5 (Re)forms of Sacrament Meeting: How the LDS Worship Service could Better Accommodate the Diverse Spiritualities of Its Attendees
The sacrament meeting is the spiritual apex of the Sabbath for Latter-day Saints, but its one-size-fits-all format doesn’t resonate with everyone.
This is the second in a series of critical reflections on LDS theology as I navigate my shifting faith.
I offer my thoughts not as an act of retaliation, rebellion or disparagement, but as contributions to the growing community of Mormon thinkers who want the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to be the best version of itself.
Previous: ‘Ring-Fencing Truth: The Tension Between Individual and Institutional Revelation in LDS Theology’
One of the benefits of being in a heavily centralized church is its worship services are the same everywhere you go. That might be beneficial for the well-heeled traveller Latter-day Saint who wants the familiarity of American culture in a chapel in the middle of nowhere, but that isn’t really the point, is it?
Sacrament meeting is supposed to be the most important and doctrinally momentous part of the sabbath experience. It incorporates the sacrament or eucharist ordinance and provides an hour of communal prayer, sacred music and sermonizing. I daresay (the heavens forbid my admitting) that it is supposed to feed its attendees spiritually.
I daresay further that quite a few people find the weekly event…well, let’s be charitable…underwhelming.
The sacrament meeting’s liturgy is heavily formulaic. Church headquarters prescribes the order of worship, giving local leaders discretion only over the choice of hymns (from a hymnal of only 300 songs, with what I’d define as ‘usable’ being closer to 200) and vague allowance for ‘music and gospel messages’. Church tradition has dictated that this means three ‘talks’ by lay members, the last the longest (oh and ‘youth, woman, adult male’ the customary casting), maybe with an intermediate hymn thrown in the middle when everyone stands up to get the blood flowing so they can attack the last talk without rubbing their eyes screaming at the bishop for letting Brother So-and-So exceed time limits again. Church faithful sit through the thing once a week. Many sleep or snooze or stare ahead in reverent but unspiritual reverie. Still others cheerfully peruse their phones to distract from the pain of droning sermons. I doubt many remember the talks much beyond Sunday lunch.
A Variety of Service Forms
Some Christian churches, in response to the varying and sometimes irreconcilable needs of their congregants, have moved to holding different types of worship services. A given weekend may, for example, have a Saturday evening service, a Sunday morning ‘traditional’ eucharist, an afternoon youth service (complete with modern Christian music and electric guitars), an evensong (a magnificent experience if you’ve never been), guided meditation or prayer, a Sunday School and so on. Members attend whichever services feed their souls. I, for example, would find little spiritual feasting while dancing to punk rock, but some people find deep spirituality in that energy.
What if the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints did the same?
Here are some ideas of different forms of sacrament meeting. All of these suggestions incorporate the sacrament ordinance because, obviously, that is doctrinally necessary.
The Silent Sacrament
So many Sundays, all I want is time to ponder and just feel spiritual, to meditate and ruminate. We all have sabbaths when the last thing we need is the racket of crying babies and hit-or-miss pulpit jokes and jabbering homilies and sobbing testimonies and droned announcements and all that…well, noise…that sacrament meetings just tend to attract sometimes. Sometimes people just need quiet. Reprieve. Prayer time.
Mormonism actually makes space for this exact kind of worship: in the celestial room of the temple and in the chapel area where members wait to begin an endowment session. These rooms are designed as sacred spaces set apart for quiet contemplation, prayer and silent scripture study. And Saints are very good at doing this in the temple. I know many members who go the there sometimes because they have a nagging question they need to pray out.
Now, what about a sacrament meeting that provides that too?
Imagine the chapel being open for an hour, say, with the doors closed to the bustle of the foyer. No music (or maybe very soft music). No speaking. No announcements. No spontaneous testifying. The bread and water are blessed prior to the doors opening for the service. Members come in whenever they want and sit wherever they want and stay however long they want. They can pray or read scriptures or just sit. Whenever they’re ready, they approach the sacrament table and a priest offers bread and water. They can stay afterwards or leave. It’s up to them.
This form of sacrament meeting would feed my soul. It would bring a temple-level of reverence to our chapels which, frankly, is so often lacking.
