frustrated and burned out. The other two active boys would hardly even help plan activities, let alone carry them out. They’d show up and goof off instead of participating. He would come home some Tuesday nights very, very angry after he’d put a lot of effort into an activity only to have nobody show up or have people fail to carry out their assignments (including adult leaders). Once, the new Bishopric showed up with cupcakes to celebrate the birthday of a boy in the quorum. . . and completely failed to recognize that my son also had a birthday that week. The other boy was really acting out and I know they were trying to keep him hanging on. . . I get that. But for crying out loud, show some appreciation and recognize the good kids who are showing up and serving every week, especially if you want them to keep doing that. Especially in that ward, I often felt that in the rush to go after the one, some of the 99 got crushed in the stampede. 

I think we're seeing decaying vitality in the Gentile church (descended from northern Europe) and increasing vitality and growth in "the islands of the sea" (including Africa). This was prophesied, and we're living it in real time. 

In my experience, it's not "duds" as adult leaders, and the youth are generally "good," but it's a lot harder to plan and execute good activities with regularity. This was true before President Nelson's big changes (Scouting or just young men's), and it's even more true of "youth led" activities --- even where we are trying to follow the program and trying to "let them lead" with support. 

Demographic shifts are kind of at a breakneck pace, and they factor in. In 2018, the ward I was bishop in had 65 youth. We moved away for two years, into a ward and neighborhood that had gone through its life cycle (20 years previously, it had a booming youth). That ward now had a skeleton crew of youth, and they were mostly extremely odd and had major problems. When we moved back into the 2018 ward, it now only had 22 youth total --- most inactive and extremely problematic (mental, social, and academic problems). There had been so many move-outs and move-ins, that only about 1/4 of the original ward remains. In both wards that we moved into, our kids were the nucleus around which they built the YM/YW programs, because they were the most "with it" (competency, personality, lack of profound issues, reliability, etc.). It's hard to plan and execute activities when the youth are very strange, have no interests, have no drive, and are very reluctant to go to church or activities. My wife is in the YW presidency, and they have a handful of great 11 year olds, but no active mid-range or older girls. The few older girls come regularly to activities because their inactive parents want to get rid of them for the night (and I would too). They are climbing the walls crazy and obnoxious, and they intimidate the young girls (my wife recommended that they meet as two groups, but the YW president wants to meet combined because there aren't that many). It's just all-around tough. Both the YM and YW organizations (and the bishopric) are among the best people in the ward, and they perform their callings well, all things considered. It's not a "dud" leader issue at all. 

Another tough issue is that youth often go to a zillion different schools (unlike when we grew up, when everyone went to the same school), and club sports, dance, martial arts, and many other activities outside of school tie up many youth and families, and they interfere with attempted church activities. This often takes away an inordinate number of the "sharper" youth, leaving the youth who aren't really involved with anything (I actually see this overscheduling as a bad thing. Youth get burned out or focus obsessively on specific interests to the exclusion of all others. That they don't participate in church activities is one of many problems with this). 

The plummeting LDS birthrate, and much higher rate of working mothers are two other issues that I think are affecting this now, and will continue to have an impact on this and other issues on the coming decades. Very little of it stems from "dud" leaders who don't do their callings (although this can be an issue as well). 

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On 9/23/2021 at 5:23 AM, Scott Lloyd said:

It’s not unprecedented. 
 

I went on my mission in 1974, a year or two before the Provo MTC was constructed. The forerunner to the MTC was the LTM, or Language Training Mission. It was split between three locations: BYU in Provo, Ricks College (now BYU-Idaho) in Rexburg and the Church College of Hawaii (now BYU-Hawaii). 
 

The Scandinavian, Finland and Netherlands mission LTMs were in Rexburg, so as a Sweden-bound missionary, I went there. We were transported by bus from the Mission Home in Salt Lake to Rexburg and ultimately from Rexburg to the Salt Lake airport. 
 

At one point during our LTM stint, we went by bus to do a session at the Idaho Falls Temple. 
 

