Rumor was that a stake in Boston announced they would begin piloting a new two-hour block schedule in the coming year. Throw in coffee & donuts, and allow for shorts, and we might be able to compete with all the surrounding megachurches in my community!
There will be an “elimination of all but essential Sunday meetings, i.e. fewer firesides, choir rehearsals, etc,” according to the original post. “Emphasis of the day is the taking of the sacrament, and having time for families.”
I’m old enough to remember church before the 1980 change to the 3 hour meeting block. When we had the split meeting schedule, we were living 26 miles from the church. In winter months especially, it could take us 45 minutes to travel each way. Families in our ward who lived near the church were asked to invite those of us who lived farther away to come over between meetings for a meal. One of these meals was the first time I ever saw someone put an ice cube in soup to cool it, and it was a Pennsylvania staple: chicken corn soup. Good stuff. Those ward family dinners fostered bonds of friendship that are so typical for Mormonism, and I still think of those families we spent our Sundays with as a great part of my extended Mormon family.
When my ward switched to the 3 hour block, we had two wards meeting in the same building (not the standard three so common nowadays), so our meetings didn’t overlap. If my dad had ward meetings after our block ended, I would sometimes stick around to go to sacrament meeting with my friends in the other ward. Three hours of church wasn’t enough for teenage me apparently.
Cue 35 years later. The 3 hour block rotates. Wards usually start at either 9am, 11am or 1pm. Everyone has a preference for their start time. What’s yours?
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In our house, Sunday meetings are followed by a family meal. The meal is followed by what we call a homework hostage crisis: the deathbed repentance our kids do to catch up on their weekend homework before bedtime. This is coupled with two other frantic tasks: cleaning up before the maid comes (we have Monday cleanings) and taking out the trash and recycling (we have an early Monday morning pick up time). We usually like inviting another family over to dinner on Sundays, but we haven’t been able to do that given how crazy the three-hour block afternoon schedule is. By the time we get home, the rest of our day is completely shot. What are your thoughts about the current three hour block?
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What do you think will happen to church attendance if we ever do move to a two-hour meeting block as the norm?
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After the leaked information about the pilot was made public, the pilot was pulled.[1]
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Discuss.
[1] To further illustrate the inanity of the 3rd hour, my ward did a 5th Sunday meeting on indexing. Indexing. That’s the Mormon equivalent of spending an hour talking about the Dewey decimal system.
Wheat & Tares 
So so silly not to make it two hours.
And of course FIRST!
My husband currently serves as exec sec. We are the only ward meeting in our building. Meetings start at 10am, but we are there for 9.30am. What with all the tithing settlement appts this time of year we didn’t get home till nearly 3pm last week. Kicking our heels in church even after the 30 minute choir rehearsal that runs from 1.15-1.45pm (which itself makes for a very late lunch).
“3 hour block allows bishops to handle ward business during the second two hours”
If only. Apparently that isn’t allowed! It all has to be before or after the 3 hours.
I’m okay with the three-hour block, and with the principles behind it. I think the principles are sometimes forgotten, though, both locally and institutionally — and sometimes, three hours is a long time. I sometimes pity the youth. Everyone else thinks the new youth instructional format is wonderful, but that format seems to go against the principles of the three-hour block — during November, with 5 Sundays, my son had ten lessons on temporal and spiritual preparedness (five in Sunday School and five in Aaronic Priesthood). He has zero Sunday instruction from the scriptures.
Here are the principles, as I understand them. Sacrament meeting is for communal worship — we pray together, sing together, partake partake the sacrament together, and share words of testimony and witness and faith. Sunday School is for instruction from the scriptures, so that we can have that needed common baseline of understanding. Priesthood and Relief Society are for practical implementation, for getting the work done of the brotherhood of the priesthood quorum and sisterhood of charity. Of course, these are not distinct, and some of each of these are found in the others. But where these principles are forgotten (essentially everywhere?), I can understand questioning of the three-hour block.
