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Why Are Mormon Church Meetings So Dull?: A Response (Part 5)
August 31st, 2010
This is a continuation of my response to Jana Reiss's article "Why Are Mormon Church Meetings So Dull?" (See Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four.) This is Part 5 of 5. The end!
Image by Pat Bagley, from the book Wake Me For the Resurrection by Robert Kirby.
Reiss states that the final reason why church is boring is that nobody seems prepared to envision this differently. She doesn't really elaborate on this point very much---and for that reason I think it's meant to be kind of a catch-all statement. With that in mind, I'll just share a couple of my final thoughts.
First, I think it would really help if we reduced the 3-hour block schedule. I have a hard time sitting for three hours during an eye-popping, action-packed film like Avatar or Inception, let alone church. The human brain/body really wasn't designed to sit and try to pay attention to something that long without frequent breaks. According to molecular biologist John Medina, the human brain actually has a hard time paying attention to anything for more than 10 minutes without some kind of attention-getting incentive to keep going. Is it any wonder we find it difficult to stay engaged for 1-hour increments over three hours?
There are complicated reasons why our church is three hours long. It requires a little bit of a background in twentieth century church history to understand. Prior to the 1970s, the auxiliary organizations (Relief Society, Sunday School, Primary, and the MIA---which is now the Young Women/Young Men's program) were all completely autonomous entities. My understanding is that their relationship to the church more closely resembled the relationship of an extracurricular program to a school. They had their own budgets, their own magazines, their own curricula, and their own staff. On a local ward level, the members of these auxiliaries met on weekdays rather than on Sundays. That all changed in the 1970s when President Lee decided the auxiliaries should be governed by priesthood authority (the First Presidency/Quorum of the Twelve) as part of the Correlation Program. This consolidated and reduced the auxiliaries' autonomy. A few years later, President Kimball determined that these organizations should meet all at once on Sundays rather than during the week. That way church wouldn't take up so much of the members' time in the week and they'd have more time for their families.
My theory is that the reason we have the 3-hour block is because there would have been a bit of an uproar if some of the auxiliaries had simply been disbanded and told not to meet any more. But I would also argue that most people who used to be members of these independent auxiliaries are seniors now and they wouldn't feel all that upset if we changed the meeting schedule today. Surely we could shave off maybe half an hour or an hour, right? On a practical level, it would also save the church a lot of tithing money because they wouldn't have to build as many meetinghouses; more wards could fit into a single meetinghouse on Sundays this way. And I think everyone would be happier to have a shorter block schedule. I think there would be dancing in the streets of Utah the day they announced a change like that. Especially people with young children and those who have Primary callings. (Kids really aren't meant to sit for three hours.)
My other opinion is that it would help to somehow increase the opportunities for social interaction between ward members. I know that church isn't supposed to be some kind of social club. That being said, I also know that when I feel that I have good friends in the ward and people who approve of me and want me to be there, I have a much better experience at church. My attitude towards church is profoundly affected by my sense of belonging.
What ideas do you have?
In conclusion, I think Jana Reiss initiated an important discussion. I had never read anything she had written up to this point. She wasn't even on my radar. But suddenly all the Mormon blogs I read linked to that essay, some of my friends sent me the links to it asking me what I thought, and some of the Mormon Studies podcasts I listen to talked about it. So it naturally drew my attention. To me that suggests that she hit a nerve and that it's something that maybe we need to think about a little bit more as a collective church.
I don't think that boring meetings are any single individual's fault or perhaps even the church's fault as an institution. Rather, everyone has a responsibility to make our meetings better---including the institution. And the best way to affect that kind of change is to begin thinking and talking about the problem. And ultimately being willing to do something about it. Amen.
Why Are Mormon Church Meetings So Dull?: A Response (Part 4)
August 30th, 2010
This is a continuation of my response to Jana Reiss's article "Why Are Mormon Church Meetings So Dull?" (See Part One, Part Two, and Part Three.) This is Part 4 of 5.
The fourth reason church is boring, according to Jana Reiss is that our talks are substandard. I agree with this one too. Have you seen this video yet? This says it all:
In the follow-up podcast to her essay, Reiss said that she thought it was a little strange that many bishopric members give the ward member a Conference talk to speak about. Isn't it a little odd to give a talk about a talk? She also proposed that instead of just assigning ward members a topic for their talk over the phone or something hurried like that, perhaps the bishopric member could sit down with the member and chat about the topic with them for a while. That way they could really engage the member in the deeper elements of the topic and help to draw out some of their personal experiences that are related to the topic. I liked that idea.
