Chapel Mormonism

I have written fairly extensively on my own personal efforts to be a chapel Mormon. Alas, I only have my own experience to draw from.

Quoting myself from another thread:

I would not be able to do all or nothing church. If this was the choice then I would choose the nothing. I have remained connected to the LDS church in my own way. My own way does not include attending church regularly or paying tithing (and therefore holding a TR). It does include holding a calling that I can do during the mid-week, attending church at least partially when I am able, attending and supporting ward activities, supporting my children in attending church programs that interest them, performing annual father’s blessings, blessings of comfort and healing, and other ordinances (baptism, confirmation, & ordination) that I may be asked to perform for my family from time to time. I also consider my participation here at StayLDS as part of how I choose to participate and remain connected to the church.

I have recently begun taking my son to the Wednesday night youth group activities of a local Methodist church. My son had been complaining about the ward YM activities and not wanting to attend. In a nutshell the YM leaders alternated between having very poor and unengaging activities and then blaming the boys for not taking a more active role in planning the activities. This is a very specific example where we recognized a need that was not being met within the church program and we gave ourselves permission to go outside of the church program to meet that need.

My family are still Mormons but part of how we do Mormonism includes looking outside of Mormonism for supplemental resources/experiences. I do have sufficient motivating reasons for me to continue to do Mormonism in this way. I would probably not have sufficient motivating reasons to compel me to do Mormonism in a more traditional way and to attempt to force a more traditional model/participation expectation would probably not prove to be sustainable for me.

How will the Church respond? Relaxing temple standards or doubling down and trying to make it harder to be a chapel Mormon?

I have not seen a relaxing of temple standards. I feel like the church had a not dissimilar issue around the 1990’s with young men going on missions that were less enthusiastic about missionary service and less prepared to be missionaries. I feel that the “Lengthen your stride” campaign was the result. I feel that part of this program was to be more selective about who was permitted to go on a mission.

I remember the “raise the bar” initiative. I checked, I believe that was in 2002. Who knows what the true impetus was, maybe a mixture of:

The classic mindset that says there are people out there deliberately sinning because they’re banking on repenting later… but they won’t do that if we punish them now!

Chicken and egg? They read the writing on the walls and anticipated a dip in the number of people serving missions/number of convert baptisms, so they got out ahead of the story with something that would allow them to point the finger at not enough kids measuring up. A cynical take. The number of missionaries serving did have a dramatic dip after the program was announced but the numbers recovered to where they would have been had they followed trend lines when they announced that kids could serve missions younger. Maybe one of the reasons for lowering the age was to give kids less of a chance to “sin” before learning better on their missions. I digress.

Under Nelson we’ve experienced a relaxing of expectations placed on members but I don’t think we’ve experienced a relaxing of standards… if you follow how I’m drawing the distinction. Three hour church to two hour church. Less expectation (time spent) but the standards of church attendance on Sunday is still there.

Relaxing the WoW to allow coffee and tea makes the most sense. Relaxing the ban on tea would open the church up to Asia and other regions where tea is more ingrained in the local culture. Though now that I say that, drawing a clearer line between us and them may be one of the points of the bans on such trivial things. Relaxing the ban on coffee would open the church up everywhere in the world. This is me whining to the wind again but no one sees drinking coffee or tea as a moral failing anymore. It’s 2021. Jeez.

We’ve had this discussion before too… that maybe the initial step would be to relax WoW requirements to be baptized, but the requirement would remain for the temple. Then later, if it’s seen as a good move, the relaxation could extend to the temple.

The center of my faith is not the church. It’s Jesus Christ. The church is a vehicle I use to hopefully draw closer to JC & to

establish human contacts. I use the scriptures, (some) of the General Conference talks & personal revelation or inspiration.

In terms of church, I take what I can use & leave the rest. Overtime, I hope, my faith & beliefs grow.

I refuse to measure my conversion or beliefs by my activity or standard of conduct within the organization (church).

Very well said.