No, changing to two hours will not increase attendance.
10am is the best start time.
I can only suppose the Boston stake was rogue — well intentioned, perhaps, but still rogue — the pattern has been established by the brethren, and local leaders and members need to sustain the brethren.
20 years ago I had an institute instructor in Logan who claimed to have worked on a committee which studied the 2 hour block concept. He told us, in 1995, to expect a major announcement regarding such a schedule change.
I’m still waiting, albeit after 20 years, my hope is waning.
I say have sacrament meeting, then rotate Sunday School with PH/RS every other week.
Here’s the financial incentive: We could squeeze an extra ward into each building.
Meeting schedule strikes me as something that would be ideally left to the discretion of local leaders. Some wards are more geographically spread out, others more compact. Some have lots of young kids struggling to last 3 hours, others have more mature members happy to spend lots of time together. Some lack enough active adult members to run all the programs, others have an overabundance. Why not leave it to local leaders to decide what works best for their unit? It’s amazing how much centralized control there is for a volunteer organization.
ji – your description of the purposes sounds wonderful, but VERY VERY far from what I have ever experienced. I take that back, serving in the nursery can be very fulfilling and uplifting.
Joel – I do think “leave it to the wards” has some merits for really small wards and would reduce some of the burnout. The only issue is that I think there would be tension between those that equate more meeting time to righteousness or indication of their leadership abilities and would push for longer meeting times even when it might be better.
A Happy Hubby- yeah there is the problem of local leaders being even more extreme and making things less convenient for the members. Wouldn’t it be great if the members could decide what was best for themselves? I think we all know what the vote would be, given the enthusiasm everyone expresses whenever the latest rumors of the 2-hour block surface.
Three stoic hours of mostly boredom is only part of the problem. The music is often painful and rarely joyful. It is three hours of prospecting through tons of debris looking for a rare gospel nugget. The correlated gospel is mostly dull and overly simplistic. The HPG is literally a snore. Gospel Doctrine can be fun and interesting, if it is it’s due to the teacher not the manual. Aside from taking the sacrament the main reason we go is we like seeing and visiting with each other.
This year I have visited many Christian churches large and small including charismatic and black South African churches also many Catholic services. My conclusion is the LDS church demonstrates zero interest in making it’s services attractive to nonmembers. This conclusion was recently reenforced by the new ban on children of gays, Either God is a sadist or the brethern are out of touch.
The Church for a few years did do a pilot program of two-hour church in Chile. My whole mission church was two hours. It was wonderful. It made getting investigators to come and stay for all of church a lot easier and it forced teachers/leaders to get to the point in classes. I wish it had been implemented church-wide.
When this pilot program was announced and then pulled my first thought was about church PR rep Michael Otterson’s assertion that came out at the same time as the infamous policy clarification (sorry/not sorry for going back to this topic again). Otterson’s piece claimed that the handbook is a guide and not rigid rules, and that local leaders have flexibility in implementation of the details. Now we see local leaders trying to determine what is flexible and what isn’t.
I think the change to a shorter block would be a huge improvement, but I don’t think it would affect attendance in the short term, and in the long term the impact would be impossible to measure.
One thing the three hour block does NOT do is expose people to the scriptures. At least not in the wards I’ve attended in the last ten years. It exposes people to the manuals, which is a whole different thing altogether.
Three blocks:
1. 15 minutes – take the sacrament – no talks.
2 and 3 – at least an hour a piece
I cubes to cool soup??? Frozen peas is the way to go.
I live in Utah, and close to the church I attend. I have noticed a large percentage of people do what I do. I attend Sacrament meeting (1st meeting) go home for Sunday school, and come back for relief society. I am an empty nester. I did not do this while my children were growing up. But, now that I am alone, there is just not a need for me to attend all 3 meetings.
I am really done with 3 hours of church. I have talked to many in my ward and we all feel the same way. It does not matter what the “official schedule” is. We are only attending 2 hours of church.