The Unsung Service
We all know there are plenty of congregants who wince as the organ intones the intro for a hymn. They hate singing, are inclined to tone-deafness anyway and mouth the odd word here or there to allay suspicion of their not participating heartily. And they certainly would rather avoid the Primary’s most recent squawking musical item to which everyone is supposed to go ‘aaaah how sweet!’ and give each other the eye that says, cohootingly, ‘What a sickly sweet song that sanitizes the gospel into a showtune that would make religion look like Barney the Dinosaur prancing through a field of daisies!’ (I might be betraying my feelings about the Children’s Songbook. Moving on….)
Some people just want words. Good ol’ sermons and prayers. No frills, no hymns, no compulsion to participate if they just don’t want to. Is there really anything wrong with wanting to be a bit passive sometimes? We manage fine without singing in lessons and in the temple (which is far more spiritually maintained). We’d just be continuing that.
I think most members would admit that a 100% music-free service would likely feel a bit dry and that music does play a liturgical role. That doesn’t mean everyone has to sing along. I’ve always wondered what the aversion is to having choirs sing the sacrament hymn. If its purpose is to prepare the congregation spiritually for the sacrament ordinance, surely we can admit that that preparation can sometimes be enhanced by listening to a choir or a soloist or an instrumental presentation? I mean, we sing the same 20-odd sacrament hymns in cycles. How many people can pay much attention to the words anymore? Variation can be the prompt for vigorous spiritual experience.
And while I’m on this point: LDS English teachers (myself included) are indebted to the Church for the public speaking exposure sacrament meetings offer lay members, but would it kill to let the ordained bishops and Relief Society presidents speak more often? They have the weight of ecclesiastical office. Let’s hear their thoughts. (And note that I said RS presidents too. Mormon men need to get used to hearing women speak with spiritual authority.)
The Morningsong or Musical Service
The resources required to pull of the evensong services of the Anglican Church are considerable and prohibitive for most LDS congregations. But there is something sublime and divine about them. For those members for whom music is the medium of spiritual encounter, the salve to the soul, the trigger of sacred feelings, a musical sacrament would be so nourishing and transportive!
Evensong is obviously held in the evenings, but I see no reason why Mormons can’t do some kind of ‘morningsong’ or musical service. If there are resources (good musicians, choirs, rehearsals), a sacrament meeting could begin with carefully selected sacred music—some congregational hymns, some choral performance, some instrumental pieces—and musically build up to the sacrament as the service’s aesthetic crescendo. Following this, the music could soften towards a reverent, prayerful, musical benediction.
With some thumping organ postlude that thrills and invigorates. I had to put that in there.
And on that point, it’s high time we recognize that what counts as ‘sacred music’ in middle-class Mormon Utah, informed as it is by white, conservative American protestantism, does not necessarily transfer to other cultures. I know there are moves in the Church’s current revision of the hymnal to explore the world’s religious repertoires, but the fear is that they’ll revert to the genre with which they’re most comfortable. We would be surprised at the depths of spiritual experience available outside our narrow musical range.
Some might bristle at the rituality of this kind of service, but we do ritual very well in the temple. Some cathedrals have seen an uptick in evensong attendance among millennials (while other services see a decline), which suggests that my generation yearns for church experiences that are aesthetically and symbolically rich. We want authentic moments that let us step out of the superficial world and into something more beautiful and stirring.
The EFY Sacrament
There is a genre of music in the Church that hearkens towards contemporary Christian music but retains some Mormonness. EFY is the closest I can come to describing it. Many bishops freely allow this kind of music in sacrament meetings already. Otherwise, they litter youth devotionals and YSA conferences.
While a rowdy sacrament service probably wouldn’t gel with most Mormons’ sense of spiritual appropriateness (right?), I think there are many who would engage with and get more out of a worship service if everything were just less stuffy and US protestant-conservative in style. They want talks that are lessons and discussions more than sermons. They want songs that resonate with their cultural expressions.
The EFY Sacrament would feel more like a devotional. It would feel loose enough not to be rigidly formal, but still retain the reverence needed for the sacrament to be holy.
I’m not advocating for all sacrament meetings to take on one of these types. Maybe some could some of the time. Maybe alternation is needed. Maybe multiple types need to be offered in stake centres where there is capacity.
Maybe just rethinking tired traditions is needed.
