rchorse

Handbook 2 Section 19.1.1 (bold mine): The Primary President should absolutely be notified in advance that someone in the primary will be released.

Hi, I've been lurking for a while here, but haven't posted. But this topic brings me out of the woodwork. As a former bishop over a ward that had a lot of welfare needs, I have to say that this is spot on. Way too many people live for years on church welfare and are never helped to become self sufficient. So many welfare abusers have become extremely skilled at manipulating the emotions of bishops with guilt trips and other things. It is very important that a bishop understand the root cause of the financial trouble and then help the member to make changes where necessary. This approach is outlined very clearly in the handbook. I had one person furious at me for quite a while because I would not help them keep a car that was too expensive and would only pay rent for 3 or 4 months to give them time to figure something out. This person had lived for I think 6 or 7 years off church welfare. Strangely, though, after about a year they were 100% self sufficient and doing very well. It's a very fine line between holding someone accountable and guilt tripping. No one should be made to feel guilty for things beyond his or her control or for having a hard time. But it can be very difficult sometimes to make sure you understand the situation and evaluate whether someone really needs the help without coming off like you're trying to guilt trip someone. We typically had a policy of always giving food when asked, but scrutinizing other expenses much more closely. Although, I had one case where a guy was trading the food for cigarettes and drugs. In that case, we stopped giving food. We also had many cases where we basically had to force people to take help when they clearly needed it. We had to resort to leaving boxes of food on the porch and similar things a couple of times. Administering welfare is really not easy and finding the right balance between accountability and compassion can be very difficult. I would cut the bishop and RS president some slack.