I am probably in the minority.
I think I’m going to miss weekly Sunday School. Having said that, I’m sitting here in the hall skipping Sunday School. So why would I miss it?
I’ve taught gospel doctrine twice. It is one of my favorite callings. It helped kick start my gospel study and forced me to try to make interesting lessons. The manual they give is so poor. Greg Prince is on the board of directors at a Methodist seminary. He handed the LDS Old Testament manual to some people there and they said they had seen some bad manuals, but the LDS manual was the worst.
It doesn’t have to be that way. LDS leaders could work to improve the manuals. They could have engaging lessons. But I’ve heard that with the elimination of an hour of church, the manuals have gotten worse.
If the manuals are worse, then I support the decision to take an hour away from church. I will spend the extra hour studying the gospel in topics that are more interesting to me. So I am grateful we are moving to 2-hour church. But I’m sad leaders don’t recognize how bad the manuals are and aren’t making an effort to improve. And that makes me sad.
While we’re at it, I’m sad to hear the LDS church is discontinuing the Hill Cumorah and Manti pageants. A friend said LDS leaders are destroying the community fabric that binds Mormons together. I agree. It’s like they want to have the most boring services ever. We already have the worst Christmas and Easter services ever. We’ve eliminated road shows, interesting missionary farewells, and continue to gut the best parts of Mormonism.
I’m sure there is a burden on locals to put together the pageants. Did pageants organizers request this? It seems not. It’s another to dumb decision from the bean counters. Don’t we covenant to sacrifice and consecrated our time, talents, and energies to the church? This decision seems to conflict with that sacrifice we covenant to.
If the pageants are hokey and not historically accurate, then fix them. Don’t dump them. I know it brought money to the local economies of Clarkston and Manti, and it’s going to hurt those communities financially. I can’t speak to other communities.
I know leaders want simplicity. But it seems like a race to the bottom. Joseph taught Mormons the mysteries of God. Orson Pratt taught amazing things. And now we dumb things down, have the worst manuals, and kill cultural events that make Mormonism unique, a peculiar people. It doesn’t make sense to me.
But who am I to complain?
Wheat & Tares 
It seems to be contrary to the plans for the current Mesa Temple grounds renovation to potentially do away with the Easter Pageant (note that they haven’t actually said that they are doing away with it). The visitors center in Mesa is being torn down to provide a better temple view, which would also provide an opportunity to reconfigure the pageant grounds area. Unlike other pageants, the script for the Easter Pageant is the New Testament–making it a pageant that can appeal right away to those in other Christian churches. It is held in the center of a major metropolitan area and the is produced in both English and Spanish. Seems unwise to let go of such a far reaching opportunity for missionary work and the dispelling of rumors that LDS are not Christians. If the decision is to decrease inequity for such opportunities among other temple districts or church regions, then I guess a fairness argument works.
I think the time for pageants has come and gone. Time for the Church to move on from that format.
Maybe the time for Sunday School has come and gone as well. It was originally an independent auxiliary with its own separate meeting (in the morning; sacrament meeting was in the afternoon). When the three-hour block schedule was established in the 1980s, that was a chance to get rid of Sunday School. We could have had the two-hour block thirty years ago. But no, it was folded into the three-hour block and sputtered on for three more decades.
An overabundance of myth and folklore bedevils both pageants and LDS Sunday School. Maybe Pres. Ucthdorf will upgrade the Sunday School curriculum. If not, let’s just kill the program and go with home gospel study for a few years.
One person in my ward openly suggested (without a hint of irony) that these changes (no more pageants, shorter church with home study emphasis) are foreshadowing and preparing us for the coming days when conditions will be too dangerous for Latter-day Saints to gather in large numbers, and eventually we will have our church meetings only in small groups within members’ homes.
To be fair, this person has an established reputation as a doomsday prepper/hoarder, and may very well end up in an armed standoff with federal agents long before the need arises for the Church to go underground. But I could be wrong. As most psychologists will tell you, it’s not paranoia if someone is really out to get you.
While I see the point of the post I (mostly) respectfully disagree. In my view the change to 2 hours and eliminating pageants is an acknowledgement of the challenges families face. As a stereotypical white middle aged male with a stay at home wife, and 4 busy children I applaud the changes enthusiastically and hope for more.
I understand why some people will miss the extra hour and the pageants. Those who value the social interaction of the additional hour (perhaps singles, perhaps empty nesters) may miss the 3rd hour quite a lot. I take my youth program to the Easter pageant in Mesa every year and they’re bored and missing 4 hours of sports and homework, but we leaders have to act oh-how-enthusiastic. As a ward leader, I need the church to give me back away another 3 hours per week. The church is suffocating the very families that they depend on the most.
In my opinion we’ve learned to lean on the church for almost everything, and most of those activities had nothing to do with Christ or salvation. When I grew up we we had church softball, church basketball, scouts, roadshows, monthly home teaching as a 12 year old, monthly ward activities, ward campouts twice a year, church cleaning, youth dances, holiday festivals, Deacons on their bikes collecting fast offerings, and documented temple attendance. None of that is essential to our salvation. The busiest families are trying to stay engaged in church but cannot do all that stuff with club sports, private music and dance lessons, and AP/IB classes in high school. The ones the church leadership have chosen to focus on (busy white middle aged middle-upper income men – and their wives and kids) are being churched to death. Bring on the simplification!
To me church is the Sacrament, a good reminder to be a good person and to check up on my fellow man. I can fill in the blanks myself. That being said, I acknowledge when my financial and social characteristics are different I will likely miss all the extras.
