This deserves better exposure than comment 138 of a dead thread, so I’ll probably repeat this as a post at Keepapitchinin: A few weeks ago, Simon & Schuster released David Roberts’s Devil’s Gate: The Great Mormon Handcart Tragedy. This is a book very much in the interpretive strain of Will Bagley and David L. Bigler, and most BCC readers will probably protest some of the author’s conclusions and the sarcastic zingers that pepper the text. Yet even this author could write in his acknowledgements:

I had anticipated a diffident or even suspicious reception when I started work in the LDS Archives in 2005. To my great surprise, the archivists, librarians, and historians in the Church History Library could not have been more welcoming and helpful. In 1964, Wallace Stegner had complained that the LDS library and archives were “open to scholars only reluctantly and with limitations.” Nothing could be further from the truth today. To my mind, the Archives now set a shining example of disinterested service to writers and researchers who will inevitably quarrel with and criticize “orthodox” Mormon history.

Who is in a better position to evaluate the church’s efforts to make its history available? David Roberts (whom everybody at the library knew was a close friend and colleague of Jon Krakauer, within minutes of his walking in the door)? Or the anonymous Mike?

That is my explanation for skipping over comment #120 when I first saw it. Mike wasn’t asking, wasn’t interested in learning. He was telling, and his telling was so obviously uninformed, that it wasn’t worth the effort of responding.

“#80 “Inactive members are a very real burden. They sap the the time, energy and morale of active members. The same amount of time and effort would be much better spent proclaiming the gospel to those who have not heard it.”

Sorry I am such a burden on you. sheesh.”
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Speaking from “in the trenches” experience–I have been a clerk, during the past 38 years, for a total of about 25 years–Yes Phouchg you are a burden. But, that is primarily because someone in ward leadership always has an anecdote about a member coming back into activity after 40 years of inactivity, or the “ninety and nine” parable.

There is no counting of the cost (in time and stress) to the active members of continuing to (attempt) to contact those that do not want contact–often against the stated desires of the DNCs!

In our ward we have 25 families that have specifically (and usually with hostility) said they don’t want to be members/want nothing to do with the church, etc. We have another 28 families that have declared they don’t want HT or VT. With our current Bishop, we have no contact (other than from him) with the first 25 and send quarterly letters to the 28. This is a sensible middle ground, in terms of effort, and in terms of bothering people that don’t want to be bothered.

However, it has not always been so. And, with every new, Ward Mission Leader and his fresh zealotry, there is an interest in mining that field (and bothering those people) again.

That, Phouchg, is an unwarranted burden–based on the (statistically) very slim hope of changing your mind. You are an agent unto yourself. To the extent that my efforts at trying to “get you back into the fold” aids me and my righteousness, my efforts are justified. Just going along with a traditional, and largely mythological, hope.

It is certainly equally ridiculous to hold a church court to consider whether to excommunicate a former member, when indeed they have excommunicated themselves and cannot legally be treated as a member over their own objection.