Warm the Room, Not the Thermometer

A few weeks ago I was taking notes in Sunday School and wrote down a simple line: Sunday meetings are about spiritual renewal and growth. Right under it I wrote a question for myself, as someone who is often at the pulpit: am I helping create the climate that makes that possible?

Later that day in elders quorum I wrote the same question from the pews: am I living in such a way that going to church can actually help me?

I keep coming back to the word climate. You can’t tell a room to be warm. We want people to share the gospel, minister, and magnify their callings. Those are covenants, and prophets invite us to keep them all the time. But somewhere between the invitation and the council meeting, it can turn into a number. How many contacts this month? How many convert baptisms this year?

The invitation is good. I’ve started to think the number is where we go wrong.

The thermometer

One of the first things I learned working with data was Goodhart’s law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.¹

A metric is useful because it moves when the thing you care about moves. A thermometer tells you how warm the room is. But if the number on the thermometer becomes the goal, you can hit it by holding the thermometer in your hand. The number goes up. The room is just as cold.

I spent part of my career building underwriting algorithms for a lender. The goal was lower default rates, and we got them down. Then the business wanted to grow, which meant approving more loans, which meant accepting more risk. Defaults crept back up. Nobody had faked a number. The metric was working fine. It just told us we were caught between two goals that pulled against each other. We kept pushing on the default rate because it was the one we’d measured, and every time we moved it the volume pressure pulled it back.

The fix is almost never to push harder on the number. You have to find what moves it and work on that.

What makes a missionary?

So what moves missionary work?

Being invited matters. We promised at baptism to stand as witnesses of God at all times. But in my experience the people who share most naturally are the ones getting something out of the gospel right now. They feel the Spirit at church. They’re growing in their callings. Their testimony is alive today, not something they remember from years ago. When something is changing your life, it doesn’t take much of a nudge to mention it to a friend.

Lehi tastes the fruit of the tree, and the very next thing he wants is for his family to taste it too. He calls them over.² Nephi later learns the fruit is the love of God.³ Lehi had just felt it, and he wanted the people he loved to feel it too. The Savior put the order plainly to Peter: “When thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren.”⁴

Goodhart explains what goes wrong when we push on the number. President Packer taught what to push on instead: “The study of the doctrines of the gospel will improve behavior quicker than a study of behavior will improve behavior.”⁵ Sharing the gospel is a behavior. So is ministering. If we want more of both, I think the faster path runs through Jesus Christ, not through more talks about the behavior.

Why we keep pushing the number

I get why we do it. Baptisms and visits can be counted. Whether someone felt the Spirit in sacrament meeting can’t. So we drift toward what we can see.

The Church has already shown us what to do about that. When ministering replaced home and visiting teaching in 2018, Elder Holland mentioned a bumper sticker he’d seen: “If I honk, you’ve been home taught.” That’s the thermometer in your hand. He told us to relax, because the end-of-month report was gone. “Here too we are trying to mature.”⁶

But he didn’t throw out the thermometer. One report stayed, the number of ministering interviews, and he called those interviews “absolutely crucial,” because that conversation is how a bishop learns what his people need. That’s what you do with a broken metric. You measure something closer to what you care about, and you use it to find people, not to grade them. Counting has always been part of this. Moroni says the names of the members were taken “that they might be remembered and nourished by the good word of God.”⁷ I’m not sure I’ve fully caught up to that kind of counting.

The things that help people want to share the gospel mostly won’t show up on any report. A sacrament meeting where we come ready to receive something. A class where someone can ask a real question. A quorum where the brothers know each other. A calling where someone is trusted with meaningful work and grows into it.

Where I might be wrong

This is where the thermometer breaks down. A thermometer never warms a room, but sharing the gospel does change the person who shares it. Ask any returned missionary. And plenty of converted people don’t share simply because they don’t know how, or because it feels awkward when most of their neighbors are already members. So teaching the how still matters. It just shouldn’t be most of what we talk about.

I also don’t want to make conversion sound like a better lever for raising the numbers. It isn’t a lever. It’s the point. The numbers are one way we notice it. And none of us can produce it in someone else. Elder Uchtdorf reminded us that converting people “is the role of the Holy Ghost.”⁸ What we can do is help make a place where the Spirit is easy to feel, and then live close enough to Him that we feel it ourselves.

What I’m going to try

I’m on our stake high council, so I’m in a lot of meetings where these questions come up. This is mostly an invitation to myself. The next time I catch myself asking how to get more people ministering or sharing the gospel, I want to ask a different question first: what would help them want to? And when I speak in a ward, I want to spend most of my time on Jesus Christ.

But the climate isn’t only up to whoever is speaking. That second question from elders quorum is one I can work on every week, and so can you. For me that means scripture study, prayer, the temple, and serving someone. Nobody is checking. I do them because they’ve made the gospel feel real to me. If you try something like it, I’d love to hear what happened.

Serving on the high council has meant more talks to prepare, and that keeps the gospel in front of me all week. Now it comes up at work and with friends, and it takes hardly any nudge, because I have something to say.

Charles Goodhart, 1975: “Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.” The popular wording is Marilyn Strathern’s, 1997. ↩
1 Nephi 8:10–15. ↩
1 Nephi 11:21–22. ↩
Luke 22:32. ↩
Boyd K. Packer, “Little Children,” October 1986 general conference. ↩
Jeffrey R. Holland, “Be With and Strengthen Them,” April 2018 general conference. ↩
Moroni 6:4. ↩
Dieter F. Uchtdorf, “Missionary Work: Sharing What Is in Your Heart,” April 2019 general conference. ↩