Occasionally, the Church does sanction a two-hour block. When the Logan Institute building at Utah State University was being remodeled in the mid-1990s, they went to an approved two-hour block in order to accomodate all the wards with only half the building available.
#4 Bonjo: Your institute instructor may be right, as Pres. Hinckley admitted that they studied the issue at length in the time frame mentioned. From the Oct. 2002 general conference:
“I need not tell you that we have become a very large and complex Church. Our program is so vast and our reach is so extensive that it is difficult to comprehend… An awareness of that fact has led the Presidency and the Twelve to hold a number of meetings, some of them long and interesting, in which in effect we have taken the Church apart and then put it together again.
“Our objective has been to see whether there might be some programs we could do away with. But as we have analyzed these, we have not seen much that could be dropped. To drop one is like giving away one of your children. You haven’t the heart to do it. But I wish to assure you that we are aware of the burdens you carry and the time you spend.”
Ji, I agree with the purposes you stated. Like Rockwell said, though, the manuals can sometimes get between the classes and the purposes (depending on individual leadership and teachers).
It’s unclear where the flexibility is allowed in the handbook. The 2010-ish handbook update happened when I was in a Primary Presidency, and I was thrilled not to have to worry about planning quarterly activities anymore. At the same time, there seemed to be a bit less flexibility on how to arrange the primary services which left us scratching our heads. Was this an area where we could argue local variation, or was this part set in stone? I feel bad for the Boston church leaders – I assume it wasn’t cleared by HQ and the rebuke was a surprise. It’s worse if they had gotten approval from regional authorities. I was a counselor in that Primary Presidency and it was frustrating believing I had flexibility in my stewardship only to be constantly rebuked by the president. It’s not pleasant to walk on eggshells in your calling because you have no clue how the higher-ups are going to react.
If you have spent two hours in primary every Sunday for the last six years you might be wanting to go home afterr sacrament.
I agree with Terry. I generally only go to two hours of church; Sacrament Meeting and Sunday School (I teach Sunday School). The thought of forcing myself to sit through EQ and a lesson about based on Benson’s talks makes my stomach turn. Oh so tedious.
The problem isn’t 2 or 3 hours or ever 4 or 5 hours, it’s the dullness of the correlated content. Crowds gathered on rocks and logs for HOURS on end to hear Brother Joseph preaching outdoors. Brigham, Orson and Heber kept crowds fixated on them in crowded halls or standing uncomfortably in streets. No, the length of time isn’t the problem, our boring content is.
My 4 step quick fix:
1) Gut correlation.
2) Sacrament meeting- 50 minutes. Include more hymns (at the right tempo) and other forms of worship, not ward business or wanna be instruction. (Jana Riess has a nice post on worshipful possibilities and sacrament meeting reform ideas.)
3) Offer 3rd hour Sunday Schooling options. You sign up for a class that suits your present needs/interests. Classes could include: Gospel Doctrine, Gospel essentials, genealogy, choir, community service, missionary connections, CES classes, worshipful dance/yoga, marriage classes, addiction recovery (depending on privacy issues), parenting, gospel through writing, painting, band, orchestra, sculpture, nature, etc.
4) Offer snacks between and during classes (especially for Primary children in Jr and Sr Primary).
Correlation would have to loosen up a lot, but local talent and testimony might be released.
Love the suggestions Mortimer, and I agree “the length of time isn’t the problem, our boring content is.”
Whilst I’m personally struggling with my church attendance, I do appreciate the intent of the individual elements of the Sunday block, other than for our youth whose time during Sunday school it seems to me would be better spent on a seminary lesson, thus relieving them and their parents of another burden, and relieving their poor teachers of re-inventing the wheel for the most demanding of audiences.
I haven’t attended the full three hours in eighteen months. Until then, I pretty much always attended the full three hour block unless I had a good reason not to. I was amazed at how many people, active members, left after sacrament meeting. I had no idea how common it is.