I think there have always been chapel Mormons but I think most active members are like muggles in Harry Potter – they don’t notice much. Put another way, I think it’s generally assumed since someone is there most of the time they’re full-tithe-paying TR holding members. My experience in the bishopric and briefly as a clerk indicates that of the approximately 35%* of members who are actively attending church at least sometimes (and therefore considered “active”) about half of them are actually tithe payers. So there are many people there on any given Sunday who are actively participating and who hold callings and give their all, etc., but don’t have temple recommends – and tithing** is usually the reason. I think those people meet the definition of chapel Mormons. My own definition is more comprehensive than that and includes those that I think are only there for social reasons – and they might even have a TR. I think most chapel Mormons do just fly under the radar, some because they’re trying to and some is just the muggle effect.

*The 35% seems to hold pretty true in North America outside the Corridor. It is closer to 50-55% in the Corridor, but it is much lower in parts of South America (some parts of Chile are less than 10%), Asia and Europe where 20-25% seems to be about what it is.

**There are various reasons for not paying tithing, it’s not necessarily all about faith or obedience. My son doesn’t pay because he thinks the church is rich enough and squanders money. I have also wondered, and don’t have anything other than some anecdotal evidence, how many of the “full tithe payers” pay on gross. I know there are some, but I also know there is a range of what people consider to be a full tithing among people who don’t pay on gross (me included). I happened to stumble across this on Wikipedia recently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tithing_in_Mormonism” class=”bbcode_url”>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tithing_in_Mormonism

The Community of Christ (previously known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) is the second-largest branch of the Latter Day Saint movement….

New converts are expected to prepare an inventory to establish their net worth. Their initial tithing entails a tenth of this net worth, which can be paid at any time. Members then pay their tithing annually, calculated by taking their gross income, subtracting their “basic living needs” and turning over to the church ten percent of the remainder. The Community of Christ defines tithing as “offerings to support local, mission center, and worldwide church ministries.” Such offerings may include 10 percent or more of one’s income, though poorer members can give any desired amount.

I didn’t know that’s how the CoC did things. (Not crazy about the convert part, but if I had converted to them when I converted to the church my net worth would have been pretty low.)

Thank you for all of the replies and for sharing your experience. I have a relative who left the Church about three years ago and went to his bishop recently and said he would like to come back and participate as a non-believing member and purely on a social level. The bishop basically, said no. Was only interested in someone who wanted to get back on the covenant path. To me that is madness and tragic.

I feel like there has been a push in conference to try to discourage chapel Mormonism and shame those who are not all in. I think that is something we will live to regret as a Church. I think so much of one’s experience depends on the ward, which is too bad. It has worked well for me in my ward. I occasionally have coffee with another ward member and catch up and there are a group of people who my wife notices are not wearing garments at ward activities (takes one to know one!). I think a ward works so much better as a community when people are neighbors and live geographically close. If you are driving 45 minutes each way to Church and all the kids go to different schools, it seems a lot harder to participate on a more casual level. From other posts on here, it sounds like a lot of folks in that situation have decided not to go back after Covid.

There is a group of people who seem to want to push out chapel Mormons and would be just as happy if they stopped coming.

I know my experiences aren’t universal but I always found smaller branches/wards to feel more like a community than the larger wards.

It feels like there’s some variant of the bystander effect that goes on in larger wards. The more people there are the more likely we are to assume that everyone else has a friend, making us less likely to reach out. That and sometimes people just get lost in the crowd. It’s harder to get lost in a branch of 60 people than it is to get lost in a ward where close to 300 people are showing up on Sunday.

Different strokes though, maybe some people prefer to be lost.

While it certainly plays a part, I don’t know how much leadership roulette plays into setting the tone of an entire ward. Could be a cultural thing, and by cultural I’m not referring to church culture but to geographic, ethnic, socioeconomic, generational, etc. cultures. Cultures that exist independent of church.

I’ve had some bumpy experiences in my area. I like to think that it’s harder to remain active as a nuanced Mormon in my area than it would be in other areas, if for no other reason than to believe it gets better.

To balance the equation I’ll also often wonder whether it’s all just me. Put me in any ward out there, even one that others claim do a good job of catering to nuanced Mormons. Would I still have a problem?

There’s the question, how welcoming is my ward? But there’s also the question, how skewed is my vision? Sometimes others make me feel unwelcome me but sometimes the only people making me feel unwelcome are the versions of other people that I’ve constructed in my head. In other words, sometimes it’s less the EQP at church judging me and it’s more me judging myself through a projection that I’ve created of the EQP.

That sounds weird. Believe it or not, it makes sense in my brain.

I intentionally used the word sometimes above because: