I’m on vacation this week, so today’s post is pretty simple, based on someone’s Tweet I read. The Tweet asked “What’s been the most awkward sacrament meeting talk you’ve heard?” I’ll rephrase it and just go with “weirdest.”
My answer was about a man in Taylorsville, Utah, back in the 90s. I think he was maybe the High Councilman. Anyway, he brought another man in with him and used this man as a prop to explain just how dangerous it was to live outside the influence of the Church. The speaker turned the mic over to this person (who wasn’t in our ward) and asked him to tell his tale of woe. In the words of the prop / man, he said “I been with whores. I seen my best friend die in my arms.” He went on and on confessing to all sorts of things, kind of like those anti-drug campaigns in the 1980s, but with “church attendance” instead of “drug avoidance.”
Every once in a while, we still just look at each other and say “I been with whores.”
So, dear reader, what’s the weirdest talk you ever heard in a sacrament meeting? Dish, please. And did the bishopric do anything about it or just let it ride? (This guy was given a second anointing level hall pass, but what else do you expect if he was the HC?)
Discuss.
Wheat & Tares 
We had two talks that were the strangest I’ve ever heard:
1. week 1: a brother gets up and expresses his strong opinion that the Holy Ghost is female (apparently more than a few members believe this).
2. week 2: testimony meeting…another brother who disagrees with the previous talk says he has seen the face of the Holy Ghost and assures us that the HG is indeed male.
A guy
Weirdest? Most memorable. In the late 1960s or early 1970s, a high councilor addressed the Edgemont 4th Ward (might’ve been 6th Ward by this time) in northeast Provo and spent most of his time summarizing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It was great.
lol
In the ward we were living in the mid 1980’s there was a guy who got up every Fast and Testimony meeting to remind us the world was coming to an end and we needed to prepare. (He was known to have a full fuel tank buried in his yard)!
We had a speaker for Remembrance Day start by telling what sounded like a children’s story about kids in a small English village back when kids listened to their parents and did what they were told and they found a strange egg the forest. It is not exactly this story http://folklore.usc.edu/shaggy-dog-story-2/ but it is very close to it. The story goes for several minutes and gets stranger and weirder and builds up the village throwing the children’s strange pet (called Rarey because it is strange and rare) over a cliff to kill it and the pet shouting up that that was a long way to go to Tip A Rarey.
And then the talk jumped to life in England during the war when her father and uncle served in the military and that ptsd effects it had on her family because no one talked about it. For about two minutes. The joke/story was longer than talking about the uncle who died before she was born and the dad who was traumatized and silent.
It was such a strange story to tell and it went on for so long
I don’t know what to choose from. I’ve heard all these in my ward. 1. The Millenium will be ushered in when the New Jerusalem will come down from heaven as a ready-built. city going from the Appalachian to the Rocky Mountains and Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. 2. While talking about the love you should have raising a family, a man brags about how he hasn’t talked to his daughter for over 10 years because she doesn’t believe in God anymore. 3. The guy who blamed how wicked our society is on Woodstock. 4. The three different High Priests who argued in Priesthood how stupid masks were or how vaccines were a form of government control all died of COVID within a few months of making those statements early in the Pandemic.
We had a guy in my ward growing up who would get up every fast and testimony meeting and turn his “testimony” into a talk – complete with scriptures, quotes and everything. It was always about the last days, second coming, conspiracies etc. He would end it every time with, “It’s real brothers and sisters. It’s real.” At some point we just stopped seeing him and it was later announced that he had been excommunicated for apostasy. Apparently, he had approached several women in the ward to persuade them to become his second wife. So, ya.
These stories are all at least twenty years old.
One memorable testimony meeting where a particularly flamboyant character, well-known to the local congregation, rose at the outset to proclaim that the general authorities were wrong about homosexuality. This had been successfully ignored until already fifteen minutes past ending time a visitor got up and went into a long refutation, the principle argument of which was how much better off one of his relatives was who had been cured of homosexuality and returned to the church. This was the same meeting where, a few minutes earlier, another visitor told the story about his encounter with a group heretofore unknown to him, the Jews for Jesus, and let us know that he was so glad that the Jews were “coming to their senses.”
The guy who testified how grateful he was that his bankruptcy had finally come through so he wouldn’t have to pay child support or alimony any more. Not sure what the situation was, but usually those obligations are not dischargeable in bankruptcy.
The guy who brought a beach ball as a prop for his talk and threw it out into the congregation. I think it had to do with his astronomical speculations about many worlds.
A gentleman who outsourced his entire talk to an episode of ER that had aired the previous week. Although he never mentioned the source material, treating the plot as a real-life faith-promoting story.
Lois,
I knew someone like that who lived near Highland High School in Salt Lake.
This first event was real although it sounds like an urban legend. About 30 years ago in a Bountiful Utah ward, a little girl (about age 5) got up and bore her testimony about how she prayed about and then searched for her lost cat. When she came to the conclusion that she finally found the missing feline in the laundry room, she concluded “And there the son of a b**** was!” I’ve never seen two proud parents shrink into the pew so rapidly!
Another time a Relief Society counselor was giving a talk about the purposes of the Relief Society. She described how rewarding a weekly origami class had been for many sisters in the ward. It wasn’t until the end of the talk that she realized that the word she had used repeatedly in her talk was not “origami” but “orgasm.” The Bishopric just sat there the entire time blushing, too stunned to react. Some Freudian slip, eh?
Bill: Your final comment reminded me of a time in a RS lesson when the teacher shared a Paul H. Dunn story (also in the 90s) that was one of the ones he had admitted was fabricated. She ended the story with “And the most important thing is that THIS REALLY HAPPENED.” This was one of those times I raised my hand and said, “Well, actually…” The weirdest thing was that after I explained that no, this didn’t really happen, and that Dunn had admitted it, she just looked right through me as if I hadn’t said anything and kept teaching that it had happened. It was completely bizarre.
Back to the sac talks that were unusual, there was a Caribbean woman who was either a convert or an investigator who got up and sang a song she had written about Jesus. Since Mormon congregations don’t respond to things the speakers do, it was awkward when it ended. The bishop got up after and said how beautiful her song was, and what an important addition to the meeting, etc. Normally he was awkward AF, but he did the right thing in this case.
1. In the early 80s, one of our hyperorthodox members gave a talk in which she tried to explain how God could cease to be God (per Alma 42 with reference to God being just). Invoking something from a Skousen book (don’t ask which), she said that all of the lesser heavenly beings that God had created would stop worshipping him if he did something unjust and without that worship, he would cease to be God. I was sorely tempted to ask her afterward how those lesser beings would go about selecting a new God, but I refrained.
2. Note that all these stories are old. This is why we rehash conference talks in sacrament meeting nowadays. That way, no sacrament meeting talk can be weirder than the weirdest conference talk. (But somehow, they can still be more boring than the most boring conference talk. Go figure.)
3. The Holy Ghost is not a sexual being. (I’m not allowed to say that in sacrament meeting–too weird–but it’s tangentially relevant here, so I’m going for it.
Oh, yeah. And there was a time when an old high priest gave a talk and extolled the hormone replacement theory he had been having. He then bragged he had the “stamina” of a man in his 30’s. His wife was not amused.
Oh really, Last Lemming? How do you know the Holy Ghost is not a sexual being?
Weirdest sacrament meeting talk? A few weeks ago, a high councilor came to our ward and gave a talk and made the following points:
1. Denying access to the priesthood and the temple was presented as a precautionary tale: listen to Church leaders, but they aren’t always going to be right about everything. Therefore, God expects us to take responsibilty for our own decisons and not outsource them to Church leaders.
2. The first great commandment doesn’t actually take priority over the second commandment: don’t use this as an excuse to treat LGBTQ members like crap.
3. He had actually taken the Church’s stance of political neutrality to heart and was going to vote differently in the next election with this newfound freedom now that he didn’t feel like he had to vote like “the Brethren”. Of course, he didn’t mention who he would vote for because, again, he had actually taken the politial neutrality statement from Church leaders to heart.
4. He was grateful that President Nelson had encouraged members to be vaccinated and felt it likely that the vaccine had saved the lives of a few loved ones. He expressed gratitude to the scientists who made the quick development of the vaccine possible.