We occupied, as I recall, one floor of the dorms on campus and shared the cafeteria with the students living there. 

I, too, am an LTM grad. German.

Ours was in Provo, and the German learners lived and worked in the Amanda Knight Hall. It's now contracted women's housing at BYU. No mention on the website of the former LTM usage. I believe it was a BYU women's dorm when it was built in 1939, so I guess it's back to its former function.

When we had our temple break, it was at the Provo temple, and we walked there.

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My predictions....

 

Nothing new to see here. Same old stuff, Different year. Lot's of boring talks and pabulum. Lots of stuff to discourage members from critical thinking skills. May be new temple announcements for temple not needed so members think the church is growing when it really is shrinking.  I wait Kennogo to nanny me on my awful vitriol.  But some things deserve vitriol.

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9 hours ago, Hamba Tuhan said:

What I think of when I read things like this:

surrender-4296604_960_720.jpg

This I know! When I was first called as YM president, we had three boys who regularly attended church. Two were teacher age, and they were both freaks. One called himself an 'emo' and had a mane of hair that hid his face most of the time. On several occasions, his parents (equally crazy) locked him out of the house, and I let him sleep on my lounge.

His mate was an awkward, gangly boy, covered in acne, who tried to be an 'emo' too but mostly failed at it. His even crazier parents moved from our city, but he ran away to avoid going with them. He spent the first several nights sleeping in pedestrian underpasses and bus interchanges, but once he'd figured out this wasn't the grand adventure he'd imagined, he ended up at my house. Formal schooling here ends at age 16, and children can access government support to live on their own from age 15 in rare circumstances. I was able to convince the government social worker this was one of those circumstances, and she awarded him a living allowance until he completed year 12. This allowed him to rent a room in a sharehouse for the next three years, buy food, pay school fees and bus fares, but little else.

At his parents' long-distance request, I agreed to become this boy's guardian for legal reasons. The first thing he asked me to do was to take him to a medical clinic. He was thin and pale and hadn't felt well for a long time, but his naturopathy-loving mum had refused to take him to see a doctor. I booked him in to see mine. She took him very seriously, ran some tests, and discovered he was quite severely anaemic.

Neither of these boys remained active once they were priest age.

The third boy was our sole active deacon when I was called -- and the only one who regularly attended activities, in part because his parents wanted him out of the house. Following the instructions I'd been given in my training with the Young Men General Presidency member, I insisted this boy be called as quorum president. I had been promised that a quorum of one -- if we called a president, gave him keys, took him seriously, and worked tirelessly to train him -- would not remain a quorum of one.

That promise turned out to be correct, but it took us two years to get there, by which time this boy was the president of the teachers quorum. To be honest, I think he enjoyed having weekly activities, often entirely by himself, with the entire bishopric and all three quorum advisers ... in large part because it gave him an excuse to play rough.

As odd as the two other boys were, this one was more screwed up ... with a driving need to flirt with self-harm. None of us knew the cause of this at the time, but it turned out that his dad was a paedophile who preyed on girls. This boy knew what was going one but didn't tell anyone until the dad was caught in an international police sting. Self-harm had been one of his ways of trying to cope. His other approach was just being bloody annoying. Loving him took everything the six of us adults had, but we did it until it finally took.

I still remember the Sunday after church when he approached me with a quorum list in his hand and asked, with some indignation, 'Who are all these other boys?' I told him what I knew because, of course, in the meantime, we adults had all been trying to reach out to those boys, but it didn't satisfy him, so that Sunday, at his insistence, I took him to visit every boy on his list. Within weeks, most of them were at activities. Then church on Sundays. It reached a point where I would have to start early on Sunday morning, pick up four boys for church, drop them at the chapel, and then go back for the next lot.

Soon we had a functioning teachers quorum, with three of these newly active, newly ordained boys joining their rescuer in his presidency. That trickled down to our deacons quorum. Bishop and I had made in-roads with the priest-age boys, but all of our efforts were temporary until some of our on-fire teachers became priests and brought their enthusiasm with them.

