Reinventing Your Sundays

I used to be pretty good friends with a guy in a ward I once belonged to here in California. A devoted convert of several years, he attended every week with his two daughters, both active in the Young Women's program. After a while I was seeing his daughters at church, but Mike was not showing up with them.  Eventually, they sheepishly admitted to me that their father had started attending a local evangelical mega-church on Sundays.

I couldn't believe it.  Mike was one of the stalwarts of the ward. Why would he be ditching us to join the sectarians?  I went over to his house later that day to find out. How was it, I asked, that he could abandon all the great truths of the restoration in order to take a step backward into mere protestantism?

“Oh, I still believe in the church,” he replied, "I have a testimony of Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon and everything. None of that's changed. I still consider myself LDS. ”

This baffled me. “Then why,” I asked, “are you going to a church where they don't share your beliefs? Why have you stopped attending the church you do believe in?

“Well, the fact is, I'm tired of going to a church every Sunday where we never do any worshiping.”

“What?!”

“Well think about it, Rock. We show up every week and hear a couple of talks from the podium. The speakers are unaccustomed to speaking in public, so most of the time what they do is stand there and just read from some general authority's conference talk from the Ensign. We sing our hymns half-heartedly just to get through them, yet we sing them at half the speed they were intended for, so they drag on forever. We're given a reading of ward business, including the same announcements that have already been written in the program. Then we go to class for instruction on the same lessons we got last year; then we go to priesthood for more of the same. More announcements and another uninspired lesson somebody reads from the manual.  Even our prayers are forced and too formal. When do we ever get around to praising and worshiping God?"

That was ridiculous.  Of course we worship God. “What about the sacrament?” I asked, “isn't that important?”

“Well yes, that's meaningful, at least for those who aren't busy trying to keep their kids occupied the entire time. Where I go to church now they have Communion, and guess what? The kids are all in the nursery so people can quietly meditate on Christ instead of being distracted because they're forever shushing their children.”

I still couldn't wrap my head around why a believing latter-day Saint could be happier at a church that would try to convert him away from his own religious beliefs if they knew his secret.

“Look Rock, when I go to church I should expect to feel something. I want it to be a joyful experience. I want to sing and shout hallelujah without embarrassment.  I don't want to waste my day just showing up and going through the motions like a bored Catholic. I want to feel the spirit of God at some point while I'm there.”

I uttered some lame platitude about how he'll only get as much out of church as he was willing to put into it, but I could see he was too far gone. I shook my head. Another good friend on the road to apostasy.

What Happened To Our Sundays?

That conversation took place several years ago, and since then I've kind of come around to Mike's way of thinking. Our church services are dull, they're too long, the spirit is lacking, and when you get right down to it, many of us attend mainly out of a sense of duty. We go to church because we know we should, not because we really, really want to. The first century Christians gathered together because they couldn't wait to get with their like-minded friends. They actually ached to be in each other's company. They looked forward to those times when they could meet together and worship as fellow believers.

It was the same for the early 19^th century latter-day Saints. People pulled up roots from far and wide not just because they believed in the doctrine of the gathering, but because they felt a longing to be in the company of kindred souls, a part of a movement that mattered. Today you can grow up in the same ward all your life and never know the names of all the people you attend with year after year.  Most of the time you wouldn't know if visitors were present unless they introduced themselves. You go to church every week and come home, and now and then there's a spaghetti dinner some Tuesday evening and even then you sit at a table with the same people you already know.  In a ward of five hundred members, you may be on more than simple handshaking terms with less than half.

What I want to know is, how did a once-vibrant religion end up with church services that make many members feel dead inside?   I can tell you what happened to the institutional Church. For starters, our base of operations was long ago purged of charismatics and theologians and taken over by a cabal of lawyers and former corporate hacks. The headquarters in Salt Lake City is a mere shell, having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof, in favor of something they like to swing around that they call their "priesthood authority."  

But what happened to the LDS church on the local level, what we used to call The Body of Christ and The Gathering of Saints? We regular rank and file members of the church of Jesus Christ?  How did it come to be that we allowed the corporation to dictate everything that happens in our meetings down to the tiniest detail?  Is it not apparent to everyone by now that the top-down program of controlled correlation has sucked the life right out of our Sundays?

A Three Hour Bore

In the January-February issue of LDS living magazine, the editors presented a feature titled "Reinvent Your Sundays!"  I wish I hadn't mislaid my copy because I wanted to quote some of those ideas here. (Yes, I subscribe to LDS Living. Does that surprise you?)