5. When he was bishop, he let the relief society president run the organization the way she thought best and now realizes if he’d overriden her, as he wanted to at least a few times, that things wouldn’t have gone nearly as smoothly. He encouraged the men in the ward to do their best to share power with the women, even if the handbook currently makes this a bit challenging.
6. He felt his free time was better sent volunteering at the local homeless shelter to help starving and cold people than performing temple ordinances for dead people who were probably doing just fine. If you listened really closely, your could even tell that he kind of doubted dead people needed help from living people in this way and wondered if this temple building spree is really how Christ would spend the money.
7. He taught that pretty much none of the supernatual stories of the Old Testament should be taken literally: from the Garden of Eden to Jonah and the whale, from the Flood to the falling of walls of Jericho–all probably fictional.
8. He plead with the congregation to stop referring to the ability of missonaries to learn foreign languages as “the gift of tongues” since it seems that they learn languages just as quickly as anyone else their age immersed in a place where a language other than English is spoken.
Yeah, this talk was a really weird Mormon sacrament talk, indeed!
There was the Mother’s Day talk of 2004 in Bryan, TX where the high councilor told a long rambling tale about a pioneer? White settler? It wasn’t clear exactly who this family was but they came west in mid 1800s and were attacked by Native American raiding party and her children were kidnapped and made part of the tribe. The talk was long and full of details about the raid including descriptions of fighting and wounds from survivors.
The mom of this unnamed family supposedly tracked down the tribe and murdered them all to rescue her children. Graphic details of her massacre.
Then he said something like, “mother’s are a force for good in the world. Be like this mom and fight for your family. Happy Mother’s Day. Amen.
We will never forget that talk even though I forget who it was about.
There was a guy in my ward when I was a kid—picture cowboys boots, big white mustache, and a thick Utah accent—who gave a talk that was truly, deeply awkward.
He told a story about a recent trip in the car with his wife in which he, jokingly, pointed out “one of those triple X places” they were driving past and said,
“Honey, in this life we are instructed to obtain knowledge. Let’s go in there and see what knowledge we can obtain.”
He was expecting her to give him a glare for a bad joke but was shocked when she solemnly replied,
“Honey, you are the head of this family. And if that is where you think we should go, I will follow you.”
He proceeded to moralize about what a sobering moment it was and how it solidified his sense of responsibility to lead his family in righteousness. My dad was quick to point out to me after church the incorrectness of the doctrine—that a wife should only follow her husband to the extent he follows the Lord (the temple context of this was unknown to me at the time). I think an even better rebuttal might be: a woman doesn’t have to do a damn thing her husband tells her to.
In hindsight, it’s such a weird story to tell and an even weirder moral to draw from it. Now, as an adult, I wonder if his wife’s reaction was either joking in kind and it went over his head or perhaps she might not have been as averse to the idea as he assumed. No matter what was really going on, it was a very weird piece of pulpit fare.
Weird good: A little girl got up to bear her testimony and was up there for about 25 minutes documenting her recent trip to Disneyland including a play by play of each ride they went on and when they took churro breaks. Best testimony ever.
Weird neutral: Another testimony meeting someone who was not a member of our congregation got up and talked about how he was so close to becoming a professional boxer and how boxing is God’s true sport and that he would stay after the meeting if we had any questions or wanted his autograph. We still say “he doesn’t even go here” referring back to this guy’s testimony. I’m convinced he’s a testimony crasher and goes around to different churches on fast Sunday to bear odd testimonies.
Weird bad: Some guy spoke about how when he was a kid (dude is younger than I am) there were only two genders and how his wife used to be a Jazz dancer and so she tended to lean more progressive and how he was constantly having to correct her incorrect notions about sex and gender issues and how lucky she was to have married him to keep her honest. I held the bishop accountable for this one and asked him why in this day of mic cutting he didn’t do anything. Bishop thought saying anything contrary would be rude. We have different definitions about what is rude I guess.
