For me, growing up in a heavy Mormon part of Utah…
All of the things listed, 3 church services on Sunday, Family Home Evening, Mutual/MIA/Young Men during, Seminary, etc.
On Fast Sunday (1st Sunday of the week) when I was a “Teacher” (I think this was the time) I would go out and collect Fast Offerings, work on the “Welfare Farm” - for me it was picking fruit in an orchard, the 2 year mission, then Temple work during the week. Did I get them all?
And my friends were mainly people in the ward (there were boundaries for the wards). So it could be people on one side of a street were friends/acquaintances and on the other side of the street were complete strangers. When I was a teenager, they expanded the ward a little bit, and now I had a new friend (who was basically a stranger.
I think you’re a bit older than I am – I only remember the 3-hour block. I really don’t understand how people did the schedule you describe! Then again now that we have a 2-hour block I am beginning not to understand how I did the 3-hour block (which was often 4 hours because as a music person I attend choir) with small kids. Even that was brutal!
@Monty answered a lot of this but yeah I’ll see what I can add, particularly youth stuff.
We still have early-morning seminary (I don’t live in Utah) and I would say we probably have at least 2/3 of the kids in our stake who regularly come to church doing it. (My high school kid is a complicated case, but she goes sometimes.)
Wednesday evenings we have Young Women and Young Men activities, which maybe a quarter to a third of the time are joint and otherwise are separate. My daughter enjoys the joint ones more (she’s not so much into the more girly activities). The kids are supposed to take ownership of planning them (a new development from when I was a kid!), but I think that depends a lot on the leadership – when my daughter went into YW they seemed more into having the kids plan them, but now I think the leadership plans most of them.
Every other Wed. evening during the school year is “Activity Day” for kids aged 8-11 which I guess is what replaced Scouts for that age range. The great thing is it’s for both genders. Boys and girls often separate, maybe a quarter to a third of the time joint activities. My son generally enjoys the separate activities more.
Of note is that the Pinewood Derby, which used to be a Scouting activity, is now an Activity Day activity for both genders. I was really psyched to find that out when my daughter was that age!
There are frequently youth activities on the weekends: dances every few weeks, stake activities every few weeks, temple trip every 1-2 months, sometimes our youth leaders have more activities for the kids – like they’ll take the kids hiking or last week there was a campout or the YW will have a movie night party or something like that …and when you add all that up it comes up to a youth activity almost every weekend.
Our stake has a stake youth choir that frequently rehearses on Sunday night, but that’s just our stake bc we have an amazing music person who runs it (and who just got released, so I guess we’ll see if he continues that)
Not as many RS activities. We usually clock one a month which already seems like a lot to me, lol. I remember when I was growing up it used to be like every week which also seems pretty brutal.
Family home evenings are still a thing. No manual, it’s been mostly replaced by the Come Follow Me manual which has become The One Big Manual. (I was skeptical that this would work – now it’s one manual for classes as well, no additional manual for Sunday School vs. youth Sunday School vs. Primary vs. YW/YM – but I teach youth right now and it seems to be working more-or-less OK. I think the manual is rather higher quality than what we were getting in the past, which helps a lot.)
My ward has other things you could do like a reading book club, a family history club, etc. but these aren’t “official,” just things that people in the ward put together for fun.
In my stake there seems to be much more of a relaxed approach for the youth that they don’t HAVE to attend Wed. night activities or whatever if they have school stuff going on instead, and not so much judgement for e.g. the kids on the spectrum who it’s hard to get to some of these, which is great (given that I have one of these kids).
Again @Monty has answered a lot of these (thanks @Monty !) but I’ll add some, with commentary on liking/disliking. (If I don’t comment on something Monty brought up, it’s because I have no opinion on it or at least nothing strong enough to type it out.)
Liked:
TWO HOUR CHURCH
Only Sacrament on Easter and Christmas Sunday. YES. Half the people didn’t attend the other half of church anyway, and the ones who remained got a lesson on… Easter or Christmas, which seems just superfluous.
New hymnbook with Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing! (I like some of the others too, but that’s the one where every music person I know voted for it to be included.)
The Come Follow Me program - specifically the part where all Sunday School classes and seminary teach the same scriptures at the same time, yes thank you
President Nelson’s teachings on being a peacemaker – I find these both extremely relevant and extremely needed.