I cannot possibly think that less time in meetings is a bad thing.
Hate to break it to everyone, but we still have Sunday school.
It’s interesting to me that participation in Mormonism is the most expensive church I know of, and yet now they are reducing services. (Not that most of those services were paid for, anyway.) But, it seems like we get so little for our investment. If they are going to reduce services, shouldn’t they also reduce the cost of participation?
I am not a big fan of the sunday school manuals, but I am sad to be losing an hour of church. But, it is for the social reasons. For those of us who have a hard time making friends, and/or are new in an area, church is it. When we moved from the US to Europe, the wards there were our only friends for quite a while. With less and less time devoted to socializing, it’s only going to isolate me more.
In addition, for those of us for whom the social support of the church was enough to balance some of the frustrating ‘doctrinal’ issues [ air quotes because my issues at least shouldn’t be called doctrine, but they are], fewer social activities just kill any future desire I have to go to church.
In some ways, I think what we’re seeing is less coddling of members with easy access to the Church and its resources, and more allocation of resources to members overseas where the Church is just starting to blossom and may even have been a little neglected up until now. Those of us who have had so many Gospel-related things at our fingertips are now going to go without. When it comes to tithing and bang for my buck, I’m willing to get a little less if it means someone in Madagascar gets a little more. I’ve heard the success of the Perpetual Education Fund has surpassed many initial expectations. Makes me wonder what other good things pageant-sponsoring money could go toward. Frankly, I also think that certain attitudes of consumerism in America have infected far too many members and expectations of their Sunday experience. Maybe it’s time a lot of us “turn the movie off and go out and play” so to speak. As MH mentioned, I do worry about the impact on the economy of in these communities. My understanding was that every club and organization in Palmyra essentially made their budget during the Hill Cumorah pageant.
The community fabric doesn’t have to break. The Church set the example. I’ll admit it’s hard to feel up to replicating it, but as individual members and groups of members, I think we can do it.
Like the person in Jack’s ward, I’ve heard similar things about the last days necessitating shorter meetings and possibly meeting in small groups. As a youth, I envisioned the last days as Indiana Jones-esqe catastrophes with chasms opening up on a daily basis. Now, I don’t think things will get much worse than they are now (arguably pretty bad), or at least as bad as I thought, but it wouldn’t be hard for one or two EMPs and other occurrences to knock out communication to members around the world for months at a time. I think the Lord knows the time to prepare for that is now. Less time in the chapel, more in the heart. Members overseas will need it more than anyone.
I’ve never heard many complaints about the manuals beyond the bloggernacle. I do think they’re a little basic for my tastes, but as long as the Church keeps bringing in new and learning members, I’ll never have a problem with that.
I enjoy visiting a non-denom Christian church nearby. One hour worship service, and the social interaction happens in small groups. Talk about “holy envy”. The closer we can get to 1 hour Sunday church, and small groups, the better, IMO. Look at all the options!
https://smccevents.churchcenter.com/groups/draper-groups
Maybe the 3-hour block wouldn’t have been such a burden if mandatory attendance for all 3 hours wasn’t required for a temple recommend? If people could show up for sacrament, and then stay or not stay depending on what they felt they wanted or needed, and not have it impact their eternal dwelling place, maybe it would’ve felt different?
There was an interesting Mormon Land podcast that dropped yesterday that featured an interview with a former director of the Cumorah Pageant. Quick summary–it was a fun event planned and put on by local members who involved the community, the Church Missionary Department took it over and slashed the budget and it went down hill and all the non-Mormons stopped coming. My takeaway is that we need to go back to giving local communities control and input. I hope this happens with the central Church pulling back a bit.
And when I heard this about the pageants, I rent my garment and my mantle, and plucked off the hair of my head and of my beard, and sat down astonied.
I have no fond memories of pageants to cause me to wax nostalgic for them. I do however have fond memories of road shows. I am still mourning the loss of road shows and wish my kids could have experienced them.
“I know leaders want simplicity. But it seems like a race to the bottom. Joseph taught Mormons the mysteries of God. Orson Pratt taught amazing things. And now we dumb things down, have the worst manuals, and kill cultural events that make Mormonism unique, a peculiar people. It doesn’t make sense to me.”
I would imagine we don’t still have a lot of “mysteries” taught or “amazing things” taught like Orson and Joseph did because it got out of hand and non-productive.
Remember the stories of Brigham young preaching for hours and hours all afternoon?
Perhaps there were some gems in some of those preachings…but…we didn’t continue that practice because it didn’t always work great…and sometimes was disastrous.
Correlation came from a good motive of making lessons better and more standard and providing teachers with material to save time preparing and reducing risks of bad doctrine being taught.
It just came with unintended consequences too. Lesson manuals seem pretty dumbed-down.
I’m not sure which is worse. I am sure that it would be worse to make no changes and just keep doing what we were doing…which was leading to continual feedback on how boring it is most of the time.
I’m with Lily…less is more for me. I think these changes are progress.
As someone who saw the Manti Pageant when I was 12, I thought it was amazing. Growing up in California, it was fun to road trip with all the youth and drive out to see it. We all got warm fuzzies and it showed that church doesn’t always have to be dull and stuffy.
What’s sad is that I read that attendance, etc has gone down drastically so I understand why they’d cut it but I’m sad to see it not be available to future generations.
As for Sunday School, I feel like by condensing the lessons will actually help offset the lousy and faulty lessons being taught out of the manuals. Why? By not having as much time to spend on a particular section, you can only do a high level overview and not dive into details.
I like the details.