When my XH and I were in our last-ditch save-the-marriage counseling situation, the counselor had us fill out a questionnaire about our relationship. This questionnaire asked things like: “when was the last time you worked together to accomplish something?” and “when was the last time you laughed together?” My answers were: “I honestly can’t remember.” I don’t know what my husband answered.
Some marriages with similar problems to ours hung together and even got better. When you tell someone your relationship is in trouble, the focus goes right to the problems. Then people start saying things like, “well this other couple had the same type of problems and they worked things out.”
Somewhere along the line, I realized that the reason my marriage wasn’t going to get better wasn’t because the bad times were so bad. It’s because there weren’t any good times. Sure, we could have worked a little harder on the problems, but the only reward was to spend time and all eternity with a man who had spent several years convincing me that he would rather not be bothered with me.
There weren’t any good times.
Leaving Church worked the same way. I learned all the stuff about history, and stayed anyway. I looked at the sexism and homophobia, and stayed anyway. I noticed the patriarchy and its blind spots, and stayed anyway. I was proud of my devotion and loyalty, actually. My faith was so strong!
Then the good times stopped. I no longer felt like I mattered. I was crying in despair every other Sunday after Church. The idea of spending eternity with anyone I was related to by blood or marriage became hell instead of heaven. Older unmarried sisters are patronized, and that really started to sting. Obedience seemed futile when I couldn’t do the one thing that mattered most to every Church leader (be happily married to a man), and when the reward for obedience was pretty awful (eternal families).
I didn’t leave the Church because of the problems. I left because the good times weren’t good anymore. Sometimes I wish I would have taken a principled stand, but I didn’t.
Frequently here at Wheat and Tares, people say they quit Church, or became more nuanced members, because of problems like homophobia, sexism, the prosperity gospel, racism, white-washed history and other problems. And I’m wondering … were the good times any good by the time you left? Was there a time when you knew all the problems, but the good times were enough still? If you’re still attending Church, are the good times enough now?
Using the relationship questionnaire as a guide, here are some “good times” questions about Church:
- When was the last time the Church helped you accomplish something?
- When was the last time you laughed at Church?
- When was the last time you felt connected to the community at Church?
Could the Church do anything that would create enough good times to bring you back?
Wheat & Tares 
Great questions and a nice opportunity for me to think about my experiences with church (which I rarely attend since the pandemic, and I struggled with engagement prior to the shutdown.)
This resonates for me. I knew a lot of the problems with the Church, but kept going. Looking back, I was definitely a PIMO (physically in, mentally out). I really did not get much out of church, but stayed due to the relationships I had in that ward. When I moved, I went to my new ward a couple of times, but starting over socially helped me to realize that I was not getting anything positive out of church besides the social connections. That realization and the fact that I had not made any social connections yet in my new ward helped me to finally walk away from Church.
It was very freeing.
My “good times” questions that got a “no” were 1. When was the last time you felt that God loved you at church? And 2. When was the last time you felt inspired or uplifted at church? And 3. Do you feel better about yourself at church or alone in a forest? As well as the ones you listed as accomplishing anything, feeling accepted by the community, and laughing.
Funny, but the last few years at church any laughing was supper sarcastic, the sad shaking head kind, or the mocking kind. None of it good or uplifting, let alone feeling loved or connected.
It was when my husband retired from active duty military and we moved back to Utah to be closer to family and give our teenaged children more Mormon teens to be friends with, that the “good times” stopped. Outside of Utah, I was able to have church friends, even if I was a bit of a heretic. My willingness to serve in callings and be a giving part of the community was accepted. I guess that wards with a high percentage of military are even more open and accepting because so many people move in and out and most are away from extended family and can’t just drop the kids at Grandma’s if they need to go to a doctor’s appointment. The culture shock of “Utah Mormons” drove the two oldest out of the church rather quickly. They just didn’t expect the rampant hypocrisy they saw in all those teen friends we moved so they could have. And I just could not make friends. I didn’t fit with any of the three social groups in Utah, the good Mormons, the nonMormons, or the JackMormmons. I was apparently too much of a heretic/feminist/social misfit to be given a calling. Big Utah wards have more women than callings for women, and so as heretic/feminist/social misfit I went 15 years with no calling.
There were other things tangled in there, but I finally put my mental health above the church on my priority list and decided that if the church isn’t good for me, who the blank cares if it is “true” or not.
Could the Church do anything that would create enough good times to bring you back?
