SSM, Church Government & Rulings vs. Judgements

The following comparison may help to clarify certain decisions made in church governance. I hope so.

­­            I am a high school basketball official. In the realm of officiating, there are rulings and there are judgments. As an official I must do both many times per game. I must rule and I must judge. And these are two very different officiating functions.

A ruling is a call that I cannot change through my own workings or assessments. For example, if a player that is dribbling the basketball steps on one of the four boundary lines of the floor they have gone “out of bounds” and I have absolutely no choice—I must call them out of bounds and award possession of the ball to the other team. This is a ruling. And rulings are determined by officiating boards at the state and national levels.

On the other hand, a judgment is a call that I have total autonomy to make. A judgement does not exist within the exacting realms of rulings. I have liberty to interpret these calls very widely. For example, when a foul is committed I judge as to whether the infraction was a personal foul, a player control foul, an offensive foul, a defensive foul, a double foul, a flagrant foul, an sportsmanlike foul, a technical foul and so forth. In fact, I can call a technical foul on a player, coach, announcer, or fans. My judgements also extend to calls that include goal tending and basket interference—which means I have the limited power to put points on the scoreboard or take points off the scoreboard for one team or the other. Furthermore, my officiating partners have absolutely no authority to override my judgment. The call is mine and mine alone.

Similar principles are at play with Church governance in Mormonism—only there is one distinct difference and it is this: ninety-nine percent of all calls made by local ecclesiastical leaders in Mormonism are rulings and not judgments. Take the recent policy regarding same-sex marriage. The central hierarchy explicitly identified a ruling—if a couple enters into a same-sex relationship and break the law of chastity, there must be disciplinary action taken. However, and here’s a noteworthy difference, the central hierarchy of the Church did not identify which ruling that local leaders must make. The final call is a judgement, not a ruling and it is made at the local level.

Furthermore, there are a series of outcomes that may result from that ruling. Now, like in basketball, the judgements may be quite similar  to judements made in different Church jurisdictions. But there remains a significant autonomy wherein local leaders may consider individual circumstances that may make the judgement entirely different from previous rulings in different wards or stakes. That is quite remarkable. As a high school official, I do not enjoy that flexibility. Not in the least. I’m glad that the central hierarchy of the Church has granted this limited flexibility to local leaders. They didn’t have to, and yet they did. Again, that is quite remarkable.