2019 reversal of the 2015 decision: now children of same-sex unions can be baptized if parents give permission. I almost left the church over this. Hilariously I actually thought in my head that the 2015 decision was under President Nelson until I looked up the dates again.
More communication with missionaries and everyone else in the world. I love getting email from the missionaries in our ward, and I know their parents love getting to talk to them every week instead of twice a year!
Moving from Boy Scouts to Activity Days – like @TokyoBayer idk about the reasoning but I like that Activity Days are more gender-equal
Suspicious of but came to like:
We no longer refer to ourselves as “Mormons” or “The Mormon Church” but “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.” Which is a mouthful, and when that first came up I was like “this is the stupidest idea ever.” But actually now I like it. It’s still a mouthful but I like that it is very very clear that we follow Jesus Christ.
The Come Follow Me program - specifically the part where we all got the same manual. As I said to @TokyoBayer , it seems to be working better than I anticipated.
Disliked:
…actually when I think about it most of the things I disliked have moved to the “suspicious but now like” column. But I guess I’ll put here that I still think his decision to go ahead and celebrate the bicentennial of the First Vision when the pandemic had just been announced (April 2020) was very poor. I was very angry about this for a while, though I suppose I’ve gotten over it now.
I’m older than you. The change to the 3-hour block happened when I was a senior in high school, so I essentially grew up with the old schedule.
Sundays were essentially church. We lived three minutes away from the Ward house by car but I can’t imagine what it would be like for anyone who had to travel to church outside of urban Utah.
The problem were the breaks between meetings. There was the priesthood meeting for the boys and men and then Sunday school in the morning, and everyone would go home for lunch. Then everyone would go back and have sacrament meeting in the late afternoon or evening.
We also had tons of activities for Mutual (12 to high school) including a lot of fund raising for the summer waterskiing camping trip.
Reading your list reminds me of how exhausting it all was. I didn’t feel that at the time, but it was like growing up in a town of two hundred people and everyone knows everything about each other.
My kids are really busy now, but the difference is that their activities are more typical music lessons and sports rather than all church related.
Yup. We shared the ward house with another ward and they were complete strangers. When I was in high school, our ward was split and half of us were combined with that ward and the other half were combined with the neighboring ward on the other side. Basically, three wards became two.
Suddenly, all the friends I had grow up with were now in another ward and I would only see them at school.
I still can drawn a map of the street from 50 years ago and mark which house was Mormon and which wasn’t.
IIRC, it was when we were “Deacons” (boys 12 and 13) rather than “Teachers” (boys 14 and 15) but yes, that was every Fast Sunday. We even had to go to inactive member’s homes, something I cringe about when I think about it now.
For some reason, I missed out on all the Welfare work. Our ward would go to the cannery but the youth didn’t.
We did the baptism for the dead on weekdays mornings in the temple, but we only did that a few times.
The other big thing was all the leadership and committee meetings. Because there was a gap between the boy who was older than me, I wound up being the priesthood quorums president about half the time after I turned 12. There were so many meetings.
We also had all those activity committees, including youth conference, “road shows “ (plays), fundraising and such.
It actually was a good experience, but it was just too much.
I did the mission, but it was when they did the experiment and changed the missions to 18 months. That changed after I was on my mission so while I had been called for two years, I got a rebate.
This actually is much more significant than most people realize.
We were Mormons. Some of my ancestors were part of the small group of Saints that fled Krirtland Ohio, then escaped the Mormon Wars in Jackson Missouri, and then the fall of Nauvoo Illinois after Joseph Smith was shot.
Mormons knew Christianity and wanted no part of it. Smith had blamed the Catholic Church for the great apostasy and called it the Whore of Babylon. Smith had looked at other sects and found them wanting. The mobs that drove the Mormons out were Christians.
(There is a more nuanced explanation but we can skip that for now.)
Most members don’t realize how apocalyptic the early church was. There were times when the missionaries were telling people to gather to Kirtland or whatever, and not even bother selling their land. Just go now. The whole world was corrupt, and that included their Christian neighbors.
Being Mormon was the core of my existence. I grew up as pioneer stock, 5th, 6th and 7th generation Mormon. Most of my ancestors walked across the plains, some pushing handcarts. Only a few came over after the train lines were built.
Both my parents grew up on farms in areas that were 99%+ Mormons, and had traditional Mormon teachings. The teachings I heard at home probably were more reflective of what they were taught growing up, rather than what was taught in the 60s and 70s.
