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Of course, the three-hour block is great in comparison to how it used to be. There’s no question it’s better overall. However, I’ve been thinking about some things that were different in a positive way, back before the block: – We sang a lot more. A lot more. On any regular Sunday, we sang full hymns to open Priesthood Meeting as well as SS. We had a sacrament hymn in SS and with the longer SM, we always had rest hymn, which isn’t always the case now. Today, while we do have a hymn to start Opening Exercises of PM, it’s almost always first-verse only.
– Having PM first made a lot of sense. In AP, we always made assignments for preparing/blessing/passing the sacrament in the three meetings where that would take place later in the day. If there was any confusion by the younger deacons about what to do, we’d go over that on the chalkboard. In other words, a significant part of PM in the morning was planning for the sacrament throughout the day.
– There were far more opportunities for young people to speak in Church. With SM being 20 minutes longer, we always had two youth speakers every SM. In addition, we had two-and-a-half minute talks in SS Opening Exercises. In combination, people were just way more comfortable growing up speaking in front of of a large group. Today, in my ward, we have a youth speaker probably once a month on average. I attended a missionary farewell recently where the missionary-to-be was such poor speaker, I had to wonder if she had EVER spoken in Church. She seemed scared to death as she read her talk and never looked up from the paper.
– Primary during the week was great as a child.
– I wasn’t in RS, but I imagine that weekly during-the-week RS meetings were kind of a nice social event. Did it take way more time than we have now? Of course. But RS now is just another meeting with a nice centerpiece and lesson during a block of meetings, where before, it was something much different.
– There was more time to mingle.
– In a certain way, Sundays were more of an event than now. Again, I don’t want to go back to 4.5 hours of meetings, but Church on Sundays was an all-day affair, which sometimes worked beautifully. As an example, as a YM, I’d often just stay at the Church building and read scriptures between PM and SS. Also, we’d put on our Sunday clothes early, and they’d stay on all day. Other than removing my tie, I probably stayed well dressed all day long, where today, I usually go from jeans to Sunday best right before going to Church and switch back as soon as I get home. There’s nothing wrong with it either way, but it produced a slightly different mindset before.
– Preparing/blessing/passing the sacrament in Junior Sunday School was a pleasure. It was typical to perform the ordinance there for the first time in order to get it figured out. The first time I blessed the sacrament was in Junior Sunday School.
Interesting reminder. I do remember the old schedule, but before I turned 12 they moved to the 3 hour block. It seemed life was a little slower back then and most people didn’t cram quite so much into a day. There are good and bad things between then and now.
I was baptized just after the start of the three hour block, so it was still fresh in everybody’s minds. As I recall, most people in my outside-the-Corridor ward really loved the block. I’m sure it was different where people walked to church, but where church was a 30-45 minute drive for some it made for long, undelightful days especially with small children. I don’t disagree it had its advantages, more singing being one of them. FWIW, the opening hymn in PM seems to vary locally. In most units in our stake we always sing all the verses in priesthood opening and I have heard the SP counsel bishops that they should (he uses a reference but I can’t recall what it is – it does say that all verses should normally be sung).
In our ward we don’t have enough active youth to speak every Sunday, let alone two. Our youth do get plenty of opportunities to speak (just like everybody else), but we don’t have a youth speaker every week because our active kids would end up speaking 10 times a year or more (and they’d eventually rebel against that).
I’d be all for moving Primary to mid-week, along with PM/RS. But that’s not because I’d go (I probably wouldn’t most of the time), it’s because I’d love to see a two hour block. Or maybe we could alternate SS and PM/RS, or make SM talks more like Pres. Monson’s last GC addresses and have way shorter meetings (I like the Music and the Spoken Word format). I personally don’t want church to be an all day affair and I don’t think most people would like that, frankly.
My experiences are very similar to DJ’s. I came after the 3 hour block was introduced but I still hear people talk about the old format. At the time our area was one of those where you drove a long way to get to church so many people opted to stay and picnic between the meetings.
A SM that is 20 minutes longer just isn’t something that would appeal to me. If anything I’d like SM to be 20 minutes shorter with a tighter focus on Christ and the sacrament. Let the ancillary meetings focus on the themes most of our SMs end up being about.
We have enough youth in our ward to have a youth speaker for the two or three Sundays per month when they get the opportunity (there’s no youth speaker for F&T or HC Sundays) but we certainly don’t have enough to have two youth speakers for each SM. Other wards in my stake have enough youth to do every talk every Sunday.