I left/seriously limited my engagement with the church because the church cultural expectations made explicit in the doctrine assigned me a role as “nurturer” (by gender) when I am a better “presider” and “provider” and then people lovingly gas-lit me and told me that I misunderstood the situation when I pointed out that I was the primary “provider” and “presider” in the household (just like women everywhere) and that I didn’t want to be “the primary nurturer” [which is why I work and I am deliberate in supporting efforts of others to nurture everywhere]. Even more baffling, I am regarded as a “champion nurturer” with all emotional intelligence won in the school of hard knocks, reading books, getting a business administration degree, and developmental research.
It’s super tough for me to be told “stay in my lane” when I technically cover all lanes with a lot of other people similar to me also not staying in their lanes to get stuff done. I solved the cognitive dissonance of “gender performance issues” in part by navigating to areas where I had more freedom to “find my lane using my strengths” in ways that were more authentic to the community and to myself.
I went back to church one Sunday in November to support my husband and children in going that day. Everyone was kind and kind of treated it like a “homecoming”. To me, it felt more like “being a zoo exhibit rehearsal” – a rehearsal to think through the “level of unnatural accommodations” that it would take to keep me at church meetings and more active church participation. I know that in part, I contributed to that because I interacted with my husband who was non-verbally asking that question. A lot of my friends were like, “We’re so happy to see you – are you coming back? No pressure.”.
This is a very thoughtful post – I think the absence of good times/experiences is easy to overlook, but it’s critical to consider. I think you’re right that we can tolerate a lot of problems as long as there are still good times hanging on the other side of the scale. Many teachings of the church tend to glorify hardship and “faithfully” suffering on, which can tend to keep us focused on grinding on even as the positive feelings and experiences may be crumbling away at the edges.
This is my current struggle with the church that I haven’t been able to put a finger on until you mentioned it just now. The church of my youth was fun, positive, and full of friends and a strong community. I long for that uplifting feeling of a community that has your back no matter what. We had a series of thoughtful, accepting leaders who weren’t particularly interested in dogma and instead focused on building a positive, inclusive community. Over time I realized that the church isn’t like this everywhere. Even so, I feel that the sense of church as a community has eroded quickly over the last couple decades.
I don’t feel much community in my current ward. There are some good people, but it also feels hollow. I crave that old sense of community from my upbringing and want my kids to have that same experience, but I’m having a hard time finding it.
I don’t think the LDS church is alone in this collapse of community either. We’re living in the age of the doorbell camera where we look suspiciously out at the world through cameras and little screens. The aftermath of COVID certainly hasn’t helped either.
A heart wrenching and insightful topic. Thank you.
Janey,
A thoughtful and profound post. Thx.
A very timely post. You speak for a lot of people currently in the church, myself included.
Very thoughtful post. I’m with Zwingli. I don’t see any draw. You can be PIMO, you can attend and not believe, you can know all the unsavory stuff and still enjoy attending, so long as the community is enjoyable and positive. Sitting in a meeting listening to thinly veiled homophobic and anti-trans dog whistles, self-congratulatory bragging about righteousness and loyalty to the institution, leader worship that would make Gengis Khan blush, and gushing rhapsodically over the most threadbare, morally dubious statements from church leaders as if they are the young emperor’s poop in a silver bowl–no, it’s not fun anymore.
For most of my life, I would hear strong statements in church, about how everyone was supposed to change in some way, and I would do an internal eye roll. Single piercings? Eye roll. Quit using the term Mormon? Eye roll. Looking back, I think that attitude protected me in so many ways. There were things stated from the pulpit that I filed away as personal opinions and not prophetic teachings. When in doubt, I went back to the teachings of Christ. My preference was, and still is, to ignore Paul and the Old Testament when looking for inspiration. I never could read the D &C as an inspired work. I found it simply weird.
What worked well for me? As a young SAHM, I did connect to the community of the ward. I felt loved and included. The way callings were given in the ward pushed me to learn new skills and work through many personal social anxieties. I could not have fulfilled callings without figuring out how to manage those issues. I learned public speaking skills. I learned how to teach. I learned how to plan and organize large events. My ability to delegate was learned through church service. I developed a significant skill set in each of those areas.
When I look back, I see a lifetime of my service for others that was done in the name of the LDS church and Christian Service. When I look for the last time that the Church helped me accomplish something, my feelings become very complicated. The real answer is never. I gave. They took. I worked through my anxieties in order to give more.