Yes, we followed Christ, but Joseph Smith was much more the focus of our religion.
My mother had a really hard time adjusting not saying she was Mormon.
It looks like things have changed a lot since then.
A side story (which will also give away my age). As a missionary, we started “tracting” (knocking on doors) in an area that had a large number of blacks (as we called them). At the time, they couldn’t hold the priesthood, I wanted to continue going there, I thought they should be able to hear the gospel too, My (senior) companion thought we shouldn’t. He spent a week with our leader and told me he was going to talk to him about it. It just happened to be the week they changed it so they could hold the priesthood. So, I never heard anything about it. My “rebellion” wasn’t rebelling anymore.
Anyway, a few years later I left the Mormon church and went to an evangelical Christian church (Southern Baptist). I noticed a major difference between the two on Jesus. It seemed to be more praising God/Jesus and not We Thank Thee O God for a Prophet, and Praise to the Man (okay, those are more extreme examples).
My question is.. If I went to a Mormon church (sorry, that’s what it is in my mind), would there be a major difference between what it was back then, and would it now be along the same lines as a Southern Baptist church when it comes to things about Jesus?
Where was your mission? Those missions always struck me as a great learning experience, kind of like a gap year. One of my good friends had a Jewish parent and one who grew up Mormon. He grew up Jewish but had lots of Mormon cousins who I got to meet. They claimed that where you were sent was a very political decision and connected people got their choice which depending on their level of piety could be somewhere easy like Southern California or somewhere remote and difficult to help them rise in the ranks.
I think that this can be either a strength or a weakness, depending on context.
The ward I’m in right now is really awesome and for various reasons has a diversity of people, and I love being part of a close-knit community where everyone knows each other and what everyone’s going through, and is willing to help each other out, and even though it’s not my primary social group (pun not intended) I see how it functions that way for a lot of people which I think is great. And before my kid got to high school and found her people, I was really grateful for the youth program and how it functioned as the only real social group she had.
But the ward I grew up in was much more insular and suffocating and judgmental (for the last, I am sure some of it was the place-dynamics – I bet that ward is still more that way than my current ward – but I think the Church in general was a ton more judgmental those few decades ago), and my family and I had very little in common with the other members so it didn’t really work for it to be a primary social outlet at all. I really disliked it. And I’ve never lived in Utah, but I understand it’s ten times more that way there.
Yeah, I mentioned this briefly but this seems to be a general trend within the Church as well. Even the super devout families in our ward have other extracurriculars besides church ones, and no one blinks an eye if faithful kids attend marching band practice rather than Mutual (which, yes, older people still call it sometimes, lol). The thing that does remain constant is that most devout families don’t do extracurricular activities on Sunday. (My kids do youth symphony which has rehearsals on Sunday, but I know at least a couple of families who don’t, specifically because it’s on Sunday.)
Hmm. It wouldn’t be like a Southern Baptist church for sure. We still sing “We Thank Thee O God for a Prophet” and “Praise to the Man,” and this year is Church history / D&C scripture study, and (to take it back to the OP!) given that one just died and we have a new one and we have General Conference this weekend, I expect it’s gonna be even more Prophet-oriented than usual the next few weeks. (Last Sunday, right after he had died, it was all people talking about President Nelson.)
Buuuut at the same time, I think you would notice a marked difference in emphasis. When I was growing up, you could literally go for several weeks without hearing Jesus mentioned at all (I remember noticing this as a young person and thinking it was a bit bizarre), and that would never be the case today. Scriptures from the Bible are used a lot more (though the Book of Mormon is still the most emphasized). Jesus Christ is emphasized a lot more as the cornerstone of our religion. Teachers (as I mentioned above, I’m a youth teacher) are asked to bring back the lesson to Christ and Christ’s atonement as much as possible. A ton of the new hymns in the hymnbook are Jesus/God-centered (“I will walk with Jesus,” “Amazing Grace”) and only a couple of new ones are prophet/Joseph Smith centered (and even those tend to bring it back to Jesus, like there’s one called “Joseph Prayed in Faith,” and instead of the emphasis being “look how cool Joseph was” it’s more “hey, I can also know that God and Jesus are real”). There really does seem to be a major push to make everything more mainstream-Christianity in emphasis. This wasn’t just President Nelson, I feel like the Presidents before him did some of that too, but I think it really accelerated under him.
