This is Scripture Roundtable 46 from The Interpreter Foundation, in which we discuss the Doctrine & Covenants Gospel Doctrine Lesson #42, Continuing Revelation to Latter-day Prophets, focusing on scriptures in D&C 1, 68, 84, 107, and 132, bringing in various insights to help us better understand the scriptures and church history. These roundtables will generally follow the 2013 Gospel Doctrine schedule of scriptures, a few weeks ahead of time.
Panelists for this roundtable include Andrew Smith, Martin Tanner, and Shon Hopkin.
This roundtable is also available as an audio podcast, and will be included in the podcast feed. You can listen by pressing the play button or download the podcast below:
Podcast: Download (Duration: 41:24 — 14.2MB)
A comment about the law of common consent arose by one of the students in my institute class, and I remembered the quote from President J. Reuben Clark (paraphrased) as read by Shon Hopkins [minute 33:05]. Where might I find the actual reference?
Thank you for this podcast and the excellent discussion on correlation.
Just a few points I want to throw out. First, correlation was not about putting all organizations under Priesthood authority–they all already were and always had been. Instead, it was about ensuring that different elements of the Church work together.
Harold B Lee was the Chairman of the Priesthood Committee at the time, and that committee was charged with correlating Church efforts.
I appreciate the emphasis on the Church spreading throughout the world. In 1950, there were 180 stakes all in the United States, Canada, or Mexico. There were four stakes in southern Alberta and 1 in the colonies in Mexico. All the rest were in the US. Five were east of Colorado. So, basically, the stakes of the Church were in the western states, including Hawaii, and LDS colonies in southern Alberta and northern Mexico. But, by 1960 that was changing and there were now 295 stakes. Temples were built in Switzerland, New Zealand, and England. Stakes followed in great numbers on several continents. The most important reason for correlation was the expansion of the Church worldwide.
Correlation didn’t stop in 1964. Regional representatives were called in 1967 to train stake presidents to ensure stakes and wards would operate with councils.
When I was growing up, the Young Men’s program was about scouting during the week, while the Presiding Bishopric was responsible for the Aaronic Priesthood program on Sundays. The Primary was responsible for the children one afternoon a week, while the Sunday School had them on Sunday (with Junior Sunday School). Young Women was only an evening during the week and no Sunday program. As a result, they had a lot more spiritual lessons on the week night than the Young Men did (because the Aaronic Priesthood covered most of the spiritual lessons on Sundays).
In my opinion, the consolidated schedule was a key result of correlation.
15-20 ward leaders in ward council all with different experience in leadership end up edifying all with different ideas. As an executive secretary, I cannot even imagine having to set up independent reporting events for all of the different organizations all the time with the Bishop and the chaos that would result if we didn’t most of the time communicate together.
I see all the time in ward council a leader of one of the elements in a ward stating a need and within minutes other organizations are offering how they can support the need.
At Church headquarters, correlation has a director and three units. One is the evaluation unit–the dreaded “inquisition” that strikes things from documents to be published (ok, they review documents for publication and point out potential issues to the correlation committee which is composed of the First Presidency and the Quorum of the 12). There is a special reseach unit that researches issues for the correlation committee. And the Church patent office is the third unit.
Some of the resources we talked about are:
– Elder Harold B. Lee in Oct Conference 1961 speaking of the Correlation program, in the Conference Report, pp 77-82, can be found here:
http://ia700805.us.archive.org/3/items/conferencereport1961sa/conferencereport1961sa.pdf
-Elder Harold B. Lee again, in Oct Conference 1964 (Conf Report, 1964, Oct, p. 137), from:
http://ia700808.us.archive.org/13/items/conferencereport1964sa/conferencereport1964sa.pdf
-And lastly, a BYU devotional given by Dil Parkinson, 2 March 2004, found here:
http://speeches.byu.edu/index.php?act=viewitem&id=981