A Little Less Like Home

The past 24 hours have been an arrangement of sadness, laughter, and joy.  I have to thank the friends who helped bring in the laughter and joy.  Without their company, I might have spiraled into an all-out rage.

Two members of the Church are being called to a disciplinary council.  These councils are the formal mechanism by which members may be disfellowshipped or excommunicated from the church.

I get that the Church has the right to do this.  I understand why they are doing it.  But in the larger context of the past few weeks, it makes me very uncomfortable.  For me, this is what I see coming from the Church right now:

1. We're meeting with Mormon Women Stand because this is how we feel proper women of the Church should behave.
2. We don't meet with extreme groups.  If you have questions about the role of women (or other teachings of the Church), meet with your local priesthood leaders.
3. By the way, we're likely excommunicating a few of people who have been critical of Church teachings.

So yeah, I feel real comfortable talking to my bishop now.

The thing that I find most frustrating is that it feels like the Church hasn't even attempted any real dialog on the issue.  The closest thing we've seen is Elder Oaks' talk in the most recent General Conference.  I read his talk again this morning to see if there was anything I missed.  Let me share with you all of the new things I learned from his talk-----okay I'm done.  Because he didn't teach anything new.  

Maybe I'm exceptional (I doubt that), but I already knew everything he talked about.  Reminders are great.  I won't begrudge anyone a reminder of the Church's position.  But reiterating your position is not the same as having a dialog on the topic.

For clarity's sake, let me mock up the conversation as it appears to have been had from my perspective:

Ordain Women: We believe true equality requires that women be ordained to the priesthood.

LDS Church: We disagree with your conclusion.

Ordain Women: Perhaps we should talk about this.  Here's are the assumptions and logical processes that led to our conclusion.

LDS Church: We still disagree with your conclusion.  

Ordain Women: Could you elaborate on your assumptions, or tell us where you disagree with our assumptions?

LDS Church: We continue to disagree with your conclusion.  We will now restate our conclusion.   

 Yes, there's a lot of nuance missing there.  There's a lot more going into the disciplinary councils than just pressure for dialog.  But this is the core of what bothers me about the whole affair.  I am extremely uncomfortable with the Church leadership stating its conclusion without explaining how it got to the conclusion.  Would it really be so hard to say something as simple as "We disagree with your assertion that Joseph Smith ordained Emma Smith to the priesthood--it is our understanding that the language surrounding priesthood ordinations and settings apart was not as specific as it is today.  We believe that, in modern language, Emma Smith was set apart to a position of authority."

I want to understand.  I don't even have to agree with all of the logic in order to accept the result.  I just want to see if the logic that led to the result is internally consistent.  With the information that is coming out of the Church (and by information, I mean deafening silence), I can't do that.

I keep hearing people say, "Well how do you know that they haven't prayed about and gotten an answer."  I don't.  I also don't know that they have prayed about it.  I don't know anything.  I haven't been given the chance to understand.  Everything I've heard is just a reiteration of what the current position is.  And that's precisely what bothers me.

Today, I feel a little less safe in the Church.  I feel that people like me, who want more depth and understanding--about not just what, but why and how--are less welcome.  I feel I've lost a part of the refuge that church has been for me the past six months.  Church feels less like home today, and that makes me sad.

Mormon Superiority Myths: Infidelity

I'm a sucker for click-bait, I'll admit it.  But my fascination usually stems from a curiosity regarding how badly the headline mangles reality.  So I couldn't resist when I saw the headline "You May Be Surprised How Many Born-Again Christians Use Ashley Madison."

A new survey conducted by Ashley Madison -- a dating website for people already in relationships -- sought to discover the link between religion and infidelity by asking 105,000 of its members around the world about their religious affiliation. More than 60,000 of the respondents were in the U.S.

The implication is that Born-again Christians are more likely to cheat on their partners than those from other religions because they make up 25.1% of the user base at Ashley Madison.  Don't be fooled: they have demonstrated no such thing.  Instead of demonstrating that a randomly chosen Evangelical Christian is more likely to be a user of Ashley Madison, they've actually shown that a randomly chosen Ashley Madison is most likely to be an Evangelical Christian.

