When I was in the Relief Society presidency, I once attended a terrible meeting for which a stake high council member came to visit our ward. Ward and auxiliary leaders arrived at this meeting to find that the visiting councilor had set up chairs beforehand on the stage: sets of threes, arranged hierarchically in trios, with each organization and auxiliary presidency being told precisely where to sit.
Then the shaming began.
The councilor first berated the elders quorum president that one of his counselors had failed to show up for the meeting. “Where is he?” the stake visitor demanded. “Why isn’t he here?” When the EQ president explained that he didn’t know where the counselor was, the councilor admonished him that he should know. He should keep on top of such things and keep all his people in line.
The rest of the meeting did not improve, as the councilor laid out the expectations of a new stake program (blah, blah) and required each leader to publicly account for what he or she would be doing to help build the congregation.
It was a tense, useless exercise whose ostensible purpose—to reactivate church members who had drifted away, and attract new converts to the congregation—was anything but realized. In fact, I felt like running for cover myself. Who in their right mind would want to be part of such an obviously unhealthy organization?
What was especially striking to me is that later that same month I brought a non-Mormon friend to a stake fireside where we welcomed another visitor: LDS convert Gladys Knight.
That evening was as different from the stake leader’s visit as night is from day. Whereas the ward leaders’ meeting was propelled by fear and public shaming, the Saints Unified Voices choir filled every heart with joy. Knight shared her personal testimony, the choir sang Mormon and gospel standards with stirring gusto, and the Spirit surrounded us with love. We clapped along and shouted amen. It was a wonderful night.
And incidentally, that event brought in more missionary referrals and reactivations than a host of austere, anemic programs designed to achieve the same end. That’s because Knight’s goal wasn’t to make a quota or treat people like numbers. Her goal was to spread joy, plain and simple.
I want to live in this church, I thought. I want to be part of the religion that attracts people because of their contagious joy.
I’m not the only one who responds to joy, and I’ve blogged before about the many sad ways that joy has become the missing ingredient in Mormon meetings. That’s not to say that individual Mormons aren’t joyful people or don’t have the Spirit with them in their prayers or in their families. It’s that as a church, we’ve forgotten how to connect with deep wells of joy in our public meetings, and that absence of delight carries over into our programs.
To paraphrase a famous Mormon scripture, human beings exist that we might have joy. Doesn’t the LDS Church exist for the same purpose?
The image of joyful leaping is used by courtesy of Shutterstock.com.
P.S. My apologies to non-Mormon readers for the odd terminology above. A member of the stake high council is called a councilor. An assistant to a bishop, stake president, or auxiliary president is called a counselor. And yes, Mormons get confused about this too.
Poqui | Jun 1, 2012 | 2:03am
I can tell you of countless times when I have experienced true joy in my Mormon worship. it’s too bad you chose to focus on one event that was negative.
Could your lack of joy stem from focusing and dwelling on the negative experiences that happen every now and then?
Maybe the problem is with you and not the LDS Church.
CortM | Jun 1, 2012 | 6:27am
We have more than our share of Mormon Taliban, bullying martinets who believe all of the Scriptures except for Section 121. It’s a shame that you, like so many of us, had to encounter one of them.
But the SUV choir ain’t Mormonism, any more than attending the Hill Cumorah Pageant is studying the Book of Mormon. And it isn’t joy, either: it’s entertaining, I guess. And it’s ecstatic. So is a World Cup match.
Joy is like the whisper after the whirlwind: it’s quiet, contemplative, subtle. It doesn’t not come with drum machines and a light show.
EW88 | Jun 1, 2012 | 9:50am
I’m sorry for the above closed-minded, judgemental comments. I am a Mormon too, but I’ve experienced the joy and Spirit and testimony of the SUV choir. I lived in wards that were less than joyful and inviting, but I’ve also lived in wards who were happy and inclusive and loving. The change starts with us. The members. Leaders do set the tone though, to be sure.
EW88 | Jun 1, 2012 | 9:54am
One more thing: The Church, the gospel or doctrine, and the Mormon culture are three separate things. The gospel of Jesus Christ is one of joy, it includes all truth, teaches love, etc. The Church is put in place to teach the gospel. The Church is not perfect, its policies sometimes change and it leaders change. Mormon culture doesn’t always have much to do with either the gospel or the Church and it is where the prejudices Mormons are accused of come in.
http://www.conservativemormonmom.blogspot.com
dAalborg | Jun 1, 2012 | 12:27pm
I left the Mormon church years ago for various reasons, but one main reason was the lack of joy and a sense of worship in the weekly Sacrament Meetings. I found that Mormons generally worship the Law not the Giver of the Law and truly do not recognize this or understand the difference. After investigating other denominations, I gave up on organized religion altogether.
The Mormons talk a good game, but their house is as a whited sepulcher.
Edgy Mormon | Jun 1, 2012 | 2:33pm
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day-Saints is a lay ministry. For the education of all the smart fannies out there with diverted thoughts, this has nothing to do with polygamy or any other immoral actions.
Let me emphatically state, members of the LDS Church (Mormons) are not indentured servants. As I have said, there is no paid ministry. It is all voluntary.
