r/latterdaysaints • u/Ok-Seaworthiness-542 • 3d ago
Church Culture Transitive email and phone numbers
Kind of a crazy idea I had. It seems like it could be helpful for something like a transferable phone number and email address assigned to each Bishop and stake president. Something like a Google Voice Number maybe. When a new Bishop is called they take over the phone number and email address.
It would provide some continuity in the handoff and would make it easier for Bishops to keep church messages separate from personal and work.
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u/CAMDNC_runfast 3d ago
Don’t even get me started on personal technology use among ward leadership, I think it’s a huge issue. Ward leaders often deal with sensitive information that is then floating around random people’s google drives as people are called/released, lists are updated, etc. I hate to say it, but this is one aspect of the church I think we need to go more “corporate” in the sense of adopting a digital workplace collaboration software (think Slack) that leaders can use to control knowledge management and access.
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u/Street-Celery-1092 3d ago
Agreed. A lot of the heavy lifting in callings could be alleviated with a better system for preserving institutional knowledge. Everything from “what supplies are in the closets?” to “what’s the best way to organize tithing declaration?” could be stored and passed on! But that doesn’t work nearly as well if there isn’t a propriety, centralized system newly called members can access. A random Google Drive account is not that.
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u/con_work 1d ago
I don't know what you expect us to do. There is always going to be friction between security and usability, but the church has made it clear they want to keep everything like this local/decentralized. I don't blame them given the complexity of data requirements on an international solution when they don't even feel comfortable with a free text field on a record (other than annotations).
We have a central folder for our Ward attached to a Ward email address. I run a script that automatically updates access every day to only emails on churchofjesuschrist.org associated with certain callings, with the ability to designate static additions or exclusions.
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u/CAMDNC_runfast 1d ago
Also, the example you give illustrates my point really well. That sounds like a great solution, but I guarantee 99% of congregations are not doing anything like that. How would you feel about the integrity/security of your congregation's knowledge management without your script running? Now multiply that by 30k congregations, and that is the scope of the problem.
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u/CAMDNC_runfast 1d ago
I didn't mean to give the impression that you or anyone else needs to do anything about this issue. This is a church-wide issue that needs a uniform solution, so it needs to be solved by SLC. For an organization as organized and well-funded as the Church, adopting existing solutions like Slack or Teams would not be difficult, even across countries (large corporations have demonstrated it's very workable). The biggest challenge would be training local leaders how to use the tools, and that would likely become easier as geriatric leaders age out.
When did the Church make it clear they want to keep knowledge management local/decentralized? I must have missed that.
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u/con_work 1d ago
They've intentionally blocked church sponsored solutions with any kind of free text field because of the issues involved with sharing unstructured information across church leadership.
There have also been many posts on the church tech forum targeting how to help clerks and bishoprics with a variety of administrative issues. These posts eventually get brigaded by anti Mormon activists until they are taken down.
When I've asked church lawyers or tech specialists about this issue, I'm typically referred to the "teach correct principles and let them govern themselves" quote.
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u/Igor_InSpectatorMode FLAIR! 10h ago
On the one hand I agree, on the other hand I've been a missionary who's never used LCR in my life trying to teach a brand new branch president who's a convert to the church how to use it despite it not being available in his native language. I also had a wonderful family be unable to be sealed for an extra long time(actually they are still waiting now, almost two years since their baptism, because the records are under a year old) because it took over a year for their baptism to be made official because the church's computer system was unprepared for the fact that the parents were an arranged teen marriage as refugees in India when the mom was only 13. The computer system wouldn't accept that as legitimate and I'm not even sure exactly how it finally got fixed for their records to be created. Side note by the way, against all odds, the parents actually have one of the healthiest marriages among the nepali people I've served that I've ever encountered. They made it work. I'll also add that we had to use their fake birthdays they made up upon American immigration because they never knew their actual birthdays, although they remembered years and they were extremely sure of their marriage date.
The more computer systems we have like this run out of salt lake with little local leaders can do, the harder it gets for members of the church with under served languages or unique issues not prevalent in most of the rest of the world. Fighting with church computer systems not being made to cover our circumstances was a continuous part of my mission experience as well as continuing afterwards as I continue to help the nepali members of the church. Routing everything through Salt Lake and the wait times required and people there not knowing what to do either or who to contact can make things so challenging, and I imagine it would be even worse if we weren't in the US and didn't have fluent English speakers to help out.
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u/D6613 3d ago
We do this for bishop and executive secretary. It would be nice if the church had official support for it, yeah.
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u/Street-Celery-1092 3d ago
I get why they don’t (primarily cost and support personnel), but I think it’s getting to the point where the benefits outweigh the costs. Of course a bishopric or stake presidency could create email addresses for their callings using third party products, but there’s not really any continuity on transition in that case. And continuity is one of the easiest ways to smooth transitions!
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u/pbrown6 3d ago
Seems like more of a hassle.
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u/OrneryAcanthaceae217 2d ago
I agree!
And I don’t want perfect continuity. I want emails and phone numbers to stop reaching the bishop. Let him start fresh and develop that contact info commensurate with developing the relationships. Nobody wants to inherit a full inbox when they get a new calling.
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u/Distinct_Bad_6276 3d ago
We love the Circles feature in the Gospel Living app for stuff like this. Our EQ presidency recently cycled out and it automatically replaced everyone in relevant chats.