You’re right, Kim, and I honestly think that’s a major challenge of positions at the stake level and above. The larger your group of people gets, the harder it is to meaningfully convey how they’re doing spiritually without drowning in all sorts of little details. I feel the same way about the way attendance is reported in quarterly reports. When the information is only sufficient to confidently say, “this person comes to church at least sometimes,” it doesn’t differentiate between a ward whose members are almost all there almost all of the time (trying to be at least a touch realistic here) and a ward that is limping along with minimum effort. Home teaching visits is along the same line – how to accurately and succinctly quantify whether the home teachers have formed a meaningful relationship with their families, are taking opportunities to teach the gospel, and are providing service as the Lord would?

When you want to measure something, it’s always about what reflects that “something”, and how you’ll express variations in it. It’s hard to send a statistical report to the stake on how everyone’s doing spiritually, and time constraints wouldn’t allow for the proper detail. So they ask about attendance and home teaching visits.

That’s why I think it’s *absolutely* essential to have leaders at the ward level who are on their game. That’s where we can monitor those things more closely, where I can go to my bishop and explain my concern about some in my quorum not grasping ‘precept X’ as well as I feel they could, and we can work on that in whatever way we feel is best within our context.

That was a lot longer than expected. :)

I think this is good practice, and is similar to what I did. Now if we could just get the leaders above the EQPs to find value in that information on not rely so heavily on home teaching statistics.

Agreed that there is no report in the church that keeps track of this data, however, I can keep track of it in my notes from PPIs and comments made from elders in my quorum. You can’t look it up in MLS, but I see part of my calling as EQP being keeping tabs on how the members of my quorum appear to be doing spiritually, and try to serve them in ways that will (hopefully) help that growth.

Yeah, I’m even later than our pal John there :)

Reported is not the same thing as measured. There is no report in the church that keeps track of such data over time.

I know of a counsellor in a stake presidency who was made elders quorum president after he was released. You don’t HAVE to be an elder to be an EQP.

I served twice as EQP. The first time I focused a lot on home teaching; the second time I focused a lot on teaching.

Why do you want to know?

That was done on purpose. What often meant was going to be different for each quorum member, and it was their reposnsibility to make sure they measured it. All we were doing as a presidency was providing an environment that would help them achieve those goals.

So we didn’t see it as a problem; we saw it as a feature.

Wow – this is interesting.
I think its a good idea for EQP to meet with the Stake Pres regularly and to meet with each other.
We don’t do either of those things here.