Some of the ideas offered were actually pretty good, but the majority of them dealt with the usual problem of getting the kids ready on time or keeping them occupied while you're there; or about being better prepared the day before so that Sunday is not such a frantic and harried experience.

What was not addressed was the elephant in the room, that unspoken reality underlining all those great ideas, and the very reason we even need articles like this to help us get through Sunday in one piece, and that reality is this: Church is a bore, Sundays are a chore, and what most of us want is to just get it all over with.

We don't even enjoy leisurely fellowship with each other anymore, because by the end of that stultifying three hour block of meetings, all any of us wants to do is just go home.

A few weeks ago I had the missionaries over and we got to talking about the high rate of attrition among converts to the church. We are actually losing more converts than we're gaining these days. The average convert family attends for about nine months, and then stops coming entirely. I told the elders I believed the reason so many converts are falling away is because they're no longer feeling the spirit.

“That's why it's important," one elder insisted, “to keep them coming to church, so they can keep feeling the spirit.”

I begged to differ, and told him why. It's precisely because they attend our services that they're losing the spirit. It doesn't take long for a convert to realize that the warm witness he felt so strongly while in the presence of the missionaries is almost completely lacking in our meetings. There is nothing pulling at our converts to keep them coming back to church.  The spirit of truth they felt while studying the gospel under the missionaries is very rarely found in our meetinghouse services, so a good number of our newcomers -a majority now, actually- slip quietly away and are never seen again.

I've written about this loss of the spirit elsewhere on this blog.  I've even posited what I think are some of the reasons why this is.  But it's not only converts whose enthusiasm for Sunday services is waning. Here is a devout member named Paul writing on one of the many LDS message boards:

"I go to church on Sunday and feel I'm on the outside looking in...Then during the week, after reading good books about Mormonism, scriptures, theology, history, philosophy, science; talking to all of you people and working out my ideas and frustrations, I feel I'm back inside Mormonism. Then I go to church and the process starts all over after I leave the church building. Some weeks it's exhausting."

Whatever efforts the leadership is making is to keep our members stoked, it doesn't seem to be working.

In the early days of the LDS church, our gatherings were exciting, almost pentecostal in their fervor.  Visions and healings were common, singing was joyful, and the Relief Society ladies were giving each other blessings and prophesying through the laying on of hands.  The sacrament prayer was always offered with arms upraised to heaven, and there was even speaking in tongues. Back around 1840 if you stumbled onto a gathering of Mormons in worship, you knew that you had discovered a religion that was alive. 

There's little question in my mind that today Joseph Smith wouldn't recognize the very church he founded.  In an early post on this blog, I reprinted a short story by Samuel Taylor wherein he imagined what it would be like for Joseph Smith to attend a modern LDS meeting.  Sometime afterward, I received a personal email from a reader named Lynn.  I've known Lynn to be a stalwart defender of the Church and all its programs.  She has maintained three or four separate blogs promoting Mormon faith and culture.  But now, she says, she's throwing in the towel.  Is she disavowing her faith completely? I couldn't tell.  But it's clear she's taken all she can of our insipid Sunday services, and agrees that our church today would no longer be recognized by the very man who started it:

"The unscriptural traditions and the corporatism have taken away the Spirit! When you look at the front of the chapel on any given Sunday morning, it looks and feels more like a business meeting than a worship service.  I have found a non-denominational Christian church, with a live band and an emphasis on praise, and quite frankly, it will be a welcome change. Where in the scriptures does it say we are to sit quietly, sing funeral dirges, not lift hands in prayer and supplication, or praise and worship? Quite the opposite; the bible is full of joyous expressions, singing in jubilation, and even dancing for joy."

When someone as devoted to the church in every way as Lynn has always been finally throws up her hands in frustration and walks away, that tells me this church has a problem.

Taking A Step Back

What would be your advice to someone who loves this religion yet can't stand going to church?  Well, I'm the wrong person to ask, since I've only attended a handful of times in the past three years myself.  I have an excuse, though.  My wife's health is such that she cannot attend, and I'm required to be near her pretty much all the time.

But truth to tell, I can pretty well assure you that if both Connie and I were to finally find ourselves in perfect health once again, you couldn't get us to sit through that entire three hour block of meetings anymore.  We've been away too long.  We've seen life on the outside. We've been liberated from any notion that devotion to the gospel is tied to weekly attendance at meetings that do little more than emphasize the importance of obedience to leaders.