😮 We’re a ward that does all verses to the hymn to open PM/RS. Between the hymn and the announcements I think the PH instructors secretly appreciate only having 15-20 minutes to fill on most Sundays.
We always have an intermediary hymn on non F&T Sundays. Sounds like I should count my blessings.
It’s hard to separate the fact that I was young from my good opinion of pre-block Sundays. Everything was beautiful for a kid without major responsibilities. But I treasure my memories of it. It was a complete Sabbath day with lots of music, speaking, socializing (on and off-campus), resting, and eating. And even though I was young I remember feeling an integral part of it – needed.
The sooner we reduce the 3 hour block to 2 hours or less the happier I will be. Or have one of the hours be a a time when presidencies can meet and work can be done. So often people would say you can’t use the 3 hour block for presidency meetings etcetera has been frustrating to me. It means everyone has to travel during the week or book of time then, when they are all together on Sunday as it is. And the gospel is as much about DOING as it is about sitting back and passively receiving information — the primary transmission model in the wards I have attended. SilentDawning wrote:The sooner we reduce the 3 hour block to 2 hours or less the happier I will be.
I agree with you. OTOH it must be frustrating for church leaders to see the footprint of the church in the lives if its membership to shrink more and more. There is a sense of assimilation with the wider non-LDS society. Some secularization of society overall. Everyone has such busy lives and from the perspective the one thing that should be the ultimate priority is the gospel (and family – which you only get to keep in the afterlife if you follow the gospel plan).
I was a kid in Brazil when the church moved to the block schedule. It was seen as a huge blessing. The bus cost 11 cents to ride. Many families could not afford to ride to and from church twice on Sunday. They would go in the morning and just hang out all day, waiting for the evening sacrament meeting. They wanted to show their devotion. To take the bus to primary AND RS durI got the week was an added financial burden.
During that time, inflation was well over 100% a year. If you were paid $200 a week at the beginning of the year, by June, prices had gone up so much, and your salary had not, that you barely got by. By the end of the year, couldn’t afford to live. It was impossible to save money. Banks didn’t pay enough interest on savings to make up for the loss due to inflation. As soon as a person was paid, they had to buy a tradable good immediately. Big groups of people would get together to buy cars. Let’s say 100 people decide that they all want the same car. Every month, they would each pay 1% of the total cost of a car. A name would be drawn, and the group would buy a car for that person that month. They repeated that for 100 months until everyone got a car. It was the only way to work around the crazy inflation.
The church was very aware of the serious financial issues of the members living in such economies. All the basic lessons about saving money didn’t work under the circumstances. Budgeting was a crazy event. Consolidation of meetings was something that could be done to decrease the burden on members.
I always saw the consolidation as something that was done for third world countries .. But the developed countries were put on the same schedule for consistency.
Let me take this opportunity to reiterate that I’m not saying I liked the pre-block time better or that we should move back to it. It’s obviously better now than it was before. I think if you polled 100 active members of the Church who experienced both, 100 would say they like the block better. The reasons for going to the three-hour block back in 1980 were many and varied. I would be in favor, as I think most would, of a two-hour block. Post Faith Crisis, I’ve often attended a self-imposed 70-minute block. But as in all major change, there are trade-offs. I’m merely reflecting on some things that, in retrospect, we kind of lost by going to the block. There is no way to recover them. It’s just interesting to note.
I think from a larger, spiritual perspective, there’s some corollary with our own lives. When our faith transitioned, there were some things we left behind that we are glad about, and some other things that maybe we miss, even though we might not want to “go back”.
Now I find myself wondering, if everyone got their wish, the church moved to a 2 hour block starting in May, what would be the intangibles that people would miss out on (but not so much that they would want to go back to a 3 hour block)? It is easy for people who have a solid foundation and family in the Church and/or who don’t love time at church to want a reduction in time. The current structure is good for those whose only interaction with other members and Gospel instruction (and who want and need that) happens on Sunday. Sometimes, it is beyond good and solidly critical.
I have no problem sacrificing three hours a week to help lift those people.
As to the original topic, more than anything else, I think, we lost an almost daily sense of religious community.
Old-Timer wrote:As to the original topic, more than anything else, I think, we lost an almost daily sense of religious community.