Emo boy now lives in a city hundreds of kilometres away, but we're still Facebook friends, and at this point he is the sole member of his crazy family that hasn't formally resigned from the Church over same-sex 'marriage'. He's married (to a woman!), gainfully employed in the entertainment industry, and has a beautiful child.

Runaway boy still lives here. Even after he stopped attending church, I was his main support. I taught him to drive my car (manual) and helped him get his licence and buy his own car. I signed his excuse notes whenever he was sick from school. He completed year 12 with reasonably good results and has been employed at a department store ever since. He now lives with his dad, who divorced his alternative-medicine wife, left the Church, and moved back. I have a good relationship with both of them, and we sometimes go out for dinner together. I remain hopeful that they'll both come back someday. Again, they have nothing bad to say about the Church, and in fact the dad praises everything we did to support his son in his absence.

Before the pandemic, the boy missed the last bus home from work, and his dad (a police officer) was on duty. It was nearly midnight, and his workplace and home are both on the other side of the city, but he rang me for a lift. I love that he knew he could do that!

Self-harming boy was our second young man to go on a mission. Despite my concerns, he served faithfully, and he continues to be a force for good in our stake, now rescuing misfit young single adults and helping them discover the safety and security of the Church. I love him with all my heart. Whenever I see him in action, I remember how much the Lord cares for the not 'with it' youth ... and how well He designed His church to give them genuine opportunities to grow and change.

One of the lessons I think we taught our boys very well was that the Church exists not to entertain but to give people like them chances to show up and make a difference for people who are otherwise lost.

It's not my place to intervene, but if I were your wife, I'd be raising this issue with the stake young women presidency. It's not fair to either group of girls. The same thing has been happening in our ward, and I've seen how bad it is. When I was trained as YM president, I was told forthrightly that we should never combine to deal with small numbers. Instead, work with the small numbers to meet their needs, and then they'll go out and bring others in. I believe it because that is precisely what worked with our boys.

Mate, welcome to the reality for the vast majority of the wards and branches in the world. The young people in my current ward would attend more than a dozen different schools, spread across more than one-quarter of our city, all with different schedules. It was sheer madness with early-morning seminary. I'm grateful Covid finally got us all online, with classes both before and after school. (We tried this before the pandemic, but we got pushback from parents who were strangely nostalgic about their own early-morning seminary experiences.) I can assure you that we are NEVER going back!

I heard recently someone say on the unmentionable podcast how there's no better experience for first half of life than what the church offers. And you sure are doing a heck of a job Hamba, helping so many! 

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Has there been any news on the Saturday evening session? I know they have chosen to continue it, stating that "All members and friends of the Church are invited to view this session. It will not have a specific theme, nor will it be intended for any particular demographic or leadership group. Holding this session will allow for more gospel topics to be taught and permit more general leaders to address the conference."

It will be interesting to see who the have picked to speak and how the format will run.

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14 hours ago, Hamba Tuhan said:

What I think of when I read things like this:

surrender-4296604_960_720.jpg

 

Golf?  Flag Corps?  Choosing to surrender?  What does this picture make you think of?  Can I buy some vowels, and some consonants, for some more clues?

  

14 hours ago, Hamba Tuhan said:

 

This I know! When I was first called as YM president, we had three boys who regularly attended church. Two were teacher age, and they were both freaks. One called himself an 'emo' and had a mane of hair that hid his face most of the time. On several occasions, his parents (equally crazy) locked him out of the house, and I let him sleep on my lounge.

His mate was an awkward, gangly boy, covered in acne, who tried to be an 'emo' too but mostly failed at it. His even crazier parents moved from our city, but he ran away to avoid going with them. He spent the first several nights sleeping in pedestrian underpasses and bus interchanges, but once he'd figured out this wasn't the grand adventure he'd imagined, he ended up at my house. Formal schooling here ends at age 16, and children can access government support to live on their own from age 15 in rare circumstances. I was able to convince the government social worker this was one of those circumstances, and she awarded him a living allowance until he completed year 12. This allowed him to rent a room in a sharehouse for the next three years, buy food, pay school fees and bus fares, but little else.

