Your Reactions to Church Yesterday, 11/16

Kent Larsen

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How did you react to Church yesterday? What did you notice? Did you end up thinking differently?

Do you think your reactions were what they should be? Were they ethical?

This is the latest invitation for reactions to local meetings, continuing the spirit of my post on September 25th about how we can take what happens in Church meetings—sermons, lessons and anything else—and enter a conversation with them, magnifying what was said or adding what we think.

The point here is that no matter how poorly prepared the speaker or teacher is, we can still find elements in what is said and what happens that inspires and edifies us. Even if church meetings aren’t conducted in a way that reaches us, we can take responsibility and find a way to feel the spirit.

So please, write down reactions and thoughts to what happened in Church. You might keep your own ‘spiritual journal’, or, if you like, you can post your reactions below. I’m adding my own reactions and thoughts as a comment to this post — instead of as a part of this post, because my reactions aren’t any better than anyone else’s.

Let me emphasize that this is NOT a place to criticize what is wrong with church or your fellow congregants. The point is to post what you learned because of what happened at Church or how that led you to think. It’s about the good things we can get out of Church, not the negative things that disturbed or upset us. It doesn’t have to be orthodox, traditional or even on topic.

If you like, make your response in the format, “They said or did this, and I said or thought that.” Even the things you dislike the most can be turned into lessons for what the gospel teaches we should do.

My hope is that these reactions serve as an example of a better way to treat what happens at Church instead of the perennial complaints about speaker or teacher preparation or ability, or complaints that the Church should do things differently.

Comments

2 responses to “Your Reactions to Church Yesterday, 11/16”

  1. Kent Larsen

    Here are my reactions to yesterday’s Church meetings (11/16):

    • I’m currently out-of-town, so I visited a ward that I am not familiar with. This led me to wonder about the ways that knowing our fellow ward or branch members changes how we react. If the ward has a good environment, then I think people can more easily talk about what they feel, even if that isn’t orthodox in the ward.
    • When one person was released, the words used were something like, “with sincere respect we release…” — I really like the “with sincere respect” part. We’re thanking people for their efforts, of course that should be done with respect — but I’m not sure it always is.
    • One place where wards and branches vary is in the sacrament bread — white or brown. Noticing what was used in this ward, my mind ended up in a tangent wondering about the symbolism involved. White is associated with purity, but brown feels more accurate. I’m sure we could go on about that…
    • A speaker’s remarks included the idea that we sometimes find ourselves focusing on what is missing instead of what is here. — yes, kind of like what I’m trying to do with these posts, change what we focus on to something we can control and that is positive.
    • It occurred to me while looking around at what others were doing during sacrament meeting that you can learn a lot from observing how others act during sacrament meeting. I’m not just talking about whether others are paying attention to the speaker, but rather how they interact with those near them—who they touch or whisper to and how. We don’t need to judge their actions, just ask why they do what they do and what that means.
    • In the Sunday School lesson, we shortly discussed D&C 130:19 — about the intelligence that we take with us to the next life. So I asked what about the stupidities we take with us to the next life? Somehow I don’t think they are left behind, as much as I’d like that. Instead, I suspect that they come with us and are a task we have to take care of before we can get on with the rest of our eternal lives.
    • When it seemed like the lesson (which included D&C 132) was going to avoid polygamy, a couple of people spoke up, suggesting that it should not be avoided. I agree that it shouldn’t be avoided, but then another person told the story about how a member they baptized had left the Church because it was talked about as an eternal principle in a lesson. It is possible, I think to talk about polygamy as a difficult subject, one that we don’t have to decide immediately about. Many of us won’t have to face it in our personal lives. But, FWIW, my personal concern is with the gender differences. I don’t understand why, as we have practiced it, it’s one man and multiple wives, and not also one woman and multiple husbands. Fortunately, I don’t think I have to believe in the gender difference — and maybe something will lead me to change my mind about all of this.
  2. Not a Cougar

    My reactions are solely about our Sunday School lesson. It was pretty clear that the instructor had spent a lot of time on the lesson and he tried to root our discussion in the text of Section 132 which I thought was a good way to go given that we only had about 40 minutes for our class (we got out late from sacrament meeting), and trying to discuss 60 years of plural marriage would have been a tough task. To pick up on one of Kent’s points, I thought that this was a lesson that needed a lot of trust along the class members in order to have a good discussion. Unfortunately, we had an elderly visitor to the class who, in my opinion, detracted somewhat from the discussion (jokes about being sealed to two different women and having to know two new names is not a good joke to tell, most especially when we are talking about plural marriage).

    This time around we didn’t really have anyone give a rousing defense of plural marriage using ideas like taking care of widows or it being a practice limited to like 2% of the membership like I’ve seen in the past. Perhaps that’s symptomatic of the Church’s increased efforts at being more transparent about the history of it. If so, I think that’s a good outcome.

    All in all, I can’t say it was the best Sunday School lesson I’ve ever experienced but we go through it with hearts and friendships intact.