churchistrue wrote:
So some people are freaking out about people calling such mundane policy changes as "revelation". I think this is a good thing for the church, to move the church and members in a direction where revelation is not considered so grand.
http://www.churchistrue.com/blog/russel ... our-lives/ You do realize the power you are giving local leadership when you define a policy as a revelation?
Any action by a member that violates a policy has now been elevated to rejecting a revelation.
It does not water down what the term revelation means, it destroys it.
It also allows top leadership to claim direct instructions from God in anything they say as a policy. It, in essence, makes our leadership look like any other church leadership.
And, on top of that you are increasing the expectations of members when they hear new policies. Think in terms of the "revelation" to lower the age of missionaries. It has not had the expected impact on males serving missions it was intended to have. So are we looking at a failed revelation or a failed policy? Or is that just one of things where after the fact we change it back to just a policy when it is clear it has failed. So only those successful polices are classified as revelation.
If you want to see how history treated the Church when it tried the same sort of thing in Joseph Smith's time, just look at all the members Joseph Smith drove away by trying to label anything and everything he said as revelation. "Hey buy shares in my bank or house because I have a revelation that says you should." There is a reason that most of the "revelations" Joseph Smith claimed to receive never made it into the canon, they were just policies that did not work out.
This is a really bad idea on all fronts.