Do we have some leaders who attempt to lead when they don’t have leadership skills? It happens. The imperfection of people doesn’t nullify a religion or its beliefs.
Have I ever sat in a sacrament meeting and listened to someone speak that could absolutely bore the paint off the wall? Only about every other Sunday.
The joy, at least for me, comes when of my own volition, take it upon myself to help the widow, the down trodden, the less fortunate the fatherless the stranger whose arms hang down.
It also comes from knowing my family is an eternal unit. My wonderful wife who has raised our four beautiful children. Together we have tried to acquaint them with the teachings of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Regardless if those teachings are referenced from the New Testament, the Book of Mormon, or the Doctrine and Covenants.
Most of all, to know that the eight sweet little spirits (grand children) that make such happy sounds around our home are loved, protected, and taught principles that will be sound throughout the eternities is truly a joy.
There have been times when members of our ward (parish) have said things that were quite offensive. Nothing says I have to take it. At least not more than once. Having said this, I am certainly not going to let it drive me from the faith I cherish. We all suffer substantial imperfections. No question I carry a substantial inventory of short comings.
Some 40+ years ago I cam out of the jungles of Southeast Asia, hating all mankind. I still don’t think a great deal of them to be totally honest. However Elohim cares enough about them to send his only begotten son to atone for the mistakes of all. That is also joy.
The person who said they left The Church (Mormon) because of the actions of others is giving up too easily. No one gets out of this life alive and without trials. However, through the redemption and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we can all be an eternal family in the eons to come. If in your heart you can feel this regardless of what faith you belong to, it is the greatest joy of all.
coltakashi | Jun 1, 2012 | 5:28pm
If you want to attend FUN Mormon meetings, you should go to Primary with the kids age 3 to 11. They get to stand up, sing and do hand motions, watch and do skits illustrating scripture stories, etc. A couple of years ago, one of my granddaughters (she goes by Buffy; her parents are devotees of a certain TV series) was assigned to give a talk about her favorite story from the Book of Mormon. She chose ot speak about how the missionary Ammon impressed the king (and eventually converted him) by going out to guard the king’s sheep and cutting off the arms of bandits who were trying to steal the sheep. Buffy and her brother and sisters drew a bunch of bloody, severed arms on butcher paper, cut them out, and during her talk, her next younger sister went around shaking out the contents of a sack containing the “arms” to the delight of all the littlest kids on the front row.
On another occasion when I was visiting, it was Father’s Day and the Primary had several fathers of the kids stand at the front of the class wearing paper sacks over their heads. Each Dad was described, and the kids were asked to guess who it was. Their own kids were not allowed to guess. It was amazing to me that these kids spent enough time in each other’s homes that they had no trouble at all identifying the other kids’ dads just from the descriptions.
Sometimes the fun is not intentional. On one Sunday our daughter and her husband were in a classroom next to the room where their oldest son had his Sunday School class, taught by the wife of their family doctor. In the middle of class there was a loud sound outside like a car backfire. The next thing my daughter heard was her son’s voice from next room, exclaiming “What the hell was that?”
One thing I enjoy in church is singing. My current ward’s choir director is a professional musician who has written and published many of the arrangements we perform. One of her arrangements is so touching that I have a hard time singing through it without choking up. Of the three times I performed Handel’s Messiah with LDS choirs in Nebraska, California and Washington, the most enjoyable was when our conductor was a professor of music at the local college and really taught us a lot about making a better sound. It was also special because our daughter was also a participant. When we went on long car trips, we were singing along to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir recording on our car stereo, to the annoyance of everyone else in the car.
I also enjoy teaching. I have generally managed to volunteer my way into teaching the adult Sunday School class in the six wards we have lived in over the past 15 years, at least once or twice a month. Sharing insights I have found in the scriptures and the understanding I gained by reading the commentaries and analysis of learned men and women is the most rewarding thing I have done in my church service, a lot more fun than being on the High Council and assigned to teach a ward’s leadership how to implement a program (I suspect that councilor was not having much fun himself), and certainly more fun than those occasions when I participated in the excommunication of someone who had betrayed his wife and family.
And of course there are meetings that can be a real downer, like the friend of ours who spoke in Sacrament Meeting (the main worship service) about her struggle with cancer, or the returned missionary who speaks about how difficult it was to find people willing to listen to his message, or when a beloved leader is being released from his position because he is moving away. On the other hand, even when the topic is sad, if I feel close to the Spirit of God I am paradoxically filled with joy by the assurance of ultimate victories and reunions. I have attended funerals in a number of other churches, for friends and co-workers, but I don’t think any of them were as joyful as a Mormon funeral can be in its optimism about the reunion of all concerned with the one who has gone ahead.
Poqui | Jun 1, 2012 | 6:15pm
@EW88 - There is no need for you to apologize for my comments. I simply offered a plausible alternative for why the author didn’t experience joy in the Mormon worship. There was no more judgment in my statement than there was in the author’s reasoning for her lack of joy.
Worship is highly personal and one can find joy in worship wherever they look for it. I have had very meaningful, personal worship services in the military while the enemy made enough noise to drive anyone nuts. It’s an attitude of worship that brings one closer to God.
