Your Reactions to Church Yesterday, 11/9

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November 10, 2025

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

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. The point is to post what you learned because of what happened at Church or how that led you to think. It doesn’t have to be orthodox, traditional or even on topic. 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

One response to “Your Reactions to Church Yesterday, 11/9”

Kent Larsen

November 9, 2025
Here are my reactions to yesterday’s Church meetings (11/9):
- I try to use the time for the passing of the sacrament for a kind of meditation — opening my mind to whatever inspiration might come my way. Unfortunately, this sometimes means that I miss the sacrament (if the deacon passing can’t get my attention) or someone has to bump me to get me to realize that the tray is in front of me. So I’m in favor of getting bumped.
- One speaker’s talk extensively used bread as a metaphor, pointing out at one point that the name ‘Bethlehem’ means ‘house of bread’. Bread is, of course, a powerful metaphor, especially in sacrament meeting where bread is a symbol of Christ’s body. But I really liked the speaker’s connections of the pressures of kneading bread and the stress of proving bread to the stresses of our lives. It really opened up the metaphor, adding depth to it.
- Another speaker focused on parables, talking about how we can “go a little deeper” by looking carefully at the parables, switching point of view, for example. On the parable of the pearl of great price, the speaker suggested that each of us were the pearl, bought by Christ’s sacrifice. I think much can be gained by “going a little deeper.”
- Both Sunday School and Elders Quorum meet in the gym, and this time of year we get the primary program practice (held in the chapel) as background music for the lessons. It’s a wonderful juxtaposition, with the music sometimes matching the lesson spot on, and other times going in a completely different direction, which makes you think about how they might be reconciled—a kind of mental and spiritual wrestle…
- The Elders Quorum lesson focused on ministering. One claim made was that home teaching was more structured than ministering. While I’m not sure that’s really true, I’m also not sure that less structure is always better. I think there is kind of an inverse relationship between structure and responsibility, as well as between structure and attention; i.e, the more structure there is, the less you have to be responsible and the less attention is needed to do the work well. But also the less structure, the more effort has to be put into the work—which sometimes means that the work doesn’t get done at all. While I think the ministering program is vitally important, I worry that it isn’t actually done anymore than home teaching was.
- The teacher asked us to think of stories in the scriptures of ministering in action. This led me to wonder what would happen if ministering was used as a lens through which we look at the scriptures. I suspect we might learn a lot about how to minister if we looked at the scriptures that way.
- And, finally, I realized that while I think I do ok at ministering, I could come up with systems and structures for my ministering that would help me do much better. There’s a lot of room to improve. So, I thought, maybe I should regularly ask myself something like ‘what steps have I taken in the last month to actually live my religion?’ Am I getting better at it?

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