The above question is often the reflexive response of naysayers to any feminist request for any kind of change in the church. I think some people ask it rudely, but some people ask it very genuinely. It is a question that deserves an answer.

In the scriptures, we are presented with a few different models for what revelatory leadership can look like. We’ve got Saul/Paul, being struck down on the road, and Moses being given stone tablets in a blaze of glory.

But we’ve also got the Brother of Jared. Who identified a problem, manually worked out a solution, then went to the Lord and asked for help in making his solution shine.

Listen folks, there’s a problem. I know there are people who are happy as clams in the church and have never wished for a single thing to be different. But the system is breaking down for an awful lot of people, and the result of this is a lot of pain and doubt and sadness.

We’ve got a problem. And if you care about the health of the whole church community, it is your problem.

I believe we all, including the leaders of our church, have a lot of a work to do. We not only have to be *open* to hearing about what problems exist (perhaps the biggest hurdle we face now), but we have to really come together as Zion to solve these problems, and ask that the Lord to “touch” our efforts. I believe we should be open to seeking after all good and praiseworthy things as we create these solutions.

In my view, the vast majority of prophetic leadership is conducted in this way. We certainly haven’t seen an instance of a leader being struck with sudden, unsolicited revelation that applies to the whole church for many generations. We have seen many instances of a prayerful people studying out issues and asking the Lord to consecrate their efforts. (For example, the Church Welfare System was set up during the Great Depression in response to the crises of that time. It would have been awfully convenient for the Lord to have zapped us with the knowledge we needed to assuage a lot of suffering before it happened in that case, but maybe the point is that us mortals have to band together to build Zion even when we can’t see things from the eternities.)

Many members who acknowledge that problems exist feel presumptuous doing anything about it. This is flaring up considerably in light of recent calls for women’s ordination to the Priesthood. I’ve heard the question often posed, “Why don’t you just wait? If something is wrong, God will fix it through the prophet. Why speak up about it instead of just trusting in the Lord and waiting?”

Waiting would not have served the brother of Jared very well when he had an ocean to cross in lightless boats. It wouldn’t have served Esther well when the lives of all her people were on the line. It wouldn’t have helped 14-year old Joseph when his heart burned with desire for greater truth and light.

In fact, our canon explicitly instructs us not to wait, but to take action. We are commanded to go and do, ask and seek, knock at the door, to be anxiously engaged in a good cause. The Brother of Jared did not just ask for a solution — he did the work to chisel stones. Emma did not just pray for a change — she spent hours cleaning the dirty floor and thereby gained the inspiration for our health code. Hundreds of men and women poured their hearts into letters to the General Authorities asking to see a woman pray.

Mormon doctrine does not endorse a passive faith of waiting for God to manifest the divine will while we sit and do nothing. Ours is foundationally a questioning, wrestling faith, where we are explicitly supposed to be actively engaged in seeking greater light and understanding. Many Mormons are comfortable with this in certain contexts, but completely disavow it when it comes to certain issues that also have deep deep roots in harmful, internalized cultural norms. I think that says more about those cultural norms than it does about “doctrine.”

We can sit in our pews in silence forever, just suffering through our pain passively while we wait for the Lord to create Zion for us. We can sit on the ocean shore forever, bemoaning the slow movement of Lord in providing illumination that would allow for our passage into the Promised Land.

Or we can exercise an active faith and knock at the Lord’s door for answers, as every book of scripture commands us to do.

In short — we Mormon feminists have been chiseling some stones. We want to, with our leaders, take them to the Lord for illumination.