Missionary lessons, feel-good television ads and thousands of family history centers are among the most visible signs to the world at large that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints puts families at the center of its faith and theology.
Now the LDS Church looks to be expanding its focus on members' emotional health, in addition to their spiritual well-being.
Word this week that the church plans to establish branches of LDS Family Services in several nations to offer family counseling services to a broader swath of its membership provides yet another extension of that focus on bolstering the traditional family — an institution church leaders say is under attack both at home and abroad.
Sermons to be offered this weekend during the LDS Church's 176th Annual General Conference, which opens today at 10 a.m. in the Conference Center, are likely to feature counsel on strengthening family relationships and defending against such societal ills as pornography, addiction and abuse.
Fred Riley, commissioner of LDS Family Services, told scores of LDS counselors and psychotherapists Thursday that his agency has received approval from church leaders "to put together a worldwide strategy to start helping members around the world" in dealing with such issues.
He said LDS Family Services — which already has offices in Australia, England, New Zealand and Japan — opened an office in Mexico in January, and it will be opening new offices in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Santiago, Chile, in July. Pilot programs will be offered in those locations, he said, anticipating that, in "three to five years, we'll be opening up significantly more offices around the world."
While many people associate the agency with adoption — in fact, it is believed to be the largest adoption agency in the United States — Riley said that, "at least initially, there will be no adoption services, only clinical services," in the new Family Services locations. "I think that's a huge validation of the work you (as therapists) do, as well as its relationship to spirituality," and the importance the church is now placing on both emotional and spiritual health, he said.
Part of that expanded focus includes publication within the past 30 days of "A Guide to Addiction Recovery and Healing," a 12-step handbook produced by LDS Family Services and now available not just to local church leaders, but to church members through LDS Distribution Centers. In the past, similar resources have been made available to church leaders only.
According to its cover, the book was "written with support from church leaders and counseling professionals by those who have suffered from addiction and who have experienced the miracle of recovery through the Atonement of Jesus Christ." Eight years ago, Riley said, the church asked Family Services to seek out the wide variety of 12-step programs that were being used by local leaders in various locales and bring them all under one umbrella.
"When we first started writing this (handbook), we were told the church would never allow a 12-step program to see the light of day," he said. But a committee comprising professionals from around the country gathered "the best of everything we could find," and "it came out as a 12-step program. I would suggest that this is the best document ever written in relationship to addiction recovery. I think anyone dealing with addiction or other types of repentance issues could be well served by this," Riley said.
While the church expands resources for emotional outreach to members, it has also focused on moral issues in a larger political context, particularly within the past decade, in an attempt to shape local, national and international policy on issues like same-sex marriage. Those efforts followed closely on the heels of the LDS Church's 1995 "Proclamation to the World on the Family," which details the faith's beliefs about gender, family relationships and the responsibilities of men and women to marry and rear children.
Several domestic organizations that lobby the United Nations, known as non-governmental organizations or NGOs, have used the family proclamation as a blueprint for declarations of their own, seeking to garner political support for policies that support the traditional family. Scott Loveless, acting director of an NGO known as the World Family Policy Center at Brigham Young University, said that since its beginning in 1996, the center has sought affiliation with similar organizations looking to protect the natural family — including Catholics, Jews, Muslims, evangelicals and Eastern faith traditions.
While historically suspicious of each other, "we all realize there is a bigger enemy out there common to all of us." The push for policies that denigrates the obligations family members have to one another in favor of individual rights has become the common enemy, Loveless said. Family-friendly organizations fear U.N. resolutions that denigrate family life will become the legal rationale for similar national policies worldwide.
Traditional families are the seedbed for "learning about our obligations and responsibilities to others," he said, adding the push for family-friendly policymaking is fraught not only with politics, but with battles over semantics about what "family" means.
The center has become a major sponsor and participant in worldwide gatherings of like-minded groups, among them the World Congress of Families, which drew thousands of participants to Mexico City in 1994. A regional meeting of the World Congress was scheduled to be held in the Delta Center this weekend, but organizers postponed it.
Loveless said the center's greatest accomplishment has been its partnership with the government of Qatar, which approached them in 2003 to help put on a series of conferences that culminated in what is known as the Doha Declaration in 2004. The document, co-sponsored by 149 nations, was recognized by the U.N. General Assembly, providing a significant shield for family policy internationally by acknowledging families as the "natural and fundamental group unit of society."
The BYU center pulled together scholars from around the world to provide social science research on the importance of family ties, supporting the issues that eventually made their way into the Doha Declaration.
E-mail: carrie@desnews.com