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<\/a>In October 2010, in a fit of pique with our increasingly banal church publications, I wrote the following\u00a0 to The Ensign:<\/em><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n From:<\/strong> Gina Colvin Please accept this feedback with the good grace that is intended.<\/p>\n I have long been a happy recipient of The Ensign. \u00a0However over the last ten years I have been sadly\u00a0 underwhelmed by both its format and its content. \u00a0It appears now to be written in sound bites which work to engage its readers with more emotion than information. \u00a0\u00a0Is there room in The Ensign to consider more complex, doctrinally engaging copy or will I have to rely on the Bloggernacle for something more robust?<\/p>\n For your information I have received similar unsolicited comments from numerous of my church acquaintances.<\/p>\n Regards Today, 18 months later, I got the following, most surprising, reply:<\/p>\n Thank you. You have an excellent point that the Ensign<\/em> is working to address.<\/p>\n Sincerely,<\/p>\n The Ensign Staff<\/p><\/blockquote>\n While I\u2019m thrilled that there is somebody actually out there receiving, thinking about, and responding to emails I can only imagine how many suggestions, letters of complaint, or queries The Ensign<\/em> must receive to have taken this long to get back to me. \u00a0\u00a0 I\u2019ve done some rudimentary arithmetic and have figured out that if it took 2 minutes to write this email (and I\u2019m being pretty generous\u00a0 here), based on an average working day of 7.5 hours, and one person alone responding to such feedback, taking \u00a0an average of 2 minutes to reply to each email,\u00a0 I have calculated that they must get about 54,000 emails per year!!<\/p>\n I can only imagine the pressure The Ensign<\/em> staff and other \u2018Cobbers\u2019 \u00a0(church office employees) must be under to respond to a membership who, from all accounts seems to be assiduously concerned with petitioning, questioning, second guessing, providing suggestions for, and criticizing the machinations of the \u2018Holy SLC\u2019, (an affectionate play on the term the \u2018Holy See\u2019 \u2013 the Catholic seat of government).\u00a0 A woman I know was a telephonist at the COB for a brief time and can confirm the huge volume of nuisance phone calls they receive from a disgruntled public.\u00a0 I\u2019ve heard that front line staff are issued a book which describes what to say in certain events.\u00a0 Perhaps it looks like this:<\/p>\n Its, Sister \u2026 here.\u00a0 I have a question for President Monson.<\/em><\/p>\n [Code Monson: page 3,\u00a0 note 1]\u00a0 Thank you for your call, please direct your query to your unit leader.<\/p>\n But I don\u2019t want to talk to him, I want to talk to President Monson<\/em>.<\/p>\n [Code Monson: page 3,\u00a0 note 2] We encourage all queries to go to your unit leader in the first instance.<\/p>\n But this doesn\u2019t concern my bishop, it concerns President Monson. He\u2019s asked me to do something, I\u2019m supposed to follow him,\u00a0 but I just want a wee chat to figure out some specifics.<\/em><\/p>\n [Code Monson: page 3,\u00a0 note 3]\u00a0 Our apologies Sister\u2026 President Monson is unable to answer questions of a personal nature.\u00a0 Please seek a response from your unit leader.\u00a0 If you are unsuccessful in this instance then you should pursue the matter with your Stake President.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It\u2019s a slick operation, the Holy SLC, the COB.\u00a0 And it\u2019s very difficult to find anything out about them without leaning on an insider to give you the skinny.\u00a0 The ex-employees are the best people to tackle with questions.\u00a0\u00a0 If they are mid-career ex-employees chances are they\u2019ll be peeved about something, and from my experience it doesn\u2019t take much to winkle it out of them.<\/p>\n Despite the intriguing investigations of Daymon Smith<\/a>, the inner machinations of the COB remain somewhat of an enigma.\u00a0\u00a0 In fact I still remain puzzled about the role, influence, and authority of the COB in ecclesiastical affairs because I have a sneaking suspicion that it isn\u2019t insignificant.\u00a0\u00a0 Which leads me to ask the question\u00a0\u00a0 (which I won\u2019t direct at President Monson because he\u2019s clearly to busy for the riff raff ), \u00a0 \u2018Who is the church?\u2019<\/p>\n In a previous post I posited that \u2018we\u2019 are the \u2018Church\u2019.\u00a0 We are the body of Christ.\u00a0 This would be the answer if we were to conduct a thorough scriptural exposition.\u00a0 Through the blood of Christ he claims us through our offering of a broken heart and a contrite spirit.\u00a0 We are his, a community of worshipers who have come together in the faith to work out our salvation and to build a people fit for the Kingdom of God on earth.<\/p>\n That\u2019s all well and good in theory, but I\u2019m puzzled by the Mormon usage of the term \u2018The Church\u2019\u00a0 which has become something of a trope to refer to an entity that exists outside the collective members.\u00a0 \u2018The Church\u2019 it would appear is an inscrutable body corporate who exercises a degree of control over us, to whom we have an obligation to align ourselves with, irrespective of our inability to entirely apprehend\u00a0 \u2018The Church\u2019. \u00a0\u00a0Enough has been said to me about \u2018The Church\u2019s\u2019 position on this or that, the way things ought to be done in \u2018The Church\u2019, \u2018Church Discipline\u2019 etc. to feel reasonably assured that those who talk in this manner are referring to something apart from me, or us.\u00a0 They are referring to an external force with coercive and disciplinary powers and functions whose \u2018reality\u2019 I need to be reminded of if I attempt to interrogate and question the \u2018authorized\u2019 version of \u2018The Church\u2019.<\/p>\n However,\u00a0 I agreed to teach this lesson, beginning with an examination of\u00a0 the holy writ in order to identify the desirable attributes of spiritual leaders.\u00a0 We decided in the discussion that these are:<\/p>\n a) an acknowledgement of Christ as our head<\/p>\n b) an absence of spiritual hierarchy<\/p>\n c) humility<\/p>\n d) a service and servant orientation<\/p>\n e) an eschewal of dominion<\/p>\n f)\u00a0 above all demonstrable charity with the primary role of the spiritual leader being that of one who directs us to seek out, know, love and serve Christ.<\/p>\n Having arrived at a consensus, and having used the\u00a0 canon as a basis for our continued discussion I then asked how the class understood \u2018sustain\u2019 in this context. It began well as we talked about being yoked to Christ and thereby to each other in the pursuit of a Zion community.\u00a0 Then the predictable Mormon fascists began brandishing their books at me to remind me to look at the manual which states:<\/p>\n
\nSent:<\/strong> Wednesday, October 06, 2010 8:19 PM
\nTo:<\/strong> Ensign
\nSubject:<\/strong> The Tabloidification of The Ensign<\/p>\n
\nGMC<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/a>Take for instance last Sunday.\u00a0 I was asked at the last minute to teach the Relief Society lesson. As this was a text conversation I said \u2018yes\u2019 before I found out that the lesson was \u2018Sustaining our Leaders\u2019.\u00a0 I have no problem whatsoever with the notion of \u2018sustaining\u2019 our leaders \u2013 I\u2019m entirely in favour of them doing a good job and will offer any advice they might seek from me to do so (said tongue in cheek).\u00a0 I do however have a problem with the conflation of ideas such as obedience, deference, and conformity with the notion of \u2018sustaining\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0 I study ideological tyrannies for a living and feel very comfortable and at peace with resisting what can end up being deeply problematic social arrangements.<\/p>\n