Chadwick, the boxing story and mic cutting dilemma reminds me of an episode, this one not an LDS example. I play the organ for a lot of funerals and this one was for an Episcopal congregation of primarily West Indian origin. Unfortunately, at this funeral they had a period of reminiscences when people were supposed to get up and say something for a minute or two about the deceased. These sorts of things are ill-advised because uncontrollable and better left for the meal or other time when time pressures are not in effect. In this instance, things were already behind schedule and the funeral home guy was starting to worry about if they could make it to the cemetery in time, when one of the sons of the deceased got up to the microphone. He then spent more than half an hour talking about his ministry in a different, more charismatic denomination as well as talking about his many achievements in life. The only mention of his mother was that he was so proud of the time he spent visiting her when she was sick. His boorish behavior seemed to mesmerize the large audience and neither the priest or any other authority figure seemed to be unintimidated enough to put a stop to it. I finally realized that as an outsider who had nothing to lose, I might be the only one who could stand up to him, so I walked over and said, “thank you very much” and took the microphone out of his hand. He was so startled that he just returned to his seat without protest. At the conclusion I received many surreptitious thanks and congratulations.
Just two weeks ago I ‘learned’ that: 1. We are only saved by works and deeds and 2. People in Cuba are sad because they don’t have the gospel.
Just last week the bishop announced that the rest hymn between the two high council speakers was to be “Let Us All Pass On”.
Same ward, years ago: My then father-in-law was relating a story of when he needed help and called his wife, and she wouldn’t help him. He then labeled her a “horse’s ass”.
Same ward, over 50 years ago: The adult SS class argued back and forth whether or not the Angel Moroni was naked under his robes. I guess they were trying to time-date when endowments may have been performed in ancient temples?
Same ward, Sunday School class again: The teacher asked the class what a eunuch was…she truly didn’t know.
Again, same ward, about 6 years ago: There’s a huge holiday crowd in attendance. They ran out of bread before everyone had partaken of the sacrament. A scramble ensued, and a helpful parent offered up their animal crackers. The Priest had to re-bless the ‘bread’, and being ever so helpful, changed the wording to “bless and sanctify this cracker”. The bishop halts the ordinance, so the Priest tries again with “bless and sanctify these crackers”. Again, it’s a no-go. The Priest finally recited the correct prayer and the service continued. I lobbied the bishop, who was a friend of mine, for a few years after to have frosted animal crackers on special holiday Sundays. There was no success for my efforts.
And finally, an older gentleman in the congregation had health issues and literally would slump over and usually lose his pulse. The first (of 3 times) he was carried out by his arms and legs, and the jostling and movement somehow caused him to regain consciousness. The speaker had to pause while a ward member, who was a nurse and shook her head like, ‘he’s gone” after looking for his pulse, wait for him to be carried out, and then resume his remarks. He may as well had just sat down. No one listened to a thing he said.
An older woman who attended erratically once bore her testimony that a rainbow colored iguana had appeared to her and told her to tell everyone in the ward not to vote for Trump. That sounds weird enough, but then she went on to tell all the women in the ward shame on them for not allowing their husbands to help single women like herself in the ward that need help. She went on and on with this blaming theme until the bishop stood up, stood next to her and asked her to sit down. She refused and kept on going. He put his arm around her back and escorted her off the podium pushing with both hands.
I was her ministering sister. I talked with her about that iguana. She genuinely believed it represented Jesus Christ and appeared to her with the specific direction not to vote for Trump for all the years I visited her.
In sacrament meeting the speaker’s talk was that all sacrament meetings were to last 2 full hours. That one did.
Baby blessings are great sources of angst for bishops. One unforgettable blessing occurred when a large family brought their infant daughter dressed to the nines in layers of silk/satin up to the circle. Halfway through, the baby started crying so we did what all stupid men do and started bouncing the poor little girl up and down. The nervous father tipped her head up and sure enough, she slid to the floor with a thud. Grandpa was standing next to the mic and exclaimed “Son of a b***h, he dropped the da*n baby”. We all bent down to see if the baby was alive, and he added another “son of a b***h into the mic. Baby survived, family left early and was never seen in that ward again.
I won’t argue with that inspirational iguana.
I too am with the rainbow iguana.
The only story so far that strains credulity is mountainclimber479’s.
