Mormon Church Meetings
Why Are Mormon Church Meetings So Dull?
Monday July 19, 2010
Jana Riess on the Fun of Spiritual Failure
A couple of years ago I read the memoir Sundays in America by Suzanne
Strempek Shea, a Massachusetts novelist. The author's project was to
attend a different religious service every weekend and write about her
initial impressions.
I felt that it was unfair to judge a faith tradition based on a single
snapshot, when so much of religious life happens during the other days
of the week. That said, what Shea concluded about Mormonism was spot
on: the only thing non-Mormons needed to fear about Mormonism was that
Mormons would bore the world's population to death.
Sometimes it takes an outsider to make us realize the truth about
ourselves. This author nailed the fact that our sacrament meetings are
beyond dull; they are stultifying. She certainly had no desire to
return. And really, who could blame her?
I've spent years trying to figure out why today's sacrament meetings
are typically an exercise in routinized tedium when worship was so
decidedly different in the early years of the LDS Church. As a
historian of religion, I offer five reasons here. As a Mormon who cares
about our message being relevant beyond our own walls, I hope we're not
too entrenched in what's not working to realize that we simply must
change.
1) We no longer expect any spiritual manifestations. The number one
reason why our services bore even our most devout members to tears is
that American Mormons don't expect the Holy Spirit to show up in
anything more than a warm, fuzzy, non-threatening way. I say American
Mormons because elsewhere around the world, Mormons still have the
early saints' experiences of praying for the manifestations of the
Spirit, being slain in the Spirit, speaking in tongues, and other
things that scare the knee-length shorts off American Mormons today.
For a denomination that invests heavily in the idea of being the direct
continuation of the New Testament Church, we have few religious
experiences now that would be remotely recognizable to believers in the
first century. When we don't truly expect God to show up, is it any
wonder when He doesn't?
2) We think we're there primarily to learn about God, not to worship
God. It's no accident that we call our Sunday gatherings "sacrament
meetings" rather than worship services. We do lots of good things in
those meetings, like taking communion every week (one of the few things
we consistently do right). But if you take a straw poll of Mormons and
ask them why they're there, "worship God" is not going to show up in
your top five. At best, we relegate worship to the temple (which only
helps about one in five Mormons), and at worst, we don't think about
worship at all. Yet the scriptures name worship as our primary reason
for gathering each week. Unfortunately, we no longer know how to do it
unless an insider-outsider like Gladys Knight shows the way by
presenting a wonderful fireside or special event that takes us out of
ourselves to worship the one who made us.
3) Our music is confining and often funereal. For a supposedly joyful
people, Mormons are missing a crucial element of joy that should
accompany our worship services. We sing three hymns per service,
sometimes four, and they are often lovely. Beyond that we do not
venture. We neglect the vast richness of the world's musical heritage,
especially the gorgeous offerings of sacred music through the ages.
Whether this failure is a byproduct of Mormon theological chauvinism or
simple ignorance I do not know. I feel a terrible sadness about the
disconnect that exists in Mormonism between the exalted beauty of the
Mormon Tabernacle Choir, which touches thousands of hearts with its
renditions of music both sacred and secular, and the anemic,
impoverished approach to music that typically exists at the ward level,
where whole classes of instruments, styles, and composers are simply
barred from the door.
4) Our talks suck. I know I've been harping on this point for ages (see
this satirical piece in Sunstone from a few years back), but the
situation never seems to improve. Considering that all Mormons are
expected to speak regularly in church--in my ward, about once a
year--it's perfectly ridiculous that we offer no training in how to do
it. (Well, no training on how to do it better; every time we sit in
sacrament meeting and hear someone doing it badly, we're being taught
that irrelevant mediocrity is the expected norm.) I think it's terrific
that we expect all members to give talks, and of course it's only
natural that there would be a wide variance in quality. But some
training in content and delivery would help everyone improve, and would
also raise the confidence of those Latter-day Saints who would rather
have a root canal than give a talk in public.
5) Nobody seems prepared to envision this differently. This, along with
point #1, is our most pressing problem: where there is no vision, the
people perish. Our leaders have not made weekly worship a priority.
I've been a church member for 17 years now, and in that time the only
changes I've seen in sacrament meeting are that we've stopped singing
the practice hymn and we no longer have official missionary farewells.
Sorry, but that's not enough. We need men and women who are
theologically trained, who understand what a worship service is
intended to accomplish, and who can comb the scriptures and our own
history for examples of how to make Sundays more fulfilling. Only when
that leadership is in place can we make the necessary changes in the
details, like improving member talks and allowing for music that
enhances worship.
I suspect that some traditional Mormons are going to look at this post
and find it arrogant. Who am I to criticize the way that Mormons
worship? "If it was good enough for my ancestors, it should be good
enough for you," they may say. There are two problems with this
argument. The first, of course, is that our kind of rote, uninspired,
and careless worship would not have been good enough for their
ancestors. This was precisely the kind of dead religion that many early
Mormons fled. They wanted worship that brought them closer to God, that
made them experience the startling possibility that God had broken into
time--our time!--to speak to a prophet and begin all things new.
Mormonism's radical message spawned a people who joyfully danced before
the ark of the Lord. Today, those same people would be checking their
watches and sneaking Cheerios to pass the time.
The second problem is that our worship is simply not good enough for
the people we're trying to persuade. Mormonism teaches that the
restored gospel is a unique, special message that changes lives. I
believe that too. But I'm tired of seeing prospective converts who
first catch the fire of our theology have that fire snuffed out with
our vain repetition and lifeless talks. They know they're being
cheated. They know our teachings show a more abundant way. Why aren't
we living what we believe?
LDS leaders often wonder why retention is low among new converts, and
identify valid reasons for attrition: converts don't have enough of a
social network in the ward, or they find it tricky to live the
standards of the gospel, or they have logistical difficulties getting
to church. All of these are true in my experience, but the elephant in
the room is that what passes for worship in the Mormon Church is not
feeding these new converts, not at all. And that's a tragedy, because
great worship is exactly the transformative missing ingredient that
could help them find their place, give them the strength to rise to new
behavioral standards, and want to attend church more often.
We need to stop giving them--and ourselves--stone for bread.