Here's a another idea: what if we had a calling similar to the Teacher Development calling only it was the Talk Development calling? When church members are asked to speak in church, they can attend a one-month class held during Sunday School (or whenever) in which they learn some principles of public speaking. Plus, it could also give them time to really perfect their talk. The teacher and other members of the class could help them with scripture research, help them to brainstorm personal experiences to share, and give them practice delivering the talk in front of a small group. The speaker can get lots of constructive feedback during the whole process and then, when the class is finished, they deliver their well-polished talk in sacrament meeting. Brilliant, eh? I'm a genius!!!
As a side note, I think the fact that Reiss brought up this point speaks to one of the underlying tensions that may be at work in Reiss's essay: the difficulties of having a lay ministry. Before Reiss converted to Mormonism 17 years ago, she was studying to become a Protestant pastor, so she probably sees some of the advantages of having a professional ministry. (What a sacrifice, eh?) In theory, I really like our church's practice of having a lay ministry. For one, it keeps us far away from that whole "priestcraft" thing. For another, it saves us tithing money---which is important since those are sacred funds. And, perhaps most importantly, it allows all the members to actively participate in the church by making sure each one of us has a "job" to do.
But, in practice, having a lay ministry can be problematic too. One of the disadvantages of having a lay ministry is occasionally people get put in callings for which they are, well, not necessarily the best person for the job. In some cases, the calling gives people the motivation to develop and refine their talents---or discover talents they never knew they had. That's the best-case scenario. But in some cases, some people just really don't enjoy working in the area where they are called for whatever reason and that can potentially be demotivating for the person in the calling or the people being served. We had an interesting discussion about this topic on one of my previous blog entries, so I'll just direct you to read that if you wat more of my thoughts on that matter. I learned through that discussion that this can be a touchy subject that gets emotions running high, so I don't think I want to stir the pot up again in this blog entry.
At any rate, I think that Reiss's perspectives as a convert are worth considering because that highlights what is at stake here: the retention of new converts. We need to think of how we can make our church meetings more engaging and more spiritually fulfilling for the sake of our tender new converts. They converted because they felt something here. Let's help them stay here by continuing to help them feel something.
Why Are Mormon Church Meetings So Dull?: A Response (Part 3)
August 29th, 2010
This is a continuation of my response to Jana Reiss's article "Why Are Mormon Church Meetings So Dull?" (See Part One and Part Two.) This is Part 3 of 5.
This image is from a series of Mormonad parodies created by a BYU Comedy troupe known as Divine Comedy.
Reiss's third reason church is boring is that our music is confining and funereal. She is probably right about this one on a general level, but I think it may depend quite a bit on the people who are in music callings in a particular ward (and also how musically inclined the rest of the ward is). When my dad was a bishop in Tennessee, the ward chorister at the time kept the music at a really, really slow tempo. Someone (I think they may have been a new convert) once asked my dad: "Why do all of our church songs sound like funeral songs?" Hymns don't have to feel like dirges---but when we play them too slow, they really drag on.
For about 10 years, I had the calling of ward chorister or Relief Society chorister in every ward I lived in. I strongly agreed with my mom's advice that the hymns needed to be directed at a fast tempo. However, this created a lot of problems for me in my singles branch because I started getting complaints from the organists (usually people who were just learning to play the organ for the first time) that they couldn't play that fast. (That's one of the disadvantages of having amateur organists rather than professionals.)
The other complaint I got was about occasionally choosing hymns that were less well-known. If we didn't have a musical number for the day, I picked a rest hymn that was not as well-known. (I like to say that those hymns are part of the "sealed portion of the hymnbook." A lot of those hymns are really interesting and I don't quite know why some of them aren't a little more popular.) But the backlash I got from people about it suggests to me that there is almost an active resistance to anything that is new or novel, musically speaking.
Reiss mentions this in her essay too. She talks about how Mormons are not very musically adventurous. She states that "whole classes of instruments, styles, and composers are simply barred from the door." I listened to a follow-up interview she did on a podcast about her essay and she said she thought the idea of not allowing a trumpet was especially problematic on Easter, which is such an exultant, triumphant holiday. I liked her idea of perhaps revising church policy to allow brass instruments in our meetings on an Easter-only basis. That way it would be treated as something special and would help us get into the glorious nature of that holiday a little more. I really liked that idea.