Big deal.

If we take a look at the percentages of religions in the population compared to the percentages of religions in the user base, we get a different idea.  Take a look:

Religion	Percentage of Population	Percentage of Ashley Madison Users
Evangelist	26.3	25.10
Catholic	23.9	22.75
Protestant	18.1	22.70
Agnostic	2.4	2.00
Mormon	1.7	1.60
Muslim	0.6	1.50
Jewish	1.7	1.40
Atheist	1.6	1.40
Jehovah's Witness	0.7	0.50
Hinduism	0.4	0.30

As you can see, the percentages track pretty well.  Statistically, we would call this good agreement between the data.  A goodness of fit tests also indicates no reason to suspect that the distributions differ (p = 0.22).

What's the practical interpretation?  Effectively, all American religions (and non religions) suffer from infidelity in fairly equal proportions.  Well, at least the kind of infidelity where people are willing to pay a website to help them cheat.

So what does this all mean for Mormon culture?  Nothing really.  At most, we might think that Mormons aren't any better behaved than other religions. 

My advice: save your money and take your partner out to dinner.

http://religions.pewforum.org/affiliations

http://religions.pewforum.org/reports

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/04/infidelity-and-religion_n_5447526.html?tm_hp_ref=mostpopular

On Missing Context

The Church's public affairs department sent an open letter to mormon blogs yesterday.  You can read it for yourself.  There are parts of it I like, and parts of it I don't.

First, the part that I don't like.  Otterson describes a criticism from the internet community at "By not engaging with the more extreme groups, the Church – and Public Affairs in particular – is not acting as Christ would."  Let me start of by just clarifying that the argument "public affairs is not acting as Christ would" is just stupid.  I get that much.  Public affairs is an entity meant to help develop and distribute messaging from the Church.  They shouldn't be expected to "act as Christ would."

That being said, if you're going to claim that you're not meeting with extreme groups, then don't meet with extreme groups.  And yes, Mormon Women Stand is an extreme group.  In response to Ordain Women, they describe themselves as women who "unequivocally sustain the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles."  That may seem perfectly harmless at first, but unequivocal doesn't leave much space for doubt and concern.  The expectation of unequivocal stifles innovation and creativity in solving problems the Church and local congregations face.

Mormon Women Stand and Ordain Women are the opposite extremes in the discussion of women's issues in the Church.  So let's not claim that we're not meeting with extreme groups.

The part I did like: in response to the question of whether women (or men) are ever demeaned or marginalized in the Church, "Yes, of course....What this argues for is better training of leaders and members¹."  As it turns out, I just had a brief talk with my bishop about this on Tuesday.  And I can't tell you how relieving it is to have a bishop to whom I can speak of my wholly equivocal support for how the ward is being managed without him calling into question my commitment to the Church.  But we talked about how so many positions in the Church require strong leadership skills, and the Church does next to nothing to teach those skills.  I mean that quite seriously: the Church does next to nothing to teach its members leadership skills.

Sure, we have "leadership training" meetings pretty much every stake conference.  There's one catch to those training meetings, though--you're only invited if you've already been called into leadership.  And most of the leadership training meetings I've been to end up with a public speaking format (ie, usually no interaction between the speaker and the audience) and focus on how we need to "listen to the Spirit" and "ask for and follow inspiration."

I won't argue against those principles.  They are certainly true and valuable.  But how about doing workshops that teach interviewing skills?  How about workshops that teach leaders how to ask questions that get members to evaluate and express their own beliefs?  How about workshops that teach leaders how to build a common vision and inspire people to want to contribute; to do better than manipulate them with "the Lord is calling you and you don't want to let down the Lord, do you?"  When  you possess these skills, the power of inspiration and revelation are magnified many times over.  We should be teaching them routinely.  We should be teaching them to people before they are called into leadership.  We should be teaching these skills to our youth, our home and visiting teachers, and our Sunday school teachers.