So I guess my answer is, somewhere in between?
One small interesting thing in this regard: my whole life I’ve been accustomed to Jesus Christ being referred to as “Christ” at church once you’re no longer a kid (kids can call him Jesus) – with an attitude of deference and veneration, as opposed to the Southern Baptist-esque more tending to refer to him as Jesus, with an attitude of him being our buddy, our homeboy. I also feel like this is slowly changing, where it’s becoming a bit more OK in the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints to refer to him as Jesus, which goes along with the more friendly attitude. Which I also think is a good thing, because if you’re going to claim that people in your church have a personal connection with Jesus Christ, I think it’s nice that this connection is a bit more, well, personal.
It can be, but also there can be problems as well. A lot depends on the leadership roulette and who is the mission president.
Often missionaries don’t real learn much about the local culture because they are concentrating on either proselytizing or just playing, but it really works out for some people.
I’ve always presumed that the children of Mormon royalty could go wherever they wanted to. My high school had a lot of grandchildren or relatives of the top authorities and some went to cool missions.
I’m not sure what they mean by going on a particular mission would help them rise in the ranks. I don’t think that going to any particular mission would have any effect post mission.
The connection to the leaders would be more important.
Yup.
Like anywhere else, Utah wards depend on the particular ward dynamics.
Yeah, the classical thing would be talks on Easter and having people bring up that the true meaning of the resurrection can only be understood by us Mormons because we have the restored church through Joseph Smith and I know he was a true prophet.
It wouldn’t only be Easter, of course. Pretty much everything could go down that path.
That is a mouthful! I hope you have a script to type it out for you. I think you can say “the Church”, can’t you?
Over in another thread, a poster noted that she is less likely to use the whole name now it can’t be abbreviated to the LDS Church.
I hadn’t thought about the Christ vs. Jesus, part before. The Book of Mormon uses Christ:
Googling to find this, I noticed that the LDS site refers to Him as Jesus when providing this scripture.
Is there more of an emphasis on a personal connection with Christ? The whole empasis when I was growing up was on knowing that the Book of Mormon was true and that Joseph Smith was a prophet (who restored the Gospel).
Salvation was through the Church, although not explicitely stated as such. But you had to be an active member, pay your tithings, follow the current prophet, attend the temple, etc.
I presume those requirements haven’t changed, but is there also an element of a personal relationship with Jesus? (That feels weird to type “Jesus”.)
The danger before was that if people had personal relationships with Christ (as we called Him), there was the potential to bypass the Priesthood, and obedience was stressed above all.
Please don’t take this the wrong way… These are some thoughts that I have, it’s not intended to be critical or anything.
I was born and raised in Utah. Multi-generational Mormon (how I see it). I did the right things, kept the commandments, church every Sunday and the weekly thing, graduated from Seminary, went on a mission, married in the temple, etc.
Then became a Southern Baptist and saw a significant difference on how Jesus was taught, worshiped, etc.
Seminary was 1 year on New Testament, and the other 3 on the other topics, with a lot less emphasis on Jesus. I seem to remember one out of seven missionary lessons on Jesus and the rest were about Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, the church, keeping commandments, etc.
After I left I heard that there were changes, such as the name of the church, and maybe some changes in teachings.
My thoughts are, were there really changes in the religion to be more “Christian”? Or, maybe just window dressing? And what about those (like me) that were before the changes? Did we miss out on the Jesus things?
While we wait for @raspberry_hunter or @Monty to respond, perhaps you could define what you mean by “more ‘Christian’”?
Do you mean doctrine? The community? Core concepts?
The one specific thing you mentioned was seminary (for nonmembers, it’s the classes given from 9th through 12 grades. It’s mentioned above as either release time if you are in Utah or before school in other places.)
What would you consider more Christian concerning seminary?
You are only a few years older than me, and of similar background. However, I went from Mormonism to atheism.
I’m not sure what the issue is. My entire association with the church, it’s been Christian. Even when I wasn’t an active member, I still considered it so. I’ve never attended church in Utah (my sole experience in that state was being stuck for a layover at Salt Lake City International Airport and boy did that airport suck out loud), but have, of course, met a number of members from that state. Some were more urban (Stifle! I mean they’re from Salt Lake.) and others were super rural. It was kind of easy to know who was from where based on their comments and actions at church. I’m absolutely sure @TokyoBayer can really expand on that.