While dealing with a few horrific medical situations, our bishop asked if we needed help. My reply was “Yes. We need help with medical and funeral bills.” His reply was, “The Church does not help in such ways, but if you need a food order, let me know.” We had food — We had an entire year’s supply of food. A little refund of past tithing paid would have been helpful. That was not given as an option. In my relationship with the church, the money only flowed one way.
After one medical event, the RSP called. She said, “You don’t need anything. Right?” Her assumption was that we had it handled. I never learned how to show my need. I did not know how.
Nothing in the LDS culture taught me how to ask for or accept help. The lessons I learned were all about giving significant amounts of money, time and effort.
Laughing at church? It has been a very long time. My youngest child is now a grown adult working on a PhD. She is on the autism spectrum. Raising her showed me the ugly underbelly of LDS culture. Mormon culture has a heavy emphasis on social success. To raise a brilliant kiddo who is socially awkward is never great, but there really is no space for that dynamic for young women in the church culture.
That social situation got ugly enough that our daughter was given permission to attend a different ward. Both youth leadership and youth were involved in that awful dynamic.
The last time I felt connected to the community at church was about 25 years ago. I was a SAHM, had young children and gave lots of time to the church. When I went to grad school, then began working in a professional capacity, there were lots of comments about my worldly choices. So many ward members would launch a big rock-sized comment at me about my choice to work in a highly regarded and lucrative career. My assumption is that each thought their personal rock was not a big deal. They never stopped to think that maybe I was getting lots of other rock-sized comments from other ward members. It is hard to dodge so many rocks. Some hit hard and caused damage.
Between the unsolicited opinions about my higher education and subsequent career and the dynamics of raising a socially awkward daughter in Mormonism, I decided that my path to a better relationship with the God of my understanding was not within the walls of the LDS church. It has now been almost 10 years since I walked away.
Recently, I have been attending occasional as a way to support my devoutly LDS husband. When interacting with ward members, I am really upfront about my own non-LDS path to finding God and I am careful to never diminish their beliefs or devotion to Mormonism. Many ward members seem pleased to have a solid conversation with me. OTOH, so many seem socially isolated and unhappy. Church attendance does not appear to be a joy for many. So many ward members simply look worn and burdened. I would like to see the corporate church doing a better job at taking care of the wards.
To me, it feels like the corporate church has sucked all the money out of the wards and abandoned the membership.
Church vs forest? The forest wins every time.
I joined the church in high school. Church activities were fun. We actually had single adult activities back then. I remember several times going with a group of people to another city for an activity, and when I had a car I also drove people. My children grew up before we killed scouting and replaced it with nothing. I remember relatively frequent ward and stake activities. Youth temple trips were a bug deal as we never lived near a temple. My sons loved camping and scouting. I remember youth and adult softball games with neighboring wards. All of that is gone. I agree that the fun is gone. Activities help a lot, and we’ve basically killed our activity program. Deciding that the ward activities had to be planned by the ward council, that they were the activities committee, was just one step in many to where we are today. We have killed activities as part of killing community. I agree that activities and communities cause their own strains and pressures, but they also pay some dividends. Maybe leaders are too much administrators trying to administer a corporation, and less pastors trying to lead a flock. Who today thinks of their bishop or stake president first as a shepherd and a pastor and a first among equals? To be fair, we see them, because they present themselves, more as administrators and executives. The business school organizational leadership models might work well in corporations, but are they the best models for running a church?
Kudos to Angela C and the posters over the past few weeks. A great number of deep and thought-provoking posts. I’m a bit like Pirate Priest, though I didn’t join the church till I was twenty. But when I did, it was fun and exciting and energizing. Lots of activities for young adults, a blossoming of YSA wards and, at least where I was as a young adult member (Florida and Utah), a number of really good, down to earth and inspiring leaders. If I had to put my finger on it, that started to really fade away by the time I was thirty. I was in a difficult marriage (which ended when I was forty), church seemed mostly like a grind, and the gospel of Christ, at least as Mormonism taught it, just didn’t seem to mean much. There was a lot of goal-setting in those days (attend the temple once a quarter, at least 80 percent home teaching, etc.), but those goals weren’t really connected to anything deeply, spiritually meaningful; they were just sort of goals to be achieved because achieving goals was vaguely connected to “being a good member”, whatever that meant.