Screw it!  We should be teaching these skills to anyone who walks through the door.

So yes, we need better training.  Can we please start by recognizing that our ability to lead is not completely determined by our ability to hear the Spirit?  Can we admit, already, that there are practical skills that we aren't teaching our current and future leaders that, if they developed, would make for a stronger church?  Can we start now?


¹ I'm going to ignore for now the fact that the problem isn't really that local leaders sometimes demean and marginalize members, but that there are systemic and cultural forces in the Church's teachings and structure that enable and perpetuate these things.

How to Break the Unbreakable Nalgene (Or, Why I Understand Those Who Leave the Church)

I don't know if Nalgene officially bills its water bottles as unbreakable anymore.  Truthfully, I don't know if it ever did.  I do know that they can withstand an incredible amount of abuse.  You can probably find plenty of clips on YouTube.  But it is surprisingly simple to break one.

Here's a decent video that captures the main points (it's only 50 seconds long).  When you watch, you'll notice that the bottle is full of, not water, but ice.  If you fill the bottle up to the cap, put the cap on, and freeze the bottle for a day or two, all of the water in the bottle will freeze.  The nifty thing about water is that it expands when it freezes.  So if the bottle was full before you froze it, all that ice is going to push on the inside of the bottle, creating a large amount of force pushing outward.  The second component is the drop onto a hard surface.  If the drop is far enough to create enough force, the combined forces pushing inward and outward will be enough to break that virtually indestructible bottle.

By Common Consent ran a post yesterday titled "Our Sisters are Leaving," in which the author discusses how some of the Church's public relations choices may influence some men (and women) to leave the Church.  Especially when the PR choices implicitly endorse hyper conservative positions on gender roles.

I believe the Church needs to make changes in how it addresses gender issues.  I'm convinced that there are several Church leaders who believe it needs to change the way it addresses gender issues.  The status quo is inadequate and many of the statements and policy changes in recent years lead me to believe that there will be more changes coming in the future.  But I also see how the Church tries to message these changes, and I also see how incredibly slow and hard fought these changes seem to come.

One of the comments in the BCC blog post stated

if the church is God’s church, however inadequately administrated, you don’t get to wander off and blame it on somebody else. You have to stay, to serve, to contribute, and even enlighten. You don’t really have a choice. What are you going to say? “Yes, God, I felt the BOM was from you, yes, I’ve felt priesthood power, yes, I made covenants, but people weren’t very understanding of my feelings, I didn’t feel valued enough, and your apostles don’t listen to you very well, so I left” I just don’t think that’s going to fly.

Unfortunately, change--kind of like breaking a water bottle--often only comes as a factor of internal and external pressure.  So I get it when people get frustrated that their voices aren't heard.   I can relate to how it feels to be marginalized because you have some of those 'crazy ideas.'  I understand the temptation to express myself with my feet, walk out the doors, and not come back.  I've sat on the precipice of leaving the Church twice in my life¹.

Alas, I am a promote-change-from-the-inside kind of guy.  If you're feeling like you don't have a place in the Church; if you feel a desire to leave it, know this: I don't want you to leave.  I also don't want to you live in constant pain at church.  I want you to stay and help build a network of saints that can support change.  But I also understand if that is a burden too heavy for your soul to bear right now.

To you I say, "please, don't go."  But if you do, know that I still value you.  I will always consider you an ally and a friend.  And I hope that as I push on that bottle from the inside I'll see your familiar hands, opposite mine, pushing firmly from the outside.



¹ And one time even had a full exit plan established.

The Statistician's Approach to Improving Home Teaching (Part 1 of 2)

Go ahead, roll your eyes. Groan. Dread what is about to come. If you're sane, the question you are hopefully asking yourself is "how can you possibly use statistics to improve home teaching¹?" Allow me to answer that question for you:

You can't.

Statistics by themselves cannot -- and will not ever -- be a useful tool for improving home teaching.

That is my official and educated position as a professional statistician. So please, for the love of all that is holy, let's stop talking about home teaching statistics².