At his parents' long-distance request, I agreed to become this boy's guardian for legal reasons. The first thing he asked me to do was to take him to a medical clinic. He was thin and pale and hadn't felt well for a long time, but his naturopathy-loving mum had refused to take him to see a doctor. I booked him in to see mine. She took him very seriously, ran some tests, and discovered he was quite severely anaemic.

Neither of these boys remained active once they were priest age.

The third boy was our sole active deacon when I was called -- and the only one who regularly attended activities, in part because his parents wanted him out of the house. Following the instructions I'd been given in my training with the Young Men General Presidency member, I insisted this boy be called as quorum president. I had been promised that a quorum of one -- if we called a president, gave him keys, took him seriously, and worked tirelessly to train him -- would not remain a quorum of one.

That promise turned out to be correct, but it took us two years to get there, by which time this boy was the president of the teachers quorum. To be honest, I think he enjoyed having weekly activities, often entirely by himself, with the entire bishopric and all three quorum advisers ... in large part because it gave him an excuse to play rough.

As odd as the two other boys were, this one was more screwed up ... with a driving need to flirt with self-harm. None of us knew the cause of this at the time, but it turned out that his dad was a paedophile who preyed on girls. This boy knew what was going one but didn't tell anyone until the dad was caught in an international police sting. Self-harm had been one of his ways of trying to cope. His other approach was just being bloody annoying. Loving him took everything the six of us adults had, but we did it until it finally took.

I still remember the Sunday after church when he approached me with a quorum list in his hand and asked, with some indignation, 'Who are all these other boys?' I told him what I knew because, of course, in the meantime, we adults had all been trying to reach out to those boys, but it didn't satisfy him, so that Sunday, at his insistence, I took him to visit every boy on his list. Within weeks, most of them were at activities. Then church on Sundays. It reached a point where I would have to start early on Sunday morning, pick up four boys for church, drop them at the chapel, and then go back for the next lot.

Soon we had a functioning teachers quorum, with three of these newly active, newly ordained boys joining their rescuer in his presidency. That trickled down to our deacons quorum. Bishop and I had made in-roads with the priest-age boys, but all of our efforts were temporary until some of our on-fire teachers became priests and brought their enthusiasm with them.

Emo boy now lives in a city hundreds of kilometres away, but we're still Facebook friends, and at this point he is the sole member of his crazy family that hasn't formally resigned from the Church over same-sex 'marriage'. He's married (to a woman!), gainfully employed in the entertainment industry, and has a beautiful child.

Runaway boy still lives here. Even after he stopped attending church, I was his main support. I taught him to drive my car (manual) and helped him get his licence and buy his own car. I signed his excuse notes whenever he was sick from school. He completed year 12 with reasonably good results and has been employed at a department store ever since. He now lives with his dad, who divorced his alternative-medicine wife, left the Church, and moved back. I have a good relationship with both of them, and we sometimes go out for dinner together. I remain hopeful that they'll both come back someday. Again, they have nothing bad to say about the Church, and in fact the dad praises everything we did to support his son in his absence.

Before the pandemic, the boy missed the last bus home from work, and his dad (a police officer) was on duty. It was nearly midnight, and his workplace and home are both on the other side of the city, but he rang me for a lift. I love that he knew he could do that!

Self-harming boy was our second young man to go on a mission. Despite my concerns, he served faithfully, and he continues to be a force for good in our stake, now rescuing misfit young single adults and helping them discover the safety and security of the Church. I love him with all my heart. Whenever I see him in action, I remember how much the Lord cares for the not 'with it' youth ... and how well He designed His church to give them genuine opportunities to grow and change.

One of the lessons I think we taught our boys very well was that the Church exists not to entertain but to give people like them chances to show up and make a difference for people who are otherwise lost.

