With the Church’s recent announcement about the change to the second-hour block on Sundays, I’ve been looking back on the Church’s decisions, guidance, and trends on various topics over the last decade.
I can’t think of what could make weekly church meetings even more shallow than they have already become than trying to now hold two separate meetings inside one hour. With chit-chat, people getting seated, announcements, and comments, this will predictably lead to shorter and shallower lessons. Whatever benefits there may be, it will be impossible to avoid the cost to lesson depth and quality.
The announcement gave no reasoning for the change and no acknowledgment of the elephant in the room, which is that teachers now get to make maybe one or two points and take one comment before class is over.
Over the last 10 years, I’ve noticed a decline in explanations for organizational changes. There is less logic, reason, or scriptural basis, and a move toward a free-flowing mass of ongoing leader-based changes. As other examples: sometimes we have Priesthood Session at General Conference, sometimes we do not. Sometimes they hold a Relief Society session at General Conference, other times, they do not. Sometimes using "Mormon" is a good thing, as in "meet the Mormons", but within a few years the term became an offense to God, per President Nelson. For who knows how long, garments had sleeves, and now suddenly they do not. The temple ceremony used to be very consistent, but now it changes frequently.
But back to some reflections on the past 10 years of rapid LDS Church evolution. What comes to mind is the baptism of children of gay parents flip-flop policy. The original announcement was stated to be revelatory, and then they reversed course and changed the policy after public pushback. That was pretty problematic if you take the time to read what they said, how it was presented, and then how they later reversed course. But few people remember that or even care now.
The Church’s pandemic response is another example that exposed a serious concern in its claims of prophet-leadership, and it goes beyond normal human mistakes or policy failures. If senior church leaders lead by revelatory insight from God, as one of the Church’s primary claims asserts, then one would expect guidance that reflects more than the public consensus available to every institution and risk-averse executive in society. During the pandemic, the Church echoed the dominant script of the time by urging vaccination and masking, without offering anything meaningfully distinct in judgment, discernment, or wisdom. They were indistinguishable from the public narrative. How much of that needs to happen before it fundamentally changes the practical meaning of prophetic guidance?
The issue is not that prophets should have outperformed medical specialists or scientists on every technical detail. The issue is that, based on their claims, one would expect keener judgment, deeper moral clarity, and some semblance of independent discernment. But their counsel was thin, reactionary, and institutionally dependent. The pandemic counsel was to follow government leaders with no mention of the voice of conscience. A church claiming divine guidance could have offered an actual message: encourage personal responsibility, strengthen health through exercise, sleep, sunlight, and good diet, care for the vulnerable, and help members think soberly about tradeoffs using conscience rather than simply parroting the then current public-health consensus.
Exercise and diet were not a full substitute for pandemic policy, but they were obvious pillars of health and resilience that were absent from the Church’s top-level public guidance during the pandemic. Has the Church mentioned those topics elsewhere in the past? Yes. But scattered mentions in prior materials are no excuse for failing to make them a visible priority when a major health event hits. Here we are six years later. How much more pandemic-resistant would the entire membership base be if they had emphasized such foundational things and continued to recommend them? You cannot fix an unhealthy or at-risk population in two weeks, but it has been six years, and the church population is arguably no better prepared for another pandemic than before.
If top Church leaders continue to present themselves the way they do, yet repeat the same narrow mainstream messaging as everyone else, and behave as any other business institution, it creates a credibility problem. And when later facts complicate the original confidence, such as the acknowledged myocarditis vaccine issues, and the overstated benefits of masking, the fallback defense becomes that leaders were simply doing their best with the information available. But that turns prophetic leadership into ordinary administration. That's not the Gospel. That doesn't satisfy the soul. That undermines their claims. In all of this, it's the people I hurt for. It's the members I'm concerned about. It's the people close to me who experience actual harm from false claims. It's the total lack of depth coming from an institution that claims to be more "Christ-centered" than ever.
My point is not that the Church should have only preached fitness during the Covid pandemic. My point is that during a historic time of public fear, its leadership displayed no visible sign of wisdom, discernment, or even long-term common sense. Rather than revealing prophetic judgment, they displayed the same business risk management as every other institution, theirs was just clothed in religious authority. That seriously undermines claims that the Church’s leaders provide distinctively revelatory or prophetic guidance in consequential real-world matters. I do not accept for one second that exercise, appropriate rest, sunlight, and a good diet were too commonplace for them to repeat during that time of public hysteria. That would have given people solid ground to build from. How can people remain spiritually healthy if their basic physical health suffers from chronic neglect, while foundational principles of health are sidelined in favor of near-total reliance on (Big) pharmaceutical intervention and trust in government leaders?
I can no longer tell the difference between organizational changes in the business world and organizational changes in the LDS Church. They are interchangeable and rely on the same tools, IE proof of concept, test runs, and they have the same outcomes. This new second-hour change to the Sunday School schedule feels like just another structure change that may well be changed again in a year or two. How can we call these trends prophetic leadership? The terms we use as a people have remained, meanwhile the actual things themselves have fundamentally drifted.
That is part of what makes this pattern so troubling. The problem is not merely that the Church is wrong from time to time or shallow in some of its responses and decisions. Everyone makes mistakes, and not all decisions turn out to be good ones. But what happens when later wisdom starts showing a pattern?
The deeper problem is the pattern of claimed prophetic leadership that is functionally interchangeable with corporate management. And once that becomes visible, it cannot easily be unseen. A church and its leaders can ask for trust and to be followed on the basis of divine authority, or it can behave like a risk-managed institution following the trends of its age, but it cannot do both indefinitely without eventually forcing members to question whether the prophetic claims are no longer meaningful, or worse, false.