Everyone seems so quick to gut Sacrament meeting but it’s important to note that this meeting is a training ground too. I’m constantly being told by people outside the church how good our people are at speaking to crowds because of the constant exposure and practice they get through this meeting. Did you know people actually pay others to have an opportunity to stand up and practice speaking to people (No offense, Toastmasters :))
I think what is needed here is a refocus on the ordinance of the sacrament and on the gospel. there are far too many talks about setting goals, how awesome Trek was, holidays and everything else but the actual gospel of Christ. Mortimer is right, we need to refocus on teaching doctrine: let us talk about the things of eternity more often.
To those who are complaining about the boring meetings, have you talked with a bishopric member, RS pres or PH leader? I know one brother in our ward who said that SS was boring, he was called as the gospel doctrine teacher and made class much more interesting.
I have also noticed that class is better when you are prepared. Make a scriptural comment in a less-discussed area of the lesson once or twice. Usually there are a few who notice and may even speak up after you.
As for youth lessons, there are always multiple scriptures that can be discussed in almost every lesson. You also have more latitude in picking the lesson, since no one ever reads it, unless you assign them the week before. If the subject has already been beat to death, go a totally different direction from the scriptures.
Of course el oso if the meetings are boring it’s the obviously member’s fault. But then that doesn’t really explain why other demominations aren’t boring does it?
45 minute sacrament meeting +
10 minute break/say hi to fellow Saints
30 minute Sunday School +
05 minute break +
30 minute RS/EQ/HP =
2 hours
el oso “have you talked with a bishopric member, RS pres or PH leader?” – yes. Every Sunday morning between 7 and 8:30 am and every second Sunday after church.
This is a constant battle in our ward. We’ve got several good (even highly accolated) teachers and great learners who are trying hard, but we struggle with correlated materials (we can go off script, but not too far or else some people start murmuring). But we also have to balance providing learning opportunities for the next generation of teachers in the ward. It’s a tough call.
The other struggle we have is finding good speakers. Again we have several good ones, but everyone needs to have a go. Not to mention the stake assigned speakers who come in a throw a curve ball on the direction we intended the meeting to take.
Daniel, I’m with you on the good speakers bit. Why must everyone speak in sacrament meeting. Why don’t we call 4 or 5 speakers and train them well (send them to Toastmasters) and just rotate through them. And if we have to “give everyone a chance at the microphone” introduce scriptural readings as part of our worship service.
Arrogant clothing designers also blame the way their clothes look on the fat consumers who look nothing like the size zero models. Contempt for the audience is a time-honored trait that spans professions and organizations.
I like our practice of letting all members speak in our sacrament meetings. I prefer messages of testimony, witness, and faith more than academic treatments of doctrinal subjects, but I really like letting me everyone have an opportunity to speak in our worship meetings.
2.5 hours including food and socializing. But no coffee.
el oso, I volunteered to teach Elder’s quorum, and the president was excited to have me teach. Then I taught a few uncorrelated lessons and was promptly released. I’ve made enough comments in meetings that they wouldn’t dare have me teach again, although I got plenty of compliments from when I did teach. So yeah, it didn’t go so well with the EQ pres.
Now I’m in an uncorrelated genealogy class. While I miss teaching Gospel Doctrine (and PH), I love genealogy, and I don’t have to listen to a crappy lesson. In priesthood, I just keep doing genealogy on my tablet during the crappy lessons.
Seems to me there’s a cultural attitude that powering through the pain and boredom of the three hour block is an essential part of being saintly and righteous. Apparently church is supposed to be miserable unless you’re super spiritually in tune, and heaven forbid we put effort into providing better content because that would be pandering to the spiritually unrefined. I’ve been in several wards where members were chided for chatting too enthusiastically during passing periods… building joyful community relationships is irreverent and not the purpose of church, I guess.
I get so unbelievably fidgety that sometimes I just leave and go for a walk during the second or third hour, if my calling permits. I don’t even feel that bad about it any more, since it allows me to be much more focused and present for the meetings that I do attend. Forcing myself to sit through meetings out of obligation just makes me cynical and resentful. However, I’d totally dig specialized Sunday School classes like yoga, Greek, painting, nature, music, history, or other topics that actually feel spiritual to me.