That’s an interesting thought. I think back to some of my happiest times as a member and it was when I was doing things with church friends almost daily. That ship has sailed,
lifehappened. I now no longer have the time nor the energy to pull that off. Apparently other people don’t either because at my age there doesn’t even appear to be an outlet for that level of interaction. Life happened to everyone. Right now I chalk that up to growing up, being in a position to have to help other people instead of living that carefree life where there’s someone else taking care of things for you. Was that the church or was that a group of people being friends? Those two aren’t mutually exclusive or anything, but sometimes you connect with a ward, sometimes you don’t. How do you survive when you don’t? Move?
I don’t feel a sense of community resulting from the 3 hour block. I don’t know that I would feel any more like a part of a community if we had meetings every day. Those daily activities with people at church in days past weren’t church meetings, they didn’t even have a churchy objective (which IMO we get too hung up on). I don’t want to derail the thread but I don’t feel like church meetings achieve the goal of connecting people. Daily 2 hour blocks or a once a week 2 hour block, it’s often the format of our interactions that aren’t doing it for me.
For those pre-3 hour blockers, did that sense of belonging come from the meetings themselves or those moments between meetings where everyone was sort of “stuck” together twiddling their thumbs because they didn’t want to drive home just to have to turn around and drive back?
DarkJedi wrote:I’m sure it was different where people walked to church, but where church was a 30-45 minute drive for some it made for long, undelightful days especially with small children.
This. Heck, I wish they’d cut the breaks between Conference sessions down to 30 minutes with an hour for lunch, move Priesthood session to the weekend before with Women’s (leave an hour between so everybody can get together for a meal then) and get the regular Conference sessions done in one day. Maybe do it all Saturday and still have just Sacrament meeting the next Sunday, leaving the chapel open for anyone who wants to have an open discussion of the Conference talks.
Yeah, I’m one of those people who will watch one episode of a series to make sure I like it, then force myself to stay away from it until I can marathon the entire season on Netflix. I don’t like cliffhangers.
As for public speaking, I think that’s just societal. Before I joined the Church, I was in a college public speaking class with a LDS student who was also doing ROTC and a freshly retired Army SSgt. The three of us were the only ones who aced the class, all getting comments on our speeches like “good control of audience” and “excellent eye contact.” I know with all the dates and figures in my speeches, (mostly about my prior city council campaign and the value of public participation in politics, so lots of raw data on turnout and registration levels) I was only making around 30% eye contact with the audience, but that was still well beyond most of the students in there.
(I think we also got some bonus points because we’d play devil’s advocate to each other during the Q&A at the end of some of the speeches; the prof really seemed to value both the ability to think on your feet about the subject and the willingness to say “I don’t know” when appropriate. Pretty sure if we’d hardballed any of the others the way we did each other, they’d have locked up. I was sort of disappointed that the school apparently discouraged the prof’s idea to have one of our prepared speeches be essentially a sermon, as I was really looking forward to hearing what those two would say, and one of my favorite “sort-of-campaign” speeches that I’d prepped for certain audiences was pretty much a sermon.)
Old-Timer wrote:It is easy for people who have a solid foundation and family in the Church and/or who don’t love time at church to want a reduction in time.
The current structure is good for those whose only interaction with other members and Gospel instruction (and who want and need that) happens on Sunday. Sometimes, it is beyond good and solidly critical.
I have no problem sacrificing three hours a week to help lift those people.
I feel the same way about the actual time spent. Others’ faith crises have meant not attending or reduced attendance, but I’m pretty sure that if I took the step to join a different faith/congregation, I would still be okay with “tithing” a certain chunk of time to just be with my new people.
If I could identify the biggest loss post-block, it would be sacrament meeting as a stand-alone worshipful experience. Now it’s crowded with ward business, reminders, thank you’s, instructions, and so on. It’s scheduled for “before or after” slot the building schedule allows. As a child I could almost feel that sacrament meeting bloomed every Sunday night and I wanted to be there when it happened. Everything else – all the other chores and activities – had been cleared away by that point in the day/week, and we were left with the essential.
But we lived on the far end of a 2 hour-drive stake and the adults spent nearly every spare minute traveling and meeting. It was all-consuming for my parents. I just wish we could have found a way to preserve more of the good.
Quote:If I could identify the biggest loss post-block, it would be sacrament meeting as a stand-alone worshipful experience.
This.
:thumbup:
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