My waning enthusiasm for church really began with the recognition that the church and its teachings really couldn’t help save or improve my marriage. Since my spouse at the time was a serial adulterer, my praying more really wasn’t going to stop. People are going to do what they’re going to do, generally. So there was that and then just the gradual realization that god and the church couldn’t really help with anything. I’m a fairly independent sort, so community means less to me than it does to most folks, and the rest of church just feels so simplistic and dogmatic that it seems more like a kind of hell than any sort of celestial place. And I identify a bit with the thing that Damascene said about my higher education and my job in that field; most of what my life has turned me into (divorced father, intellectual, college professor, liberal, lover of rock and roll) already puts me on the outside of the so-called church community. So there’s just really nothing left for me there anymore. I haven’t felt good at church for a long, long time. Great comments and a great post, Janey.
I laughed in church last week. One of the speakers who has gone out of his way to be kind to me said something true and funny and painful about the ways our children force us to see ourselves. He was relating this to God and why God would bother with having any of us, and it was profound and funny.
To laugh, to feel connection, arguably to accomplish anything meaningful, we have to be in a place where it’s safe to be vulnerable on some level. Church just isn’t a safe enough space for vulnerability for far too many of us. I can’t think of a worse failure for the body of Christ.
For me the faith transition began with the birth of my fifth child with the series of defects. It wasn’t caring for my son, as hard as that was, that hurt so much. It was my husband’s depression that correlated with the birth. He managed to keep working (in spite of prejudicial firing) so we had money and health insurance. But emotionally he fled into the multiple player online game world (World of Warcraft). He stayed there almost 9 years. Counseling and medication eventually helped. But during those years I came to feel that our family was damaged and not good enough to really fit into the ward. I came to hate the songs “Love at Home” and “Families Can be Together Forever” because I felt so alone in my marriage. I felt pressured and empty with talks about temple attendance, family history, etc. I just had to get through one more day with my children and husband alive, either at home or the hospital.
Our kind and experienced bishop was a great support for us. I had friends in the ward. At least at church I had other adults to talk to. I was heavily dependent on my ward. Then our bishop was released.
The new bishop really didn’t have the skills to deal with a family like ours. Sadly, he wasn’t humble enough to know he didn’t understand. He blamed me for all my family’s problems. I have always been a naturally out spoken woman. He thought I was sinful or broken, unlike his wife who was always quietly deferring to him. My husband was the introvert in our home, and it seemed to the bishop I was in the wrong, though he never clearly said as much… at least not directly to me… though I heard about comments he made to other people.
With my kids with disabilities, I often had to speak up and ask for additional accommodations at church. It put my husband and I at odds with the bishop. Our ward was desperately small. We had multiple callings. There were endless conflicts. But we did work through them. We were a small ward family, and like any other family, you find a way to forgive your brother or sister. We had to learn to make our own decisions and not to let leaders tell us what to do. We took one summer off from church, more or less. The bishop asked us to come in and we declined. Eventually this bishop was released, after all of us learned more than we wanted to know.
It took me 5 years after he was released to understand that I do not believe the patriarchy is inspired by the God I pray to and love. Since then I have been studying, growing and changing my political and religious ideas at a high rate of speed. There’s no going back to who I was.
My children have each found one by one that they don’t fit into the church for a variety of reasons. They combined our ward with another ward last spring. That has been very very hard. It doesn’t seem like it matters that much if we are there. We fulfill our callings and then sneak out. It feels like too many people to us. (I know, we are impossible to please.)
I love playing and singing with the choir. I love to see my friends. I love helping with Primary and activities. But I have become very sensitive to lessons and talks that put down and exclude LGBTQ people, and non or inactive people, and almost every talk has at least some connection to eternal family or how we think we are more right than everyone and more blessed. I do not believe in prosperity gospel and find many of these topics uncomfortable. Sacrament meeting is boring at best. At worst I get up and leave or escape into my cell phone so I don’t hear and feel upset.
I used to enjoy participating in a good discussion of gospel principles in RS or Sunday School. I have become so sensitive because of things that have happened in the last year, it’s hard to know if I could still comfortably participate. I have struggled with general conference talks discussed lately. If they divided into smaller groups I would definitely try again to participate.
lws329, of course, my story is different because I’m a man but it’s also very similar in that I tried for years to work things out with a depressed wife. When she eventually left me, I started to move away because people looked at me like it was my fault. After 10 years, I eventually remarried and we tried going to my little ward and even sent my stepson on a mission but it was too hard to attend without retreating into the phone or just turning off listening. So we quit going basically around the time Covid-19 hit. That was about 3 years ago. NO ONE has reached out even though I’ve lived in this ward for 40 years. The bishop will walk by us in the store and not say a word to me. He may talk to my wife but he’s on the school board and she’s a teacher. His wife, who grew up with my daughters, is the same way with me and won’t even look at me. I feel like a part of my life is missing but, I don’t want to go back to what it was because they haven’t changed, I have. I’ve heard too many times that our ward is the “best, friendliest, and has the most love in it” but I’ve never experienced any of that and realized what Christ said in the NT that even the publicans love their family and friends.