The great irony here is that ever since I've become technically "less active," I've been more devoted to the teachings and theology of my religion than ever before in my life.  I mean, really: what Jack-Mormon would maintain a blog dedicated to promoting the theology of the Restoration?  I'm immersed in Mormonism every day.  I love it's doctrines, it's theology, its history.  I love everything about it except the way the gatekeepers have been coating it with layer upon layer of their own philosophies and opinions until they have nearly completely hidden its glorious, shining message of love.

After reading my previous post on The Metaphysics of Mormonism, I received the following comment from someone named Chris:

"You did it my friend. You made Mormonism awesome. This is the one that makes me think Mormonism is potentially kick ass at its core. Thank you for this. I might actually start to like my religion now!"

Well, there it is.  That's what I've been trying to say for the past two years, and this guy nails it in a few words:  Underneath those layers of dross and detritus lies a religion that really kicks ass.

Time For A Moratorium On Mormon Meetings?

So if Mormonism is such a kick-ass religion, why aren't our Sunday services overflowing with joy? Why don't we really, truly enjoy church anymore?  And most importantly, why aren't we learning anything worthwhile?

In his youth, Joseph Smith had no more use for the stodgy New England revival meetings than he would likely have for our own today.  He felt he could find better uses for his time. "The year after Alvin's death," writes his biographer, "a revival struck Palmyra and nearby towns. Even Joseph Sr. attended two or three meetings before refusing to go again, but Joseph Jr. held back. He told his mother he could learn more in the woods from the bible than from any meeting."

-Richard L. Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling (pg 46)

I can certainly relate to young Joseph.  I learn more in one day here at home from my books and scriptures than I ever did in a month of Sundays at church.

So you want my advice?  Before you get so suffocated by the church that you finally run screaming in terror from the religion of your youth, why not just take a hiatus?  Allow yourself a vacation from church.  I don't mean a vacation from your religion, I mean take a vacation from attending meetings.  See if that doesn't reinvigorate you and your entire family.  You may, like me, come to appreciate your religion all the more.

Now I realize that this advice will ruffle the feathers of a lot of true believers.  To many of the devout, it's a sign of apostasy to stop coming to church.  To advise such action in others is worse than heresy.  Sadly, we have been so indoctrinated to believe that church attendance is a key measurement of our faith that it may be hard to recall that in Joseph Smith's day there were no regular Sunday services as we know them today. Regular weekly sacrament meetings were not even instituted in the church until the late 1850's, long after our founding prophet was dead.

Keep in mind that when I recommend you take a vacation, I'm not saying take off to the beach. The word "vacation" is derived from "vacate."  You vacate the place where you're accustomed to being and place yourself somewhere else.  In this case you will be vacating the chapel for period of time, taking a step back and assessing the local congregation's role in your life.

And it does indeed have an important role. The initial first century Christians met together primarily for fellowship one with another.  The word "Church" is derived from the greek "Ecclesia" which means "come out," or more broadly translated, "come out of her, my people" -the her being in reference to the Babylonian worldly system.  What today we call "church" was a way for believers to occasionally take themselves out of the world and join with like-minded disciples of the Christ. To the early Christians, church was literally a vacation from the world.

Today we tend to bring the world back into our meetings with our tacit insistence on formal business attire for both men and women.  We conduct our meetings by the book, according to a long established order: Opening song, opening prayer, announcements, administration of the sacrament, two talks, closing closing song, and closing prayer.

All participants conduct themselves in a respectful, businesslike manner, just as they would in a corporate board meeting.  No one spontaneously shouts "amen" or "hallelujah" anymore, as that's not how things are done in the world these days.  We keep our arms folded so we don't inadvertently clap our hands for joy, since we are trained to believe that would somehow disrupt the spirit, which we have been taught is always quiet and still, never joyful and spontaneous.

If "Ecclesia/Church" today meant anything like it did to the first century Christians or the 19th century Mormons, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

In my view, the purpose of Sunday meetings is to provide the following:

1.  The opportunity for fellowship with other disciples.
2.  The opportunity for praise and worship through joyful song.
3.  The opportunity to experience or witness the spirit of God at work.
4.  A means for receiving edification and instruction in God's word.



If you are not getting any or all of the above out of your church service; if you feel you're just spinning your wheels every Sunday, you may be better served by emulating the founder of our faith.  Perhaps you, like Brother Joseph, can learn more by reading your scriptures alone in the woods than by attending any meeting.

That would make a nice vacation, wouldn't it?

                                                                                         *****
For a suggestion as to an alternative to staying home on Sunday, click here for part two of Reinventing Your Sundays.