Just to make sure we're all on the same page, by and large, when someone talks about home teaching statistics, they are referring to "the percentage of families who received a visit from their home teachers in the last calendar month."  I blame ward clerks for this.  Clerks are tasked with the ever-unpleasant task of reporting this percentage to the higher-ups once a quarter, and so they routinely ask those in charge of the home teaching program to provide this percentage.  The problem is that the clerks are the only people in the world who are asked to have this kind of information.  Those who are in charge of home teaching are required to, "give the bishop monthly home teaching reports. Each report includes a list of those who were not contacted."

From my own experience as a clerk, getting a list of names was nearly impossible.  Almost every time I asked for it, I was given the home teaching percentage instead.  I'm sure that my insistence on being given a list of names was not well received.  I can only imagine that it was a frustrating request because the list of families not visited was so long, and people hated typing out all those names³.

So, of course, since the monthly percentage is so convenient to report, that's what gets reported.  It's also the metric by which congregations often evaluate the quality of their home teaching program.  So here's a hint from a statistician: any time you try to boil any issue down to a single statistic, you're doing it wrong.

Statistics is the art of allowing data to tell its story (not to be confused with using data to make up your own story).  As with all good stories, there needs to be context and depth.  You have to be able to relate to the story, and if your statistics don't help you do that, they are worthless.

The monthly home teaching percentage is a worthless statistic.

Have I harped on that enough yet?  I think I've made my point.  So let's talk about how, as a statistician, I would recommend evaluating the quality of a home teaching program.  Rather than focusing on a single statistic, we're going to look at a combination of three key pieces of information⁴.  One piece is superficial, the second is contextual, and the third is personal.

The Superficial
First -- and this one is going to make you scratch your head -- calculate your monthly home teaching percentage (go ahead, take a moment to scream at me).  But never look at a single percentage alone.  Instead, look at a graph of (at least) the past three months' home teaching percentages.  In my congregation, it would probably look something like this (yes, this makes us look pretty bad):

What's important about this graph, however, is not the height of the bars, but the height of the bars relative to each other.  What you want to see is consistent, constant effort from month to month.  If you 31% in January, 73% in February, and then 20% in March, it means that you managed to motivate people to get involved in home teaching for a month, but their energy and enthusiasm wasn't sustainable.  Ministering to individuals and families should, ideally, be integrated into our lives.  If we are successful in this integration, the height of the bars should be fairly consistent from month to month.

The Contextual

While the previous graph may give us insight into the consistency of the home teaching program, that insight is very limited.  Most notably, that previous graph could mean that nearly every family is being visited in a three month period (equal effort across all the home teachers) or it could mean that the same 30% of families are being visited each month (effort is only coming from a limited group of home teachers) or anything in between.  So we need another graph, and the way this graph appears will give a lot more context into what is actually happening.  In this graph, we want to show the percentage of families whose last visit from their home teachers was one month ago, two months ago, and three or more months ago.  I provide two examples below and will discuss the interpretation of each.

This graph actually shows the percentage of families that haven't been visited.  In each case, 31% of the families were visited last month, so for 69%, it's been over a month since their last visit.  If there is a balanced level of effort from the home teachers, we would expect the percentage of families without a visit to decline  as we get two and three months out.  This would indicate that, although not every family is being visited every month, they have been visited sometime within recent memory.  On the bottom, we see what happens if only a portion of the home teachers are participating--the percentage of families who haven't been seen in recent memory keeps climbing.  Obviously, the goal should be to keep the bar on the left as small as possible.

The Personal
The last piece of information you need is feedback from those being home taught and is where you actually learn if your home teaching program is working.  This feedback should be received during the regular meetings the leaders of the men's organizations are supposed to have with the men.  During these meetings, the leaders should ask a couple of tough questions.  Questions like:

• Do you have a friend in the ward you would feel comfortable going to for advice if you were having marital/relationship problems?
• Do you have a friend in the ward you would feel comfortable talking to about your concerns of paying for heat this coming winter⁵?  
• Do you have a friend in the ward you feel comfortable asking for advice about your home improvement projects?
• Do you have a friend in the ward you feel you can safely talk to if you had concerns or doubts with respect to church doctrine?