Instereo,
I am so sorry. Life can be just so hard. And it seems such an obvious and Christ like thing for people to just say hello, like you would even to a stranger.
We often say in our household, that we know other people CANNOT understand. And we wouldn’t want them to have to go through what we’ve been through to understand. I would spare them that.
But without the simple kindness of a hello? 🤷
I am afraid I find myself judging those who can’t even say hello to you. Maybe eventually I will repent of that.
This is exactly the thing that finally led me out of the church. I had decided earlier that I didn’t want to make the decision to leave solely on weird history or on the church’s current stance on social issues, even though I strongly disagree with the church’s official stance on my issues. Any organization older than a few decades has some weird stuff in it’s history, and, as we know, the church will change course on social issues in due time. Plus, even in Morridor, at least in the places I’ve lived, church members are more tolerant than church leadership.
What finally pushed me out was the realization that I had never once in my life woke up and thought “boy I can’t wait to go to church.” Never on a Sunday afternoon did I think “wow what a great service.” Sometimes, you really don’t want to go for a jog, but then you do, and even though it hurts after, you’re glad you did. I never even felt that kind of good and participating in church. The only time in my life that I sorta liked attending church was on my mission, and that was only because I didn’t have to be tracting and could just sit for a few hours.
I even realized that, oddly, I’ve never really had a “church friend”, despite growing up in a faithful Mormon family deep in Utah County. I had friends that I saw at church, but the friendships were kindled elsewhere (school or work, mostly) and would have happened with or without the church. I didn’t meet my wife at church, didn’t attend a church university, have never worked a church job. I’ve had only 1 active LDS coworker in the last 8+ years.
Looking back, many of these decisions were intentional, even though I made them while I still considered myself “all-in”. I knew I wasn’t going to byu before I was ten, for example, because I knew I would chafe at the churchiness of it all.
Honestly, for all of my time in the church, I thought everyone kinda hated it. I thought that was the point. You spent your life forcing yourself to go to church and pretending to like it so you could go to heaven. It wasn’t until after I left that it started to occur to me that there are people who really enjoy being a part of the church. And good for them! But it’s not for me.
Reading the comments makes me wish I could invite you all over for cake or coffee or both and a long chat and maybe some games. Gotta make good times and community where you can.
When was the last time the Church helped you accomplish something?
– This one is probably the hardest for me to answer. I can’t say that I attend church as part of a quid pro quo or as an opportunity for networking (though maybe I’m missing the point of the question). I certainly have friends who attend their particular churches exactly because they will have opportunities to network. I’ve also had ward members who helped me out (including one who helped me repair my lawn mower without prompting – really nice guy), but in terms of accomplishing things, it’s much less concrete. I’d probably point to the culture of education the Church supports (even if I didn’t attend a Church school), my much better than average grasp of the scriptures, my willingness to sacrifice for things I consider to be bigger/more important than myself or my immediate family and friends, as well as discovering that I really like traveling to foreign countries. It’s not that I couldn’t have developed all these things independently of the Church, but it certainly was a big driver in my development.
When was the last time you laughed at Church?
– This past Sunday. I have a bunch of friends in the ward, and I feel like I’m a pretty affable person. Moreover, the speakers in our ward by and large try to throw in a joke or two (a speaker this past week was quite funny), and the Sunday School teacher is particularly entertaining. He’s flat out said he feels a big part of his job is to make the class entertaining so that we’ll actually remember what is taught and, if nothing else, that we’ll want to come back. I very much appreciate that approach and the laughs (his maybe-maybe not inadvertent male anatomy quip from a couple years still makes me chuckle).
When was the last time you felt connected to the community at Church?
– This past Sunday. This follows on from the last answer, as I fell pretty plugged into the ward. I know that’s a lucky place to be (depending on who you ask), and it doesn’t always last. And, sure, were I to leave the Church, I’m positive my interactions with many of those in the ward would die off immediately, but currently, I do have as good a friends (and probably better) as in any other public part of my life (better than at work, certainly – and I like my coworkers). I’m just sorry that more people don’t have a similar experience at church to mine.