A lot of the things in the list I posted upthread are procedural matters or matters of practice. The name of the church doesn’t get me, but I tend to be insistent on spelling it correctly if one uses the full name. That’s because of other outfits using similar names with those different misspellings of the LDS’s spelling.
Focus on Christ? As I just said, I’ve always found the church to be Christian in my experience. Mind you, I had a rather long period of inactivity starting a couple of years after I joined so maybe I missed a lot of upheaval I would not notice without being actively involved at the time.
Yeah, of course. We need more information about what @Author_Balk considers to “Christian” and what is window dressing.
Despite the LDS church leadership seeming desire to be seen as mainstream Christianity, it’s just not.
Evangelical Christians are going to consider a lot of other Christian churches to not be Christian, I would imagine.
My family was unique in that both parents grew up super rural but then we lived in SLC.
Both parents were really devout, and dedicated their lives to teaching us all about Mormonism as we were growing up.
I frequently knew more about the gospel than my adult teachers in Sunday school. We were strange that way. And knowledge of the gospel did not translate into leadership.
In SLC, there was a pecking order of wards and how elite they were. My high school included a neighborhood called Federal Heights, where the apostles, church leadership and other Mormon royalty lived.
One example of the difference in how they were treated comes what we called the “Federal Heights Syndrome.”
The number one rule for boys is that you must absolutely not have sex before going on a mission. Of course, you can’t have sex until you’re married, of course, but it’s really, really, really bad to have sex before you go on a mission.
My cousin from rural Utah broke that rule, and it took him about a year to be forgiven before he could go on his mission.
Boys from Federal Heights could do whatever they wanted and then an apostle, their uncle or neighbor, could get a waiver and it was all good.
Because they were Royalty, there wasn’t a shortage of girls.
Because of polygamy and the intermarriage of the elites, most of the top leadership through the 70s came from a few families: the Smiths, Youngs, McConkeys, etc.
Mormonism has lay leadership, and anyone can up a bishop or stake president, (although it helps to be a professional rather than a blue collar worker).
But having a connection really helped for those who wanted to go above that.
President Nelson seems to have been a good shepherd of the Mormon Church, and done quite a lot to bring it more in tune with the current era. Pretty good for a guy who was really old when he took the helm. Rest in Peace.
We used to have a babysitter who was an apostate Mormon. She planned to join the peace corps when she graduated from college. I teased her that it would be her mission. And she didn’t disagree.
I spoke to some of the missionaries in salt lake City, and they basically had no time to do anything but their “meet & greet tourists” job. They are right next to some of the most beautiful hiking in the US, and they couldn’t even do that.
But i have met men who got a lot out of their mission.
Lol, that would be me. I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but that’s just too much to type most of the time.
Yes, this is not the right thread to get into that topic, but the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is probably more different from mainstream Christianity is than Judaism is different from mainstream Christianity, and a whole heck of a lot more different than Judaism is from Islam.
Unfortunately, the Church took stricter measures against transgender members under his watch.
Mormon church issues new restrictions on transgender members
The new policies include a measure to annotate trans members’ records, grouping them with members who have committed sexual violence or child abuse. [and other crimes]
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, known widely as the Mormon church, issued a slew of new policies this week expanding its restrictions on transgender members.
The policies, released Monday, include rules barring trans people from working with children, becoming priests and serving as teachers. The church also expanded on an existing rule that barred trans people from being baptized.
[my addition]
But the continued focus on Christ apparently is continuing. I see that as a positive step.
Yes. I know people who went and were really happy and those who went and didn’t like it and considered it as waste of time.
It was my introduction to Japan and I’ve obviously liked that aspect, regardless of any other issues.
I agree that this isn’t the thread to debate that, but I think that this demonstrates the difficulty that the Church has with its campaign to appear more mainstream.
I don’t have any sort of definitive answer on what is Christianity. But I do know that what was taught in early Mormonism would likely have disqualified it by most people’s interpretation.
The most controversial teachings have been walked back and recent leaders have further de-emphasized some of the remaining controversial teachings.
Growing up in an almost fundamental Mormon family (minus the polygamy, of course) and having step away from it in my 20s, there are some aspects now which I wouldn’t recognize.
I wrote a couple of things in response to what I meant by Christian and then threw them out. It’s probably better for me to drop out of the conversation. I want to be respectful to others in the thread.
I think you can say “the Church”, can’t you?