As I've mentioned on my blog before, I once sung in an amazing stake choir while I was a student at BYU. Being a member of that choir was a deeply spiritual experience for me. Every choir practice left me feeling spiritually fed and the meetings in which we sang were spiritually cathartic. Besides singing at stake conferences, we sang twice a year: once at Thanksgiving and once on Easter. The choir director, Brother Kasen, occasionally got criticized for bringing brass and timpani into the stake meetings. His reply was: "But the angel Moroni is playing a trumpet!" The brass and timpani definitely added an exultant feel to the meetings. There is such power and strength in those instruments. It wouldn't have been the same without them.
Music has such incredible potential to make our meetings better. Not only does good music heighten the level of spirituality in our meetings, but it's intuitively engaging and interesting to us. So I say hear, hear, Sister Reiss. You definitely got it right on this point. We are not fully tapping into that potential in our meetings.
By the way, if anyone wants to read some interesting perspectives by a professional musician about how to improve music in the church, check out these interesting blog entries:
- Music and the Church: On Regulation and the Unfamiliar
- Music and the Church: On Music Education
- Music and the Church: Musings on Ends, Means, and Musicians.
Why Are Mormon Church Meetings So Dull?: A Response (Part 2)
August 28th, 2010
This is a continuation of my response to Jana Reiss's article "Why Are Mormon Church Meetings So Dull?" This is Part 2 of 5.
The second reason our church meetings are boring, according to Reiss, is because we think we're there to learn about God, not worship God. When I read this in her article, I realized that I don't really have a clear definition of the word "worship" because Mormons really don't use that term very often.[1]
I'm not even completely sure what Reiss means when she uses the word "worship" and how it could make our meetings less dull. But my friend Dane offered an interesting counterpoint to Reiss's argument by suggesting that Mormons may actually think of instruction as a kind of worship. Dane's idea seems to be in line with Bruce R. McConkie's definition of worship. McConkie defines worship as keeping God's commandments and, for that reason, he argues that "knowledge of the truth is essential to true worship."
If instruction is indeed a form of worship, then I can see how good instruction-worship could make our meetings more interesting. The process of gaining and sharing new knowledge is always intensely pleasurable for me. I definitely feel engaged when I'm learning something new. (I think there's brain research that corroborates that, but the specific references escape me at the moment.) In fact, learning something new even feels akin to spiritual enlightenment for me---receiving new light and knowledge and what not---even when that knowledge is secular in nature.
However, I have one problem with Dane's idea of instruction being the LDS equivalent of worship: if his idea is true, then is the quality of one's worship defined by gaining new knowledge? Because if that's the case, then it's not always working for me personally. I feel like it's been a while since I learned something new about the gospel in my formal church meetings. I don't think it's because there isn't anything new to learn about the gospel. On the contrary, I feel like I gain new insights about the gospel all the time. But most of the new insights and perspectives I gain about the gospel come from my own personal studies outside of the meetinghouse---reading books, meditating, reading blogs, journaling, listening to podcasts, and having one-on-one gospel discussions with family, friends and the sisters I visit teach.
I suspect that the genesis of the Church's Correlation Program could explain the roots of this problem. If I understand its origins correctly, one of the reasons why President Lee instituted the program in the early 1970s was to help make church members more knowledgeable about fundamental gospel principles. The Correlation Committee came up with a list of concepts that every church member should learn and then they designed instructional manuals that would teach these concepts to the members throughout their life in the church: each concept would get taught 3 times in Primary, 3 times as a Youth, and 3 times ad infinitum as an adult. The idea was that through repetition, members would get a deeper understanding of these core doctrines. (It's the principle of "myelination," to use fancy neuroscience term to describe it.) The problem is that it's starting to get a little old for me.[2] While I enjoy exploring the various angles and perspectives about each of those core concepts, I'm starting to get a little tired of them too. I've had plenty of milk (and it was good) but I'm developing an appetite for meat. And the lack of meat makes church meetings a little less engaging for me personally.
I'm not sure what the church could do to institutionally make more "meat" available to us seasoned members. The Correlation Program is probably not going anywhere any time soon. I guess the real key is to just treat church meetings the place where you come to get reminded of the basics. And that we as individuals shouldn't just let church be the only place where we study the gospel. We need to take the initiative to study outside of church to gain our own light and knowledge.
Footnotes
[1] I realized that I personally only hear the word "woship" used in the context of worshiping false idols. So, Chris and I spent a little time the other day trying to come up with a better definition of what "worship" means in Mormonism. We looked up "worship" in the Bible Dictionary, but there wasn't an entry for it. Next, we looked up "worship" on the church's website. We found worship listed under Gospel Topics, which basically said that worship meant to give "love, reverence, service and devotion" to God. I wanted to dig in and find out what that meant on a practical level and the website further defined it as offering prayer, going to the temple, participating in priesthood ordinances, fasting and "joining in fellowship with others who worship Him," which I guess means going to church. It seems like a pretty all-encompassing term. What do you think worship really means to Mormons? When do you feel like you're really worshiping God?
