Local motion: making local voices count in a global age

A few weeks ago our stake had stake conference. This conference took the form of a one-way broadcast from Salt Lake in which several General Authorities and a General Young Woman's Leader addressed us via satellite from Salt Lake. I genuinely appreciate this attempt by the leadership in Salt Lake to connect with LDS members in other regions, but I also felt that this conference illustrated the pressing need for our church to access local voices.

Stake conference plays an important role in developing local church communities. It presents one time in which local leadership can help members understand the particular challenges that their unique outpost of LDS faith faces. The introduction of these new broadcasts dismantles that opportunity, replacing it instead with a chance to listen to leaders who, in our case, repeated general conference addresses and are often painfully out of touch with local concerns.

This broadcast demonstrated that we now have the technology in place to effectively bring the voices of leaders to people who do not generally connect with them. However, it also demonstrated how inadequately we have developed a social system that enables leaders to hear local voices in exchange.

In part, we might attribute the fact that we have not successfully found a way to bring local concerns to the attention of Salt Lake to the very models of priesthood organization that we rely upon. Namely, we utilize a hierarchical chain of command - not unlike certain business structures - in which each local leader reports to his supervisor. Although this system functions well to ensure that information moves from the top down, it also presents numerous opportunities for information NOT to move from the bottom up, because information can stop with any one member of the chain.

This heirarchical method for communicating information becomes particularly problematic when we note that organizations tend to appoint leaders who thrive within the current system. In other words, organizations tend to appoint as new leaders those who most successfully model the leaders already in place, thus creating a governing body that lacks diversity. In the wards I have lived in, people who thrive within business or the law while attending church regularly tend to epitmize leadership and Mormon success.

While this practice might be useful in some situations, it also makes it likely that the voices of those whose concerns do not match the leaderships' will not be heard. Within the church, the fact that our chain of command works through the priesthood organization makes the problem of women's voices being lost especially acute.

For many years this hierarchical system has helped to give us the comforting reassurance that the church "is the same" wherever we go. But while we ought to maintain consistently throughout the world in our core beliefs, we also need to appreciate how the church culture can and should be different as local needs dictate. If we are to have a church that can continue to respond to its members' needs, and a church whose leaders can know what questions to bring to the Lord, then we need to develop more dynamic channels through which to communicate information. It seems quite telling that the most successful companies today have made improved communication their business.