The three-hour block is pure torture for young children and their mothers. Getting the brood ready for church, struggling with them for three hours, little ones missing naps and meal time and getting cranky, young and old alike getting hungry, returning from church and immediately launching into meal preparation, followed by meal cleanup, turns the three-hour block into a five or six hour endurance test for a mother. If she also teaches a lesson or heaven forbid, has another meeting that day, it can stretch into a seven or eight hour marathon before mom even has a chance to catch her breath. Sunday is a full work day for mom, anything but a day of rest.
It is so difficult for families with adult children to get together on Easter, Mothers Day, Fathers Day, and other holidays, because of all the conflicting meeting schedules. When one of our married kids’ church ends at 4 pm on Easter, our family gathering starts at 5 and ends at 7 because their kiddies have to be put to bed. Surely church could be shortened for these holidays!
Are the comments turned off on this post? I still haven’t seen my comment come up and I submitted it yesterday morning.
Comments weren’t turned off. I checked the spam filter to see if any comments were there, but didn’t see anything.
Doug, you have a comment 9 comments in… dated 1 December. Would that be the one?
Time usage and content are my biggest problems. It takes 20-30 minutes to get through priesthood opening exercises…Rehashing the same announcements, giving the young men the opportunity to stand up and say what they are doing this week by asking their advisers. Pushing through the simplified and correlated content….yawn.
Yeah, I see it now. Thank you everyone for your patience with me!
El oso,
Despite your helpful suggestions the problem is that the content we are given to teach and delve into is milk- not meat. I think that many saints are starving because they have outgrown the milk and are craving the meat. Much of our correlated content is focused on obedience and behavior, while the larger golden questions discussing the why are thought of as ‘Kolob stuff’ and off topic. Many saints are needing to wrestle larger topics and concerns, that go beyond “Webster defines ___ as ____”. Who wouldn’t sit in a class on the edge of their seat if the mysteries of the universe, the purpose of life, and the great struggles of mankind were to be revealed and discussed?
That being said, I sympathize with families and moms who complain that 3 hours is just too much. We could do more to make church more comfortable for women and children, but that would take LISTENING to them and INCLUDING them in decision-making processes. But, I have to say that the complaints about the time frame (3 hours) fall on deaf ears when no similar complaints are levied against pumpkin patch outings, watching Frozen over and over again, and soccer/baseball games, etc.
I have actually gone on record for suggesting that we bring back family box pews (like old colonial American churches have) which are built-in play-pens for little rug-rats. That might be one small way of helping.
I would disagree with those who suggest it’s not about the 3 hours. My wife and I are both educators and I’m not aware of any research that would support the principles of learning evident in our schedule. I would even suggest it goes beyond learning and into the area of indoctrination. There is very little new learning and basic principles are repeated ad infinitum. Like chanting. But with suits.
I recall Pres Hinkleys comment in 2002. What concerns me more than their inability to effect a change in this ridiculous schedule, is the fact that he believes having a priesthood lesson removed is like giving up one of his kids. If that’s the feeling in Q15 then we have very little room to believe any change is possible.
LDS_Aussie, the idea of learning for 3 hrs is interesting. I remember learning Novell Netware in a 8-hour/day, 5 day course. I learned a ton, but it was a bit exhausting.
In the summer, I teach classes that are 2 hours straight, and it is a difficult subject (statistics). I know some weekend classes are 3-4 hours once/week, which would be similar to church. It’s definitely a tough way to learn statistics. In my master’s course, it was 3 hours at night/once per week. Certainly church curriculum is not as hard as statistics, but I understand your point. It may not be best way to learn, but it isn’t all that unusual either.