Not a talk but a youth fireside in the early 90s when I was a Laurel. This was in Houston Tx. My early morning seminary teacher, who was the bishop’s wife and a Catholic convert, gave a whole fireside about how the Catholic church was the great and abominable church spoken of in the Book of Mormon. I was shocked at the Catholic bashing and kept looking around and wondering why no other adults in the room were saying anything to shut her down. The whole thing was so inappropriate and unchristlike.
We had a young man in a sacrament talk in 2022 say that he paid 3000$ for tiles to repair a flooded bathroom and kitchen , but his boss who owned the tile shop, made out the invoice for 6000$ for the insurance claim and his family made a profit of 3000$, which was a blessing to them because they paid their tithing. My daughter who is a police officer said quite loudly, when he said it, he just admitted insurance fraud and it is a blessing for paying tithing??? He was married in the temple a couple of months later. So no problem answering are you honest in your dealings with your fellow men.
I truly wish there was a 😅 icon for some of these comments. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading these.
The Aristocrats!
That iguana was probably a salamander.
When I was in a YSA ward in SLC roughly a decade or so ago, a Stake High Councilman opened his talk recounting how he led his High School basketball team his senior year all the way to the State Finals, only to be defeated in the final game. Sitting alone in the bleachers after the court had cleared, he made a solemn vow to himself that he would marry himself a tall woman and raise a son to win the state high school basketball championship for him.
So, after serving as an AP on his mission, he enrolled at the University of Utah and met his wife, a model-tall ex-Miss Utah contestant, and proposed to her before he even graduated. As he applied for Dental School or Business School or whatever, they obeyed Prophetic counsel and began bringing forth those tall, Aryan super-children immediately.
Yet as his various sons entered high school, one disaster after another struck: one joined the wrestling team instead; another also played football and was injured before the basketball season began; a third simply showed no interest in basketball; and so on and so forth.
We in the congregation initially chuckled good-naturedly at his story, but only because we thought we knew where this story was going: clearly he was going to reveal that none of his children had vicariously fulfilled his juvenile dream for him, that he had learned some humility and perspective, and to love his children for who they were, not merely what they could selfishly do for him; that he had come to appreciate their unique and diverse gifts, as indeed all of God’s children must be appreciated; that, as he matured and grew older, he had learned in his own small to view his children as our Heavenly Father views us, in all our divine potential, so much greater than mere basketball games. Or ya know something along those lines.
Yes, I think we mentally corrected his talk for him as he spoke (the same way we sometimes mentally correct a grammar error in a text as we skim along), because the one thing we were not prepared for was the fact that he had been, all along, completely sincere: breaking into choked-up sobs, he concluded his talk by recounting how his youngest son at last fulfilled his childhood dream of leading the high school basketball team to win the Utah state championship. The moral of his talk, it turned out, was to trust in the tender mercies of the Lord, if we will but put our faith in Him.
I imagine he took our sudden silence to mean we were as deeply moved by his story as he. Boy did he misread the room.
The RLDS equivalent to weird sacrament talks would be Wednesday- night prayer & testimony meetings. Those testimonies, I recall, tended to be more boring than weird (although you could often expect some Three Nephites tales, which, of course, first required a belief in actual Nephites–but I digress).
My family didn’t go very often, even though we lived just down the street from the church. I finally asked my mother, late in life, why that was. She reluctantly explained that when she was growing up in Depression-era Ontario, her mother insisted they go every week. One older woman would stand up just about every week and give the same testimony. Unfortunately, at least for the attendees in that small church building, this woman had cabbage and sausage for supper every Wednesday night before coming to church, thus guaranteeing considerable flatulence. My mother vowed that when she grew up she wouldn’t put herself and her family in that situation.
JB,
I just have to say it. Bad mental health. Bad parenting. People at church teaching these things to each other is just wrong and hurtful.
As a bishop of a YSA ward about twenty years ago, I had a young man say:
We can’t be half assed about keeping the commandments.”
My counselor looked at me aghast, I just smiled and told my counselor: “he isn’t wrong.”
Orem, Utah, in the 1990s:
The bishop is giving a talk/testimony, starts crying and confesses to the congregation that he abuses his wife and kids.
