Why Lack of Discussion Leads to Disaffection

I googled LDS manuals. A link to Melchizedek Priesthood jumped out at me. Here’s a few quotes from that page:

1st Sundays

Approved resources for first-Sunday lessons include the scriptures, Church magazines, and the resources listed to the side. A member of the elders quorum presidency or high priests group leadership teaches this lesson.

4th Sundays

Fourth-Sunday lessons are to be taught from selected addresses in the latest conference issue of the Ensign or Liahona. Stake presidents may choose which conference addresses should be used, or they may assign bishops to select the addresses.

5th Sundays

To meet local needs, the bishopric selects the subject and Church-approved resources for fifth-Sunday lessons. On this Sunday the elders quorum and high priests group may meet separately or together, or they may be combined with the Relief Society.

Lots of references to “approved resources” and it sounds like if you ain’t in the elders quorum presidency, high priest group leadership, stake presidency, or bishopric you won’t have any say whatsoever in what the topics will be. Even then it’s a walled garden of approved resources, there’s not much choice for the folk in leadership either. It’s not the community’s church, it’s the correlation department’s church.

At church we’re only having discussions that other people want me to have, not discussions that I’d like to have. I might be more engaged if I felt any sense of autonomy at all at church. The discussions are safe places (which I hear fellow members complain about having to create for other people) so they become stale.

We’re also regularly read the riot act about going off script (outside the manuals) for church lessons.

I don’t know that I’d go as far as to say that a lack of discussion leads to disaffection but I’d definitely say that a lack of discussion leads to disinterest. For me the article could have equally been called “Why is church so boring?” I became disinterested in the lessons long before my journey away from orthodoxy.

At church we’re only having discussions that other people want me to have, not discussions that I’d like to have. I might be more engaged if I felt any sense of autonomy at all at church. The discussions are safe places (which I hear fellow members complain about having to create for other people) so they become stale.

Last month’s combined HP/EQ lesson was on the October 2016 conference talk about being “ambitious for Christ,” which illustrates its point using a story about a missionary with an artificial leg who was sent to a biking mission by mistake. Pre-FC Reuben hated this story, and thought the missionary should have learned a valuable lesson about giving feedback to priesthood leaders, instead of learning how to justify their mistakes. When we talked in class about how “enduring to the end” could mean “get on with things without complaining,” post-FC Reuben said, “Does anyone else think the missionary should have complained?”

Silence. Some students might have considered this but wouldn’t dare say anything. Our teacher obviously hadn’t considered it. He faffed about, I drew a distinction between pain that helps you grow and pain that doesn’t, he faffed again, and we went on as normal. This was obviously a discussion he didn’t want to have, or felt unsafe having.

Discussions are meant to be safe, yes – but safe for whom, or for what? The authority structure of the Church, its truth claims, its leaders, etc. When members align with the Church, keeping those safe makes members feel safe. They feel safe in the pleasant fiction that Church leaders always have their best interests in mind, or that what their leaders tell them to do is what God wants them to do.

To get to a place where they can imagine advocating for themselves, they have to first recognize that they’re not as safe as they feel.

I wonder if resistance to losing the feeling of safety is why we have such a hard time talking about certain subjects at Church. I can’t remember the last time someone talked about how a prayer wasn’t answered (without twisting it into something to feel good about) or how one of Joseph Smith’s prophecies didn’t pan out. I have absolutely never heard anyone explain, in a Church setting, how the priesthood and temple ban came about. “I belong to a perfect organization that always gets things right” is just too flippin’ cosy to give up.

Edit: Huh. I guess I had things to add after all.

I was drawn to this because of the word “discussion” – human voices. I just read “The Promise,” by C. Potok. One of the most memorable scenes is of a diametrically opposed Jewish teacher demanding that he and the protagonist speak to each other. Because that’s when their mutual love of Torah is evident. That’s when they’ll put down their weapons and listen. The ideas that were so threatening in a book were less so coming right out of his student’s mouth.

We need to discuss for real in GD.

At least the essays now add an interesting pool of “approved” topics. I just wish we could have a series of GD lessons just on the essays. That would certainly stimulate a lot more interesting discussion. They’ve been out since 2014 (right?) and still that hasn’t happened yet. Disappointing.

https://www.sunstonemagazine.com/pdf/136-47-51.pdf

A recent Mormon Matters podcast links to this Sunstone article about teaching.

https://www.sunstonemagazine.com/pdf/136-47-51.pdf

A recent Mormon Matters podcast links to this Sunstone article about teaching.

This was good. I was actually about to not listen to it as I just wasn’t in the mood. I listened to it and found there were a few good pointers on how to pay homage to the lesson manual, but at the same time, ask better questions that really encourage discussion.

When leaders and correlation committees come up with guidelines for lessons and warn not to veer from the material…that comes from somewhere, doesn’t it?

It comes from Sunday School lessons about Jesus being a polygamist; being married to Mary Magdalene, Mary (sister of Lazarus), and Martha.

In 2017 what Mormon folkdoctrine will sustain me through 3 hours of church?

I think it comes back to having a balance. Too much correlation, bad. Too little correlation, bad.

There’s the read directly from the manual levels of correlation, including reading the manual questions. I think this phenomenon is more related to not having a lesson plan than it is due to correlation.

There’s the method I try to use when teaching. Go outside the confines of all things Mormons to share stories that are related to the topic of the lesson. Lessons don’t always have to be what GBH did, what the pioneers did, or what some historic church leader said. They can be stories that teach the same principles. There’s a subtle difference between correlated doctrines and using the same correlated stories to teach the doctrines and that’s what I’m seeing during church lessons. Correlated dialog and correlated thought. Surely there are other stories out there to teach charity and Christlike principles.