Authority vs. Empathy in Leadership - with YSA Bishops

It’s been about a year since The Soloists launched with an episode on the history of singles wards — Latter-day Saint congregations organized specifically for unmarried members of the Church. At the center of each ward is a bishop, whose role is to offer pastoral care but also to navigate members through the repentance process. Today we’re sharing a conversation with singles wards bishops and their wives about shepherding young adults through seasons of loneliness, doubt, and repentance.

We go straight for the elephant in the room — the Church’s sexual standards for single adults — where authority and empathy potentially compete. Our guests today are Cami and Matt Vail and Jeff and Jana Parkin, who all married young, in a different cultural moment, and they readily admit that the world of dating and relationships for today’s single adults feels foreign. On paper, this looks like authority at its most mismatched: leaders who never lived this stage of life are asked to uphold sexual standards for those still in it. In practice, they witness and hold single people’s most intimate stories — the struggles, desires, and despair — and are powerful conduits of God’s love. Could they serve as conduits without deep commitment to the Church and its standards?

In this conversation, we press into that paradox. Should older singles be allowed to adapt standards in a way that suits their age and stage of life? Or are the leaders right, that the boundaries are firm and its consistency that matters most? Who’s right? How are we missing each other? Though Mallory and Diana have had countless singles ward bishops over the years, it’s rare to sit down with them outside of ecclesiastical authority and ask them, openly, about how they approach these difficulties and how serving single young adults has changed them.

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