I really liked Church as a kid, teen and young adult. I mean, of course I whined and complained sometimes, but I liked sitting still and being quiet because of how much I daydreamed. I would be complimented for reverence, and the truth was that I hadn’t heard a word anyone said for the past 20 minutes.
Here’s another fun childhood memory. My family were ward stalwarts. We were there to set up for every ward activity and stayed to clean up. You know those really long carts they use to store the tables and chairs? And then they’re slid into those short cupboards under the stage? Those were the best. We rode all over on those. Races, bumper cars, adults warning us about not pinching our fingers, hiding in the cupboards to avoid helping put away folding chairs. Then, when the group was down to about 15 people, all the kids would evaporate from the cultural hall and reconstitute in the hallways where we’d play hide and seek or cops and robbers. Those wide, long, straight hallways were created for children to run in. They really were. Church was like a playground, especially if you could get on the stage. My extended family would do FHE in Church buildings and we would run wild. Stay out of the chapel, of course, but everywhere else was So Much Fun.
Why did anyone start telling kids not to run in Church? I mean, sure, if the hallways are crowded, don’t run. But if you’re there for a weekday activity and there’s no one else around, children should be free to do laps around the Church hallways.
Also the kitchens. My childhood self loved to go help all the moms cook in the kitchen. Put six women in a Church kitchen and creating a group meal is such fun teamwork. Then washing the dishes and cleaning up. Women rotating in and out of the kitchen, but there was always someone to pitch in. It was like a barnraising – making dinner for Church parties. Being told to only use the kitchen for warming up precooked food is so totally lame. I know why – all the food safety training. But still. I loved group cooking.
I’m fortunate to reside within a ward that I like along with two of our daughters and their families. It’s a nice ward but we’ve come to it as oldsters and although there are lots of people I genuinely like a wouldn’t say we have close friends in the ward. I’m very much PIMO, I’m not sure that I even believe in a God anymore. It’s a faith deconstruction I’ve been on for 35 years. Most of the people in my ward would probably be surprised or even shocked to know this, I’m able to protect them by not attending classes – easier to do when you’re old but I do feel like a bit of a fraud, and it’s probably a bit damaging to my desire for authenticity. However, I can say that the church has been a positive influence in my life at times but that doesn’t make it true to me. I’m very much concerned about the areas of harm and sick of the patriarchy. I do like attending, being part of a community and singing the hymns and getting some occasional uplifting messages, and yes even sometimes humour. I also enjoy some of the RS focus groups and attend also for the sake of my husband and family that are believers. Fortunately they are mostly nuanced to some degree – even my bishop SIL. They all know some of my pet peeves and they even share those to some degree but I feel sad than I can only really share some of my deepest thoughts and concerns on the church with a select few – a daughter who had her name removed, my sister who was exed in another country (for getting pregnant while not married no less🙄) and a total stranger I met on an LDS adjacent group who I have since met in person.
I don’t like the corporate church at all, though I like and admire a lot of the people in it. There is a lot of goodness but I despise the harm.
My experience is somewhat different than most, I think. I’m currently a student in a YSA ward. The dynamics of a YSA ward are vastly different than a family ward–or at least mine is. It’s an incredibly great ward with loving members of similar backgrounds and social preferences. It’s easy to fit in here. I go for them, and it’s taken me a while to realize that’s as good a reason to attend church as anything else. What keeps me in the faith is the teachings that relationships matter–not just family relationships. I don’t get that teaching from the Church, per se. I get it in Mosiah 5. That when we are converted to Christ and become His child, we, by implication, all become spiritual siblings. I find it beautiful. Though my current ward may not think in that way exactly, we certainly act like it. It’s a strong sense of community that I don’t think I’ll find anywhere else–not even in the Church.
When I eventually leave this ward, most likely by aging out, I don’t see myself attending Church regularly, if at all. I think I’ll always believe in the Book of Mormon because I do have a strong testimony of Jesus by reading it, but I can foresee a way in which I still believe the BoM, but not the Church. I’m in the Church because I, as of right now, have those good times. Those good times are defined by the laughter and amiability and intimacy I share with my spiritual siblings as of right now. I love them like family because I genuinely believe they are (mind you, with all the necessary and important boundaries that must accompany that).
So to answer the questions:
1. I can’t remember, don’t know if it ever has. (Unless we want to count making the BoM accessible for me and thereby helping me establish a relationship with Christ. In which case, years ago.)
2. Yesterday at institute
3. All the time (as of right now)