Have you ever wondered why LDS church lessons seem to be recycled every few years? Or why the lesson manuals can be used in high priests group, elder’s quorum, Relief Society classes? Or why there isn’t much distinction between what is taught to the high priests or the MIA maids? It’s called correlation, and despite the opening of this blog, there’s actually as many positives to it than there are negatives.
As author Matthew Bowman explains in his superb book, “The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith,” by the mid-1950s, the LDS Church was in real danger of becoming a global bureaucratic nightmare, and an expensive one. “Bowman writes, “By the early 1950s, fragmentation, overlap, and dysfunction had grown almost unmanageable. the curricula of the various auxiliaries overlapped and sometimes contradicted one another; they claimed different influences and priorities, and bureaucratic turf battles were common. … the problem remained: if they attended all their meetings, church members would be instructed from three or four different curricula, each at best vaguely aware of the others.”
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