Making a list

I have started to notice how much time is wasted in our meetings teaching (and thus re-enforcing) church culture as opposed to gospel teachings.

BINGO! I reached this conclusion after reading Ben Franklin’s biography, the passage from which I’ve quoted at the end of this post.

And yes, it bothers me. My biggest concern is the imbalance between individual needs, and organizational needs. I call it the tension between Christianity and Churchianity. Or between Mormonism and MormonChurchism in the LDS culture. The balance is way too far on the church side of the continuum for my liking. So, I now have a filter that weeds out the talks and comments that are meant to make us good Mormons rather than good people. I reject them….

Based on recent developments in my family, I also believe I should be creating my own system of values and perhaps, even practices in my family that reinforce the values I believe are most important. It’s a bit late now — I’ve abdicated to the church for too long, but they say its never too late to become a good parent. Not that I’m a bad parent, but I think I let the presence of the church lull me into letting that organization dictate the values to my children more that I should…..

But, as a coping mechanism — use your powerful role as a parent (if you have children) to neutralize the good soldier culture of the church when that culture is destructive or wrong in your mind.

Here is the quote from Ben Franklin:

Tho’ I seldom attended any public worship, I had still an opinion of its propriety, and of its utility when rightly conducted, and I regularly paid my annual subscription for the support of the only Presbyterian minister or meeting we had in Philadelphia. He used to visit me sometimes as a friend, and admonish me to attend his administrations, and I was now and then prevailed on to do so, once for five Sundays successively. Had he been in my opinion a good preacher, perhaps I might have continued, notwithstanding the occasion I had for the Sunday’s leisure in my course of study; but his discourses were chiefly either polemic arguments, or explications of the peculiar doctrines of our sect, and were all to me very dry, uninteresting, and unedifying, since not a single moral principle was inculcated or enforced, their aim seeming to be rather to make us Presbyterians than good citizens.

At length he took for his text that verse of the fourth chapter of Philippians, “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, or of good report, if there be any virtue, or any praise, think on these things.” And I imagined, in a sermon on such a text, we could not miss of having some morality. But he confined himself to five points only, as meant by the apostle, viz.: 1. Keeping holy the Sabbath day. 2. Being diligent in reading the Holy Scriptures. 3. Attending duly the public worship. 4. Partaking of the sacrament. 5. Paying a due respect to God’s ministers. These might be all good things; but, as they were not the kind of good things that I expected from the text, I despaired of ever meeting with them from any other, was disgusted, and attended his preaching no more. I had some years before composed a little liturgy, or form of prayer, for my own private use (viz., in 1728), entitled “Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion.” I returned to the use of this, and went no more to the public assemblies. My conduct might be blamable, but I leave it without attempting further to excuse it; my present purpose being to relate facts, and not to make apologies for them.

As someone who regularly participates in a number of Christian Churches, I have observed that our church and church culture seems to be the most tolerant of members of the congregation reading silently in the pews.

I’m not sure what to think about that – but at least one take away is that being disengaged in SM is not especially frowned upon.

I use this to my advantage when I don’t feel like the particular topic is of benefit to me.

That’s a good point Curtis (it’s going to take me a bit to get used to calling you that). On the other hand, things similar to what he described happen in sacrament meetings all the time.

SilentDawning,

Thank you for sharing. Your comments help me remember on of the Thoughtful Faith podcasts with Adam Miller where he talks about his unpublished book “Letters to a Young Mormon”. In it, he uses a metaphor of a map to describe the gospel. You graduate from youth into adulthood and you are handed a map (the gospel) and as long as you follow all the instructions on the map, you will find yourself with a wonderful family, you will be called as a bishop, your kids will all serve missions, yadda yadda yadda (hint of sarcasm).

He then says something interesting, and that rings true. He says that you will be tempted to sit around and gossip about how wonderful and perfect the map is and then call this religious living. Although it may be religious, it is not really living for even the best maps are no substitute for real roads.