If you're getting a lot of 'No' responses, you're home teaching program isn't working and you should probably work on building friendships within the group.

If you're only getting a few 'No' responses, congratulations!  Your home teaching program is a success⁶.  You will also know which people feel the most socially disconnected and are probably in need of additional friendship.

A quick note on this piece of information: First, don't ever publicize a percentage of 'No' responses.  When you make a display of this information -- and especially if you make it a common goal to reduce the number of 'No' responses -- you inadvertently put pressure on people to give the answer they think you want to receive.  The only answer you can be interested in with these questions is the honest answer.  Remember that the focus of these questions is not to demonstrate how good your home teaching program is.  The purpose is to gain the insight necessary to take steps that may improve the lives of those being home taught.

One more caveat on this:  if you're going to buy into this kind of an approach to evaluating the quality of your home teaching program, you may want to consider (partially) abandoning the expectation that home teachers visit every family every month.  It would be nice if it happened at all, and it would be fantastic if it happened consistently.  But only if it's happening because people are getting together in friendship.  If your 100% home teaching is accomplished through a sense of duty instead of friendship, I would argue that you've lost a lot of the strength of the home teaching program.

The home teaching program has infinite potential as a power for good.  I worry that by boiling it down to monthly percentages, we've put artificial limits on its potential.  We need to talk less about metrics and more about relationships, friendships, trust, and ministry.  We need to stop caring so much about the numbers and motivate ourselves to care about the people the those numbers represent.  We need to stop using improvement in numbers as a motivation to do good and start using our motivation to do good as a way to improve our numbers.

For Part 2, I'll discuss some strategies and concepts for organizing home teaching that, in my opinion, have the potential to enhance the process of building relationships between people.

¹ The home teaching program in the Church is a kind of internal tool for evaluating the spiritual and physical needs of families within a congregation. Each family is assigned a pair of home teachers from among the men who are expected to come visit the family periodically, get to know the family, and be their first line of spiritual and temporal support.  For an extremely sterile description of home teaching, you can read what the Church has written in its administrative handbook.

² Everything I'm about to say could be applied to visiting teaching as well. But I'm male and ego centric and am not directly affected by visiting teaching.  So I'll talk about home teaching and you can call me sexist.  Deal?  Okay, moving on.

³ Now would be a good time to point out the the Church's computer software has the ability to generate this list automatically if people would use it. But people don't use it. I can't really blame them for that, because the software isn't particularly user friendly, and is only available on the lone administrative computer given to the congregation which is always in high demand. So what I'm really trying to say is that if the Church would finally go about making home teaching reporting available online, you'd get much better usage, much better reporting, and much better tools for improving home teaching (assuming we stopped talking about it in terms of monthly percentages). 

⁴ You may be curious about the difference between a statistic and a piece of information. If I were to state it simply, the statistic is the number. The information is what that statistic tells us about what we are trying to measure. The numbers I'm about to address aren't what's really important, but what they tell us about the home teaching program.

⁵ By this I mean, minor financial worries. I'm not advocating that we should feel comfortable borrowing large sums of money from each other, but perhaps it isn't all that bad to be comfortable saying things like, "money is tight right now and I'm worried about the cold weather" or the car breaking down. Some of these things can be repaired or alleviated if you can find someone with the right skills, and it would be good if we had relationships in which we were comfortable letting down the barriers that prevent us from talking about these things with strangers.

⁶ Well, maybe. It's possible you're getting a lot of yes responses, but the friendships involved aren't between home teachers and home teachees. But I don't know that it is important to know if the friendships involved are related to home teaching. If you're getting a lot of yes responses, it means a lot of people have a support network within the ward, and that really isn't something you need to bother tweaking. Instead, your home teaching program will hopefully support and expand those relationships while allowing you to focus on building networks for those people who say no. But I wouldn't investigate any further than a yes or no answer here.