[2] This is probably best illustrated by a joke I heard recently: A Primary teacher asks her students, "What has a bushy tail, runs up trees and stores nuts?" A confused child answers, "I know the answer is Jesus, but it sounds like a squirrel to me." Repetition isn't always a good thing. :)
Why Are Mormon Church Meetings So Dull?: A Response (Part 1)
August 27th, 2010
A month or so ago, Jana Reiss wrote a provocative essay entitled "Why Are Mormon Church Meetings So Dull?" that generated a lot of discussion on the bloggernacle. Reading the essay, I found that I agreed very much with the basic premise of her argument. She's right that church meetings are usually dull. If I were to try to quantify it for me personally, I'd guesstimate that the ratio of meetings in which I am bored (or otherwise distracted) vs. those meetings in which I feel engaged is about 9 to 1. (Having to wrangle toddlers drastically affects my level of engagement these days.)
Reiss's essay had me feeling a little bit like Howard Beale in the film Network. I found myself saying, "Yeah, she's right! Church meetings are boring! And, flippity fetch, why don't we do something about it?!" I agreed with many of the top 5 reasons she listed about why our meetings are dull and so I wanted to extend her argument by talking about some practical methods through which the church as an institution could possibly improve church meetings. I'm no prophet, of course---so it's not up to me to make these kind of changes. But I like imagining different ways of doing things anyhow.
The first reason why church is boring, according to Reiss, is that we no longer expect spiritual manifestations in our meetings. I agree with her reasoning, but not necessarily how she applies it. She talks about how meetings in the early days of the church would "scare the knee length shorts off American Mormons today." Things such as speaking in tongues, being slain in the spirit, and what not. That's the kind of worship meeting my mom used to disparagingly label as "Holy Roller" worship when we lived in the South. For my part, I'm actually fairly grateful that this kind of Pentecostal worship meeting was gradually phased out of the church. It all feels just a little too nineteenth century for me. Perhaps Reiss feels a little bit differently because she is a convert from a Protestant faith tradition, but the whole idea of that kind of worship feels very foreign to me.
That being said, I think that she's right that spiritual manifestations make a big difference in church meetings. I'm reminded of the opening of Eugene England's essay "Why the Church is as True as the Gospel":
I was convinced when I was a boy that the most boring meeting in the Church, perhaps in the world, was a quarterly stake conference. In those days they were indeed held every three months and included at least two two-hour sessions on Sunday. The most interesting highlights to us were the quavery songs literally "rendered" by the "Singing Mothers" and the sober sustaining of the stake No Liquor-Tobacco Committee.
But one conference was particularly memorable. I was twelve and sitting near the front because my father was being sustained as a high councilor in a newly formed stake. I had just turned around in my seat to tease my sister who was sitting behind me, when I felt something, vaguely familiar, burning at the center of my heart and bones and then almost physically turning me around to look at the transfigured face of Elder Harold B. Lee, the "visiting authority." He had suddenly interrupted his prepared sermon and was giving the new stake an apostolic blessing. And I became aware, for a second and confirming time in my life, of the presence of the Holy Ghost and the special witness of Jesus Christ. How many boring stake conferences would I attend to be even once in the presence of such grace? Thousands---all there are. That pearl is without price.
Personally, I would like to see us bring that gap down from a thousand. :) And I think one way we could do that by easing up a little bit on the concept of some things being "too sacred to share." While I feel like that the concept of keeping sacred things sacred is certainly valid, I simultaneously wish that we would all be a little more candid about the spiritual experiences that we have---both small experiences and big ones. I personally err on the side of saying too much when it comes to those kind of experiences. That's because hearing about those kinds of stories from others really strengthens my own faith. And the experience of telling those stories can be profound for me too. I'm definitely more engaged in meetings when people share profound experiences like that.
Another reason why those kind of experiences are so engaging is simply because humans like stories. In a follow-up interview Jana Reiss did on a podcast, she mentioned that she can't always remember exactly what points of doctrine were discussed in General Conference, but she always remembers the stories. That's because narratives are intuitively engaging. They show us how the gospel applies in a practical way in our lives. Plus, the really great stories engage our emotions, which is the brain's super-highway when it comes to paying attention to things.
Well, that's my two cents on her first reason why church is boring. I've written out my response to the rest of her five points, but the blog entry ended up being incredibly long I decided to break it up into five smaller blog posts. I'll be posting one entry each day for the next few days. Stay tuned for more!
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