Would anybody prefer to go back to the old ways? I remember dad going to PH in morning, by himself, coming home and taking the family to Sunday School mid-day, home for a few hours, and then sacrament meeting at night 90 min, not 70 like now. Primary and RS were during the week. I remember walking from school to primary at the church down the street from our school. Church was a day-long affair, and I think it could be argued that we were keeping the Sabbath day more holy than church in the morning, football in the afternoon.
I do remember watching a football game when I was young that went to overtime (LA Rams with Merlin Olsen played at outdoor Viking stadium, Fran Tarkenton QB and game ended 10-10 tie in a blizzard), but we had to go to Sacrament meeting so I missed the end of the game. We don’t have that problem with the consolidated schedule now.
LDS_Aussie,
Is the most important function of church the ‘instruction’ and ‘learning’? If your answer is ‘yes’ then I agree with you that educational research says you can’t hold attention for more than 15 min at a time, and even broken into 15 min increments over a period of time, 3 hours is too long. (Again, I find it funny that the same educators that cite the ’15 min rule’ don’t have any hesitation in advocating for 8 hour school days for kindergartners. At the same time they whine about 3 hours for adults at church. Mmmm. It is interesting to see where people advocate for ‘research’ to be applied and ignored. I think it is because people don’t want to be at church, they are bored and want to be focusing on leisure things, but I digress.)
I think that worship is the primary purpose of church, which is different from indoctrination. Worship is giving of ones’ self – it is honoring and addressing deity.(From you to God, with love). Indoctrination is the process of teaching another to accept a set of beliefs. (From someone else- to you). Of course I think there is an important space for edification of one another (me and you and you and me) in communion.
From this thread, I gather that many feel we are imbalanced toward indoctrination, and need to include more worship and edification.
Although we have MUCH room for improvement, our church structure is set up to be extremely educational and utilizes advanced adult learning theory. Compared to a traditional protestant homily, we are extremely participatory. We give the talks, take turns leading and following, rotating through callings we know nothing about, bear responsibility, create the music, etc. We aren’t just passively sitting and smiling, we’re doing- which increases relevancy and applicability- and ultimately (one hopes) learning. We make the saints APPLY their learning in various callings and responsibilities. Our audience is active- at least we take turns being active. And, in good adult learning style we have people reflect MONTHLY on their spiritual learning by reporting out loud to others- in testimony meeting. See how that works? We’ve been subjects of reflective learning all along and didn’t even know it.
It isn’t perfect, but if we could build upon those positive learning elements we would 1) have more music, art, poetry, writing, oration, dance, etc. 2)challenge people to give more difficult talks and release people from regurgitating correlated content and discover truth for themselves 3) encourage more testimonies and edification . . . however that looks. (Personally, I think the answer is music, music, and more music.)
The church has a beta program for special needs wards which are less than 2 hours long. Like student wards, these special needs wards pull in individuals from many wards/stakes who would benefit from a different sacrament meeting format and class structure. I’ve seen them in Utah, but I think they haven’t gone mainstream.
The joys of the 3 hour meeting schedule? Ask the Nursery leader who tries to inspire, teach and entertain often multiple 18 month old children pretty much in the same room for 2 hours. That 2 hours occurs after those young children have been expected to remain quite and still for the hour before during sacrament meeting. Last Sunday at the end of closing exercises in Primary there was a discussion amongst the leaders of how we can help the children have greater reverence in those last 15 minutes. Some ideas were suggested, but really, even though some of the activities are designed to be fun and get children up, moving and engaged, the children have been really sitting and being encouraged to be quiet for almost 3 hours by that stage. It isn’t child friendly or developmentally appropriate and just because the educational system has its failings doesn’t mean we should make those choices in church. We want children to feel the joy of the gospel, excitement in its truths and the beginnings of recognising the Spirit. Right now I feel we are, even with the hard work of creative leaders, preparing them for the example of the boring, repetitious experience of many of our adult members. I feel this in our children’s lessons and in the adult classes even though I do prepare and share.
We have a very active music time for our senior and junior primaries, and are fortunate to have the space for them to move.