Are Sunday worship services working?
That’s the question I’ve been exploring over a series of newsletter messages.
This is part 5 and for context you can find a summary of each meeting purpose at the end of this message.
In this message I’d like to consider how we can improve the Sunday worship experience by analyzing our traditions of leaders facilitating sacrament meeting talks.
I state all this after reading 29.2.1.4 of the General Handbook which addresses sacrament meeting.
I recently polled the newsletter audience asking you what are the typical ways you see your bishopric organize sacrament meeting topics.
Here are the results from the non-scientific poll:
38% – Bishopric assigns a specific topic
27% – Bishopric assigns a General Conference talk
12% – Bishopric allows the speaker to choose topic
23% – Other (Ward Council chooses topic, Topic is related to CFM, etc.)
I didn’t find these results overly surprising; however, I don’t think the issue is so much how leaders assign the topic as much as how they prepare the speaker.
Preparation is key to improve the first hour of the Sunday worship experience!
I’ve mentioned previously that during my time as bishop we had a specific process that improved our sacrament meeting talks tremendously.
Here is an article I wrote about it long ago.
In short, we would invite the speaker early (4-6 weeks or longer) and the initial invitation would come via email.
We would also send them detailed expectations related to their talks.
This dramatically decreased the likelihood of unclear topics or even silly stories about how the bishopric invited them to speak.
I also think there could be more done to offer upcoming speakers support and direction as they develop their talk.
This would look different from ward to ward and may not be necessary for some speakers, but imagine if after an individual is invited to speak they then have a regular support class they go to (maybe during the second hour) where they can share ideas and get feedback from other individuals in the ward.
This would allow individuals to work out any kinks in their presentation and help guide them to a message that is focused on Jesus Christ and doctrine.
I’d love to hear any ideas you have because I am sure there are hundreds of ways to approach this.
The main point of my message is that we can improve the quality of our Sunday worship services exponentially by taking a few more steps in the preparation of sacrament meeting speakers.
Summaries of meeting purposes found in the General Handbook
Sacrament Meeting: Take the sacrament, worship, build faith and testimony, conduct ward business. (29.2.1)
Sunday School: Teach doctrine of the kingdom, support all learning and teaching. (13.1)
Relief Society: Save souls, relieve suffering, accomplish the work of salvation and exaltation, serve others, build unity, and learn and live doctrine. (9.1.1)
Elders Quorum: Accomplish the work of salvation, serve others, learn and live doctrine. (8.1.1)
Sincerely,
Kurt Francom
Executive Director
Leading Saints
P.S. This is an older newsletter message. Get the up-to-date message weekly by subscribing for free HERE.
P.P.S. Read this series of messages starting HERE.
Thanks for sharing this article. I’m a sister who serves in a ward council. I keep thinking about asking the bishopric if they’ve had instructions from the Area Presidency to only assign General Conference talks to members to talk about. But I’m afraid it might come off as criticism. It doesn’t say to do that in the Handbook. But it seems like everyone is doing it now. I watch other wards’ meetings on YouTube sometimes and they are doing it also. But it doesn’t make sense and it usually is boring to me to listen to someone”give a talk on a talk.” One time we had a stake high counselor give a talk on a conference talk, which was originally 12 minutes long, but he stretched it out to 35 minutes. Sorry, this sounds awful what I’m writing. I was thinking that someone got the idea to assign conference messages to members to give talks on from Pinterest and the idea just spread by word of mouth or by new move-ins whose previous wards did it and they got called to leadership positions. But if it is instruction from Area Presidency then I’ll shut up about it. It just makes Sacrament Meeting boring and distracting, because it’s usually like a book report. I’d rather listen to the original. Wouldn’t people grow more spiritually and have more opportunities to practice receiving personal revelation if they were asked to either choose their own topic or given a general topic like, Repentance, Sacrifice, Charity, Faith in Christ, etc. And perhaps the bishopric could recommend a conference message as study resource? Because if people are assigned a conference talk to give a talk on, it kind of treats them like children whom they don’t trust. I understand that they pray which conference talks to assign for each month as messages we need to hear, but maybe instead they could recommend that we all study those 3 or so conference talks for the month on our own. Also Relief Society and Elders’ Quorum prayerfully choose conference talks to have lessons on for each month also. So we are quite inundated. Last time I was assigned a conference talk to give a talk on, I gave a talk on a topic that was related to the conference talk and shared one quote from it. I really don’t want to sound critical.