Ward Bishop

A ward is a Latter-day Saint congregation of a few hundred members within a drawn geographical boundary, and the bishop is the man who leads it. He is called rather than elected or appointed by application, serves about five years, holds an ordinary job throughout, receives nothing, and has no training in theology or pastoral care beyond what any member has had. He may be a dentist, a mechanic, a schoolteacher or a farmer, and on Monday he goes back to work.

The load is substantial. He presides at Sunday worship and conducts the sacrament meeting. He calls almost every other officer in the ward, several hundred positions over the course of his service. He conducts the interviews that determine whether a member receives a temple recommend or may serve a mission, which makes him the gatekeeper of the movement's central ordinances for everyone in his boundary. He administers the ward's fast offering fund and decides personally who receives help from it. And he counsels members individually in what the church calls the office of a common judge, which in practice means marital crises, addiction, bereavement, financial collapse and disciplinary matters, in a role that a trained minister would find demanding.

He is assisted by two counsellors and holds the presiding keys of the Aaronic priesthood for the ward, a detail with real content: his authority is over the congregation in front of him and does not extend past its boundary.

The word is shared with episcopal Christianity and almost nothing else is. A Latter-day Saint bishop is not in apostolic succession as Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican churches understand it, has no diocese, ordains nobody to a professional clergy because there is none, and confirms nobody, since confirmation in the movement is performed by Melchizedek priesthood holders and frequently by a father. He is not a bishop in a hierarchy of bishops; he is the presiding officer of one congregation. The office descends from the calling of Edward Partridge in 1831, whose original charge was to administer the consecration of property rather than to lead worship, and its pastoral character developed afterward.

The most distinctive feature is that it ends. A bishop is released, not retired, and the following Sunday he sits in the congregation as an ordinary member while a man he may himself have called now presides. Latter-day Saints regard this as unremarkable and outsiders regularly do not, because it removes the possibility of a clerical career.

The office has also been the subject of serious public criticism, most of it directed at the interviews. An untrained volunteer conducting private worthiness interviews with adolescents, including questions touching on sexual conduct, is a structure with obvious risks, and the church has changed its rules more than once in response, including a 2018 instruction permitting any member to bring another adult to any interview.