It's not my place to intervene, but if I were your wife, I'd be raising this issue with the stake young women presidency. It's not fair to either group of girls. The same thing has been happening in our ward, and I've seen how bad it is. When I was trained as YM president, I was told forthrightly that we should never combine to deal with small numbers. Instead, work with the small numbers to meet their needs, and then they'll go out and bring others in. I believe it because that is precisely what worked with our boys.

Mate, welcome to the reality for the vast majority of the wards and branches in the world. The young people in my current ward would attend more than a dozen different schools, spread across more than one-quarter of our city, all with different schedules. It was sheer madness with early-morning seminary. I'm grateful Covid finally got us all online, with classes both before and after school. (We tried this before the pandemic, but we got pushback from parents who were strangely nostalgic about their own early-morning seminary experiences.) I can assure you that we are NEVER going back!

Kudos to you!  It warms my heart to know there are people like you in our Lord's church.

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8 hours ago, Teancum said:

Nothing new to see here. Same old stuff, Different year. Lot's of boring talks and pabulum. Lots of stuff to discourage members from critical thinking skills. May be new temple announcements for temple not needed so members think the church is growing when it really is shrinking.

The good news is that you are almost 100 per cent guaranteed to hear what you're expecting! :good:

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Hi all. I’m new on this forum. I enjoy reading the dialogue on this board, and today felt the desire to write a post.  Reading some of the posts on this page from leaders (former bishops, YM and YW leaders) inspires several thoughts: (1) I marvel at your goodness and your service towards the youth and (2) I am perplexed by some of the language used to describe the youth. Some of the words used to describe them seems to me to be derogatory, and while I can tell that you love them, I wonder how they would feel if they were to read those words? No intention here of blaming or shaming just wanted to bring some awareness to this. Also don’t mean to hijack this board.  
B699B0A4-4BCA-4CF7-BE88-73C03B67E594.jpeg.9f4d81ea71d71fdb079d1453c3cbfe64.jpeg

 

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7 hours ago, JLingo said:

Hi all. I’m new on this forum. I enjoy reading the dialogue on this board, and today felt the desire to write a post.  Reading some of the posts on this page from leaders (former bishops, YM and YW leaders) inspires several thoughts: (1) I marvel at your goodness and your service towards the youth and (2) I am perplexed by some of the language used to describe the youth. Some of the words used to describe them seems to me to be derogatory, and while I can tell that you love them, I wonder how they would feel if they were to read those words? No intention here of blaming or shaming just wanted to bring some awareness to this. Also don’t mean to hijack this board.  

No worries, it's not a hijack. And your point is very well taken.

This is a discussion board, and while you are correct that we wouldn't discuss these things to some of these youths' faces in this manner, there have to be times and places where such things can be discussed. Where people can be frank and speak their minds. We don't bat an eye about this in other settings, like attorney-client privilege. There are very good reasons why, for example, the principle of executive privilege exists. Executive leaders wouldn't ever be frank and honest in discussion if they had to act as though everything were being recorded, and the transcript available to anyone and everyone. There have to be times and places where people can freely and honestly express their thoughts and feelings without fear.

We do love the youth, but if a spade can never be called a spade in frank discussion, then certain important things will never be said by anyone, and frustration/concerns/issues will never really be discussed. This isn't hypocrisy or lack of true love for those being discussed, it's a necessary part of the diplomacy of talking about such things. 

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2 hours ago, pogi said:

Live general conference now on youtube for first time.  Also, note taking abilities for conference in the Gospel Library app has been added.

https://www.ksl.com/article/50251171/church-of-jesus-christ-launches-new-digital-features-for-october-2021-general-conference

Not exactly correct. I've been watching GC on Youtube for years - it's my preferred media. What's new is GC now has its own channel as opposed to the general church channel.

I do take notes often, probably won't use the app to do so, but for people who might it's a nice addition.

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8 hours ago, rongo said:

We do love the youth, but if a spade can never be called a spade in frank discussion, then certain important things will never be said by anyone, and frustration/concerns/issues will never really be discussed.

Can you share any examples where you (or someone you know, etc) were unable to trash talk youth? Or not speak as poorly as you wanted to - whatever is in play here.

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