Provo, Utah in late 00’s (2):
-A man becomes very emotional during a talk about pioneer something or other and starts to cry-sing: “Come, Come Ye Saints”
-In January, when sunday school is starting the New Testament. One of the gospel doctrine teachers gives a talk in sacrament meeting that is a very secular history of what happened between the old testament and new testament, there’s not testimony or attempt to come up with some spiritual lesson, only historical exposition (I really liked that talk).
@simply a sister
good on that guy to be honest, I 100% support taking advantage of insurance companies whenever possible, they’re not fellow men, they’re fellow parasites
@JB
These are my favourite kind of talks, when the speaker doesn’t realize how they’re broadcasting how psychotic they are
I’m not fond of insurance companies either but admitting to fraud in a sacrament talk and talk about it being a blessing of tithing is stretching things a bit much.
A few come to mind:
1). An elderly man in our ward, during testimony meeting, asked the ward to fast and pray about Mitt Romney being the next President. He was a right-wing conservative and made sure everyone knew it.
2) A man bore his testimony and was extremely negative. He ended up telling the ward that he was tired of the youth in our ward and the disrespect they showed. I think this all was as a result of one of the youth playing his car music too loud. Anyway, he ended his testimony by saying he would not be back and was going to find a ward with better people. He walked off the pulpit, down the aisle to where his wife was sitting, grabbing his coat and leaving the chapel with a loud bang of the door. The sad part of this story is that just a few weeks later, he fell down his stairs and died.
When I was on my mission in France, a sister (who I’d never seen before) got up to bear her testimony. She started out talking about how long it had been since she’d been to church, segued into how it was because she’d been really sick for a long time and from there started haranguing the ward members for not coming to see her or check up on her. That was interesting, but then another sister in the congregation came back at her with the attempts she and others had made to contact her but been rejected. These two really got into the back and forth with it. I don’t remember how it ended, just the intense gratitude I had that we didn’t have any investigators at F&T that day.
(1) A 1980 fast and testimony meeting in the Hyde Park Ward in London during which a visitor arose to apologize to British people for the murder of John Lennon, accompanied with gouts of tears and commentary on Lennon’s songwriting career.
(2) Along the same lines, a steady stream of visitors to New York City wards expressing admiration that faithful members can thrive while living in a city teeming with filth and sin. (Granted, the summertime stench of rotting garbage can be a bit much.)
(3) Numerous fast and testimony meetings in the months following several performances of Saturday’s Warrior in San Jose, California … and the baby boomlet beginning nine months thereafter. (just sayin’)
I don’t think I made clear that the other woman was making her comments from her pew, and the back and forth was going from her to the woman who was still at the podium.
YSA ward 1996 Holladay, Utah – a guy from NYC is bearing his testimony and commenting on his life changes and unfortunately stated “I was a male prostitute !!”
There was the time when the EQ president called all the Pepsi and Coke drinkers in the congregation to repentance. I’m sure the bishop was wishing that was the extent of the challenges the members faced.
A recent convert brought his guitar to Fast & Testimony Meeting and sang his testimony, then proceeded to tell us, in glorious detail, of his prior sexual sins, which were many.
Another F&T meeting, a woman stood up to testify about what a jerk her ex-fiancee was.
A man was giving a talk about who knows what, when he referred to a science experiment that determined a naked human placed in a cold room wouldn’t raise the temperature of the room much. But two naked people, a man and a woman, would really raise the temperature of the room.
Another man gave a talk about the importance of 100% church attendance and told the account of an old man, whose wife was dying, choosing to leave her side to attend church to maintain his 100% attendance record. His wife died while he was at church, but he had made the right choice to keep 100% record.
#1 “My daughter is not a whore!l” a woman began. She went on to shame families and individuals for gossiping, slander, and uncharitable faults and call them to repentance. It was like watching “Mean Girls” set in a ward.
#2 Love me a good “confess-i-mony” or confession/redemption talk with all the juicy details about all the sins. Pass the popcorn.
I’m late to this party. Been laughing all the way through the comments. Thanks. Again, makes me sooo glad I live in a really normal ward in the Northeast. Sure we’ve had a couple of nutty one, but they are usually summer visitors who have come to see the church history and take pity on us poor saints that life so far from Zion. My response is always, “Utah was God’s 4th choice, so chill.” Love you all for brightening my day.