Ministering

Every member of a Latter-day Saint congregation is assigned to watch over a small number of specific households, and somebody is assigned to watch over theirs. Men are assigned in pairs through the elders quorum and women in pairs through the Relief Society, and one of each pair is often a teenager, which is how the practice trains the next generation into it. An assignment usually covers three or four families and lasts a year or more.

What the assignment requires is deliberately unspecified. Since 2018 the instruction has been to find out what a household actually needs and provide it, which may mean a monthly conversation, a lift to a hospital appointment, help moving house, a text message on a hard anniversary, or, for a family that wants to be left alone, being available and otherwise leaving them alone. Progress is discussed in a ministering interview with a quorum or Relief Society leader rather than counted, which was the point of the change.

The practice is what makes a ward function as a mutual aid organisation and not only as a congregation. A bishop with several hundred members cannot know which of them has lost a job or is caring for a dying parent; the ministering network is the mechanism by which he finds out, and it is why a Latter-day Saint family that suffers a bereavement will typically have meals arriving within hours from people who were not asked.

The practice is old. Section 20 of the Doctrine and Covenants, from 1830, gives the teacher the duty to watch over the church always and to visit the house of each member, and some form of assigned visiting has existed ever since. Through most of the twentieth century it took two separate forms: home teaching, in which pairs of men visited assigned families monthly and delivered a prepared message, and visiting teaching, in which pairs of women did the same for assigned women. Both were counted. A ward reported its home teaching percentage monthly, and the number was watched.

The counting is what eventually broke it. A monthly visit that has to be recorded produces the phenomenon every Latter-day Saint of that era can describe, the visit made on the last evening of the month so the number could be reported, and a system in which the measurable thing displaced the intended thing. In April 2018 the church announced that home teaching and visiting teaching were discontinued and replaced by ministering, that the monthly visit requirement and the percentage reporting were gone, and that the prepared message was no longer required.

The change was small on paper and large in practice, and members of long standing describe it as one of the more candid institutional admissions the church has made about itself: that it had been measuring the wrong thing for decades, and that the measurement had begun to produce the behaviour it was supposed to detect.