What Did You Think About Church Yesterday, 2/15?

Kent Larsen

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Was something wrong at Church? Did you object to what was said? I know that things sometimes go poorly at Church (and everywhere else, for that matter). But do we go to Church to catalog the problems and errors?

We claim that we go to Church to worship, but often members talk about Church like it is entertainment. I hear things like “I got bored”, “I didn’t like that talk,” “What they said was wrong,” etc. If you are worshiping God at Church, why do these questions matter? Is the presentation, good or bad, why you came to Church? If you are worshiping, why would you allow the inabilities of speakers or teachers keep you from that?

The simplest model of communication consists of a speaker, a listener and a message. But when we apply this to worship, is it different? Where does God fit in that model? Is he the speaker? If so, how is he communicating and what is the message?

Sometimes, we hear that God speaks through others, if so, are we listening to that? If we are disappointed because we are expecting to be entertained, are we letting that disappointment keep us from hearing God’s messages?

Given this idea, 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 looking for what God had to tell you? 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

3 responses to “What Did You Think About Church Yesterday, 2/15?”

  1. Kent Larsen

    Here are a few of my reactions to my Church meetings yesterday (2/15):

    • I was asked to also attend a branch in our area, so I got to attend two very different Sunday School lessons, both about Noah. I enjoyed both of them, despite how different they were:
    • One focused more on the structural issues during Noah’s time—on the idea that the situation had gotten so bad that no one could learn. I like that take, because it acknowledges the way the social structures in our lives lead to assumptions about how things must be done. And these assumptions are sometimes quite evil. For me, this also raises the question of how do you face such structural evils?
    • The other lesson focused on Noah’s role as a prophet, and the various tools available to us for discovering truth——prayer, personal revelation, scripture, talking with leaders, etc.
    • In one of the lessons, the teacher suggested that it might be better to look at our path returning to our Heavenly Parents not as “the” covenant path, but rather as
      “your” covenant path. The idea is that so much of what we experience in life, which effects the timing of the elements of our path, is specific to us individually.
    • The branch I attended was quite small — I think there were 25 people in Sacrament Meeting. Of course, passing the sacrament in a small unit like that is much faster. OTOH, it is also quieter, which made it easier to hear the bouncing basketball from the next room [eye-roll].
    • In both meetings I ended up thinking about the boundary between the structural things that push us toward actions and our personal responsibility for our actions. It seems to me that our actions come from a combination of the influences of these external, structural elements, and our own deliberate decisions. The more I think about it, the more I see that these external things push us to do things that we shouldn’t, and we usually don’t have the moral backbone to resist, often because the alternatives are poor. Do we really have the ability to make moral choices in such cases? And, perhaps more important, what do such situations teach us about how to act in the future?
  2. Jonathan Green

    Our recently-released Stake president and his wife are now the service mission coordinators in our mission, so their presentation pre-empted Sunday School. The growth in service missions is one of the less heralded changes in recent years but it has the potential to have a big impact in terms of who can serve a mission and what the public face of the Church and its missionaries looks like.

  3. RLD

    I started last week’s reading with a bad attitude: what can we learn from Noah and the Ark other than “be good or else”? Fortunately, our teacher pointed out the chiastic structure of the whole story, which makes God remembering Noah the turning point. He then used that as a springboard to talk about getting closer to God, played a clip from President Oaks’ BYU devotional, and made it a pretty great lesson.

    That actually dovetailed with something I noticed in my reading: we frame this as a “follow the prophet” story, but as far as is recorded Noah never tries to persuade anyone else to build a boat or to get on his. His prophetic message (according to Moses 8) is “repent.” Of course if the “violent” and “corrupt” society he lived in had listened, no boats would have been needed. But since that didn’t happen, he then received personal revelation on how to mitigate the consequences of living in a violent and corrupt society for him and his family. That certainly seems relevant today, even if both the consequences and the mitigation are just a bit different.