Jana Riess | Jun 2, 2012 | 6:45am
I love serving in the Primary! For precisely the reasons you mention. It is joyful and unscripted.
As for the Saints Unified Voices choir: It is absolutely fine for any Latter-day Saint to pass over that more enthusiastic style of worship as a matter of personal taste. My own personal taste (and, judging from the response, the preferences of hundreds of others in the room) is that it is a breath of fresh air. But to claim that a Mormon fireside in which an all-Mormon choir sang mostly Mormon songs “ain’t Mormonism” is patently unfair, not to mention historically inaccurate. That style of worship may not be what we are used to today, when reverence is equated with silence, but it has far more in common with the church of Joseph Smith and Eliza R. Snow than the worship forms we see in sacrament today. It most certainly is Mormonism.
CortM | Jun 2, 2012 | 12:22pm
When a white guy dressed in a red satin choir robe implores me to “raise your hands up high, ‘cause God is GOOD in Houston!” I am not thinking “Mormon Fireside.” I am thinking “Pastor Joel Osteen down at Lakewood Church.”
Nantucket whaling vessels used to employ Black men as deckhands. These men were believed to be especially spiritual; often they served as de facto chaplains, leading the crews in prayers and hymn singing. They also were not allowed to sleep in the same quarters as the white crew men (they were placed in the fire hold, the dankest and most cramped part of the ship), they were given fewer and poorer quality rations, and in the unfortunate event of a shipwreck, it was considered socially acceptable to cannibalize their bodies. There is a little of all of this in the SUV story. We love the sweet and pure faith of our African American brothers and sisters, just so long as they stay out of our wards.
Try this experiment: go to ward council, and announce that a new sister has moved into the ward. She’s a convert. She’s Black. She’s been to the Temple, but she has a job in a nightclub/casino, and the uniform she wears makes it impossible to wear temple garments on the job. She’s been married four or five times; several of the marriages broke up over her serious personal struggles. Watch for the head shakes, the sagging shoulders, the fixed stares. Then say, “And her name is Gladys Knight,” and wait for the mood to take a dramatic turn.
I have nothing against Gladys Knight. I don’t like her music - turning I Am A Child of God into a smoky torch song is particularly egregious - but I don’t like the Mormon Tab, either. What concerns me is that the popularity of her choir is masking very real, very dangerous social, ethnic, racial and economic divisions within the Church, divisions that should not exist, by convincing us that clapping our hand and adding a couple of B-3 organ flourishes to our music means we’ve achieved tolerance, diversity, and joy.
And the varieties of religious expression Ms. Reiss mentions have never been all that varietal, and mostly amount to a Kiplingesque paternalism: “Oh! They say ‘Aloha!’ before they speak! How choice and precious!”
Gee, if you thought I was close-minded before, you must think I’m Ghengis Khan now…
coltakashi | Jun 3, 2012 | 10:22am
Dear Ghengis Kahn: A lot of Mongolians have joined the Mormons over the last 20 years, since the fall of the Soviet Union. Nearly 10% of the population of Ulan Batar is Mormon now. Some of that is attributable to the pioneering work of John Groberg, whose experiences as a young missionary in Tonga were dramatized in the movie The Other Side of Heaven. He is just one of thousands upon thousands of “white” Mormons who have given large parts of their lives to bringing into the Church the people of 150 nations. In my current ward, three of the high priests (including me) served missions in Japan. One senior couple in my neighborhood spent a year in Nigeria, and a doctor participated in the medical clinic run by the Church in Haiti after the earthquake. One bkack family has been members about ten years, another was baptized last month. Our ward contributed most of the labor so a Hispanic sister could get a new home in a Habitat for Humanity project. I think we did a lot more than 10% of the work on the ten houses that we helped build. One older sister from our ward took the midnight plane to Georgia to serve a mission in Atlanta where a lot of the members and investigators are black. A coworker of mine in San Francisco and his wife served a two year misdion in a very mixed race area of southern New Jersey, and have just finished 18 months in Hong Kong, whete one of their assignments was.ministering to LDS Filipinos who work as maids and nannies and don’t get Sundays off, so they hold church meetings for them on Thursdays.
Because of my own Japanese mother, I grew up very aware of a network of Japanese and Japanese American Mormons in Utah with ties and shared experiences across the Pacific. One of my Japanese missionary companions has several kids who have served missions, one in Florida. One graduated from BYU Hawaii and she and her Japanese husband work in Chicago. Another attended BYU Idaho and married a local guy.
I just don’t see the racial divisions the Ghengis talks about.
Tim | Jun 23, 2012 | 9:36pm
I was an Elder’s Quorum President in the same stake at the time of the Gladys Knight concert. Somehow that High Councilor skipped our ward. Guess I dodged a bullet there.
Those who are disparaging the Saints Unified Voices need to be aware that the church sponsors this group. It’s quite literally a church group. They sing in stake conference buildings. I know we discussed how to prepare for this missionary opportunity for several months in ward council. They’re a great tool for missionary work and a great way to make black members feel like they belong in the church.