cfitch wrote:Occasionally Bishops give first-time recommends to students, originally from their ward, but the students still have their records in their student wards. After the Stake President completes his interview and the member leaves, the Stake Clerk tries unsuccessfully to activate the recommend. The Stake Clerk then has to contact the new recommend holder and tell him his recommend is not valid (He/she may want to attend the temple the next Tuesday). The Stake Clerk then has to contact the Ward Clerk to request the new recommend holder's membership. Then the Stake Clerk has to watch for the membership records to arrive. When they do arrive, he can activate the recommend and contact the member and tell him the recommend is now valid. The obvious answer is to better train the Bishops. This is somewhat effective. Giving Stake Clerks the option to request membership records would eliminate the need to call the member and tell him his recommend is not valid and eliminate the call to the Ward Clerk.
Training the bishops is by far the best answer. A bishop has no keys of authority regarding someone who is not a member of his ward, and so he has no right to issue a temple recommend to them. If the student is returning home and the records need to be requested anyway, then the bishop needs to make sure the records are requested before he interviews that member.
If the student is still attending the YSA ward, then the bishop and stake president should not be issuing the temple recommend. That just creates a situation where the bishop has to do one of two things:
- Tell the student that he or she will just have to start the interview process again in the YSA ward and stake; or
- Pull the record from the YSA ward temporarily until the stake can activate the recommend and then send it back.
But that second option is not a good choice. It has far more negative effects than the home ward and stake often realize. When they do this, it has these effects:
- It releases the member from all callings
- It removes the member as a home or visiting teacher, and removes them from being home and/or visiting taught.
- It clears out the contact information (address, phone, email).
- It removes any custom fields associated with the member.
- It removes the member from the ward, so that any reports that are printed during the time the membership record is temporarily gone will be inaccurate.
That creates a significant administrative burden for the YSA Ward. All that work has to be redone when the record comes back. It's much better not to do that at all.
Modifying the Leader resources to support a process that shouldn't even be happening doesn't seem to me to be a helpful course of action.
Questions that can benefit the larger community should be asked in a public forum, not a private message.