Hierarchy or Equality?

[teresaq]

Will we ever learn?

Or is the system instituted since the fall so ingrained in us we can see no other way?

Will we continue to slide into a dependent hierarchical system, or learn to individually lean on the Lord thereby truly becoming equal brethren (which includes sisters) under the One Head, Jesus?

Elder Boyd: Isn’t there safety in the multitude of counselors? But suppose the president of the conference wanted to know and needed to ask, then he would have to ask the president of the General Conference, I suppose.

But suppose the president of the General Conference wants to know—who shall he ask? [Congregation: “Ask the Lord.”]

Oh, well, you can ask the Lord, can you? So, then, we common people can get our knowledge from the Lord without straining it through half a dozen persons like the other Catholics? Can we? [Congregation: “Yes.”]

Is that so? [Congregation: “Yes.”]

In the Catholic church the common people cannot get at the Lord except through the priest and the priest through the bishop and the bishop through the archbishop and the archbishop through the cardinal and the cardinal through the pope? Is that the way the Lord’s people are to do? No, sir. That isn’t God’s method. When you want to know a thing, you ask the Lord. He is your Counselor, and He is my Counselor. And when He is your Counselor, then, Brother Boyd, “in the multitude of counselors there is safety,” and not until then either, because then we have counsel of the Master of Assemblies. And when He is the Counselor of each one and then we counsel together and He is in the midst, then there is safety in the multitude of counselors.

ATJ 1893 GCB/GCDB 1893, p. 201.2   (General Conference Daily Bulletin, vol. 5)