Your Reactions to Church Yesterday, 1/4

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January 5, 2026

Recently I explored the writings of a Mormon literary thinker little-known among Church members today, Wayne Booth. In The Company We Keep, Booth proposes that human beings not only learn by induction and deduction, but by what he calls “coduction” — the discovery of knowledge in conversation with others. This is a cornerstone of how we are supposed to learn at Church, in our Sunday School, Priesthood and Relief Society classes. It is also a key element to how we are supposed to learn in counsels. It requires that each person in a class, or in a counsels, both listen carefully to what others are saying, and contribute actively to the discussion. Without both of these, coduction, or group learning, can’t happen.

If we are to learn at Church, we need to be engaged. It doesn’t help if we complain about how others act. Instead, we need to listen carefully to what they say, and to what that implies, and contribute to improving the experience for everyone. And we can start by looking at how we react to what is said or communicated at church.

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? Did your reactions make things better?

This is the latest invitation for reactions to local meetings, continuing the spirit of my post on September 25th about how we receive 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. In these posts I’m asking us all to think about how we listen and receive what happens at Church. If we only listen for mistakes, or things that bother us, what does that say about us? Is it most important to criticize others? Or to try to change ourselves?

The point here is that no matter how poorly prepared the speaker or teacher is, or no matter how what happens triggers us, or is objectively or doctrinally wrong, 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

One response to “Your Reactions to Church Yesterday, 1/4”

Kent Larsen

January 4, 2026
Here are my reactions to my Church meetings yesterday (1/4):
- Giving his testimony, one brother, a trained chef, observed that the stove had been removed in the building’s kitchen, and we only had ovens now. But, he said, structural changes like that don’t matter — the gospel is still true, and he can still manage to produce good food regardless. I agree with him, but I also see that small changes like this can have implications for many members. Structural things like this do matter to some people for many reasons. Each of us have things that are important to us, and that help make our lives easier. On the other hand, change can be good as well — we create new structures to work around the changes — I won’t be surprised to see hot plates appear in the kitchen to replace the lost burners.
- In Sunday School (as part of the Introduction to the Old Testament lesson), the teacher suggested we often suffer from the “Ramona the Pest” problem: In the Beverly Cleary book, new kindergartener Ramona is told to “sit here for the present,” and remains glued to her chair waiting for the promised present, not realizing the alternate meaning of “for the present”. So the Old Testament can be like that — misunderstood because of alternate meanings and the wildly different cultures represented there. This makes me think of the statement “The Past is a Foreign Country.” — and the more in the past it is, the more strange and foreign it is.
- The discussion in class drifted into a discussion of how we learn — visually, audibly, in conversation with others, etc. T. S. Eliot was cited, “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” Its one thing to noticed something in what we read, but quite another to understand its implications and yet another to know how to use that to change our lives for the better.
- In a conversation after class, a friend reminded me of the change from Home Teaching to Ministering, which at the time he had summed up with the acronym AGAC: And give a crap. Sadly, many members of the church see ministering as just a new name for home teaching. If someone isn’t on their list, or as soon as someone is taken off the list, they don’t feel any responsibility for knowing them or taking care of them. AGAC is the answer. We’re supposed to care about one another. Ministering is a tool or structure to help us do that. When you just make it a to do item, you miss the point.

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