Recognizing, Understanding and Valuing Current Prophets and Apostles

I think it's next to impossible to judge how much of what happens in any organization is "prophetic" or "inspired" or "innovative" or "transcendent" (and, especially, "lasting") in the moment. Just like in my own life, sometimes the best benefit of enduring comes from looking back with the perspective of time and realizing why I felt impressed to do something that I didn't understand in the moment. That happens all the time to me now, but I have multiple decades of adulthood and marriage and parenthood which I can ponder now.

Personally, as I look back and try to see the fuller picture of the Restoration, I think I can appreciate the chaos of the genesis of the Church, the entrenchment that followed as the leaders dealt with the splintering that occurred as a result of the chaos, the move to correlate what was believed to be the core of the "restoration" and systematically stop teaching the speculative stuff that flourished amid the earlier chaos - and the current move to shift focus back to much of the original that is considered to be unique AND non-speculative.

My point with that long sentence is that "prophecy and seership" can take different meanings in different times, but I think, just like how a prophet is often without honor in his own land, it is easy for us to discount "current prophecy and seership" because it seems so common and non-fantastic to us. Personally, I have seen a HUGE shift over the last 20 years to push the responsibility for practical prophecy and seership down the ladder and ask local leaders and members to become prophets in their own sphere - and that is an exciting return to a former time, albeit with correlation that attempts to control the chaos and limit collateral damage so that the earlier splintering doesn't happen again. Having to manage that type of shift probably would give me ulcers, and it is an incredibly dangerous thing from an organizational development standpoint, so I appreciate it as truly inspirational.

Again, however, that is hard to recognize from the perspective of limited years. I dare say it might be almost impossible to see the staggering amount of change without at least 20 years of adulthood in the Church, which automatically excludes nearly all of those who yearn the most for change - the 18-35 year old group.