I think this is brilliant. We (the church as a whole) spend an awful lot of time talking about “Churchism” as you call it. A lot of time is spent discussing the nuances of the church and settling into its culture without critically thinking about what is really important as it relates to THE GOSPEL and God’s plan.

Sorry for the length of the post. It’s like I can’t write a short, succinct post.

The price of a lay clergy. People in callings may either not have any experience or the wrong kinds of experience to draw upon. I confess that I’ve often spent time just filling the allotted time requirement when stuck in a calling that I did not enjoy. I bet there are a lot of people that fall into that category. It’s hard to do something that you’ve been told to magnify as opposed to having the opportunity to do something you actually enjoy.

People share the how I met your mother stories, give vacation synopses during testimony meeting, and talk about their kid that is on a mission… but I think they are probably getting something out of it. People want to feel important and church does provide a forum.

Timing… for the last several days I have been thinking thoughts that are very similar to what you posted. I tried to reflect on when was the last time I had heard a lesson about the atonement or other gospel principle? 😳

Before heading out to church today I turned on the TV and watched a televangelist for a few minutes. Usually I completely tune those guys out so it was an odd thing for me to do. I heard more about Jesus in those 5-10 minutes than I had heard in church over the last few months. Why?

More often than not assignments to speak and manual lessons will focus on a topic. E.g. give a talk on the WoW, tithing, hastening the work, etc. Sometimes it can be hard to relate these sorts of topics back to core gospel principles. It’s super-easy to go a whole lesson on food storage for example and not once talk about a single gospel principle.

Also, the tendency is to define a topic, talk about bad things that will happen if we don’t obey, and spend a bit of time talking about the good things that will happen if we obey. More often than not that’s all that is covered. Nothing has changed since the last time the topic was covered so there’s only so many times I can hear a certain topic without it getting stale. I enjoy the meetings where the focus shifts from definition, punishments, blessings and enters the realm of drawing upon the group’s life experiences in attempting to live true gospel principles.

Rambling. Focus. Focus.

I read the priesthood lesson ahead of time and knew the subject would be Jesus today. This was going to be different from more recent Sundays, I was looking forward to it. It really was different. A missionary offered up some very good questions in the gospel principles class and the questions really re-centered the lesson (chastity) on the atonement. We can’t control what material a teacher presents or the direction a class will take but I was really impressed at how a strategically offered question can reintroduce the gospel into a lesson.

Sacrament meetings are harder. You can’t offer up questions that are aimed at re-centering the discussion on the gospel. Testimony meetings are the worst offenders, human nature is such that a testimony meeting can subconsciously become a competition to see who has the most profound story to share. I wonder what testimonies people are being deprived of because people don’t feel comfortable sharing unless they have an elaborate story to go along with their “testimony.”

Of course the priesthood lesson focused on the savior, he was the assigned topic. What was interesting was that we started the lesson by talking about the picture of Jesus with the black sheep that appeared in the lesson manual. The group spent 7-8 minutes talking about just that one picture, it was wonderful.

A pretty good Sunday by comparison. Wish more were like it.

That “Why?” was more of a rhetorical question…. but I agree about the televangelists. That’s why I started up with the lay clergy comment when I first stepped up on the soap box. It’s just one dynamic of our church – you aren’t going to get someone trained to spiritually nourish people, more often than not you’ll get someone like me that’s just up there winging it / doing the best they can.

My way of describing this is to say “the church often gets in the way of the gospel.” I said this in a RS pres. meeting once and no one knew what I meant. We were discussing why all the sisters were so depressed and discouraged. When I explained what I meant they all agreed we needed to focus more on the uplifting teachings of Christ. Things were way better for awhile, then a new presidency and back to the status quo. Sometimes I go through an entire day of Sunday meetings and never hear Jesus Christ mentioned other than at the end of prayers or talks. It makes it very hard for me to get through those days at church.