[prisonchaplain]

Originally Posted by Snow

I doubt there are any such other Christian churches (or many such) where they can get the kind of commitment from it adherents as the LDS Church gets from it's 19 year old youth (missionaries who spend 24 hours a day for 2 years preaching the gospel) or bishops (full time work in addition to their regular job) or stake presidents (12 years of full time committment, or thousands and thousands of retired couples who become full time missionaries, for the 2nd of third time in their lives.

A couple years ago the principle struck me as I read a newspaper article about a new mission president. The CEO of a major US corporation - Sutter Health in Northern California resigned abruptly at the pinnacle of his career and became a mission president doing grunt work thousands of miles away from his home. How does that sort of thing happen? The CEO gets a call from and LDS authority who says 'we'd like you to quit your job, move thousands of miles away from home and do grunt work for 4 years' and the CEO says, "okay."


... and that happens over and over and over.

Sure people volunteer for all sorts of good endeavors in all sorts of Church. I'd suggest that there is a much different scope and intensity in the LDS Church.

And interesting but simple illustration of that (and the Church's extraordinary organizational structure - all run by volunteers). There could be a of sort sort catastrophe - a fire, earthquake, etc. An authority to start the ball rolling by making one phone call and 90 minutes later you could easily have 20,000 able bodies LDS elders on the scene with picks and shovels ready to help. I've been part of such an incident with a flood. Granted, that doesn't require extreme commitment but it does require extreme organization.

You probably just gave me the best description I've heard of the benefits of having a hierarchical, and yet nearly all-volunteer church.