Gordon Monson: I worry that boredom at church, as much as anything else, scares away Latter-day Saints

Imperfect is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints because it is run by and filled with imperfect people who do imperfect things. Yeah, two plus two equals four.

Pretty much everyone around here knows Utah’s predominant faith is a lay church, at least through most of its levels. The top leaders get their checks and would be considered professionals based on the traditional definition. They’re paid for their imperfection.

Almost all the others — area leaders, stake presidents, bishops, Relief Society presidents, counselors, clerks, teachers, speakers in Sunday meetings, missionaries — are not paid. They are asked to fill those significant roles, nonetheless, as duty-bound volunteers. Their training might be and often is limited because, well, they’re amateurs. They’re winging it, relying on varying amounts of education, life experience and common sense to get church jobs — known as “callings” — done.

Sometimes, it’s a smooth, nearly flawless fit. Sometimes, it’s a 50-car pileup.

Callings and teaching and speaking assignments are supposed to be issued by lay leaders to congregants via, in church vernacular, promptings of the spirit. Those promptings sometimes come in the form of bursts of inspiration from heaven, but some come only dressed up as that. They instead may be generated from personal biases or friendships or indigestion bubbling up in the gut from scarfing two plates of bad lasagna the night before. This is a huge gray area, a game that, like golf, can never be won, only played. Played off, too often, as the will of the Almighty, when in reality it comes down to what’s convenient for the bishop or whoever’s extending the call or the assignment.

Human beings doing human things.

Either way, the process gives regular folks the chance to serve in the faith, to apply and share their understanding of Latter-day Saint doctrines and teachings with fellow followers in hopes of bettering church members’ lives, improving their worship, guiding them along a bumpy path toward heaven. On a side note, the service comes free of charge to the church, which contributes to an astoundingly healthy organizational bottom line. Free labor. Even custodial duties at meetinghouses are spread around among congregants. Dust the pews, vacuum the chapel floor, clean the windows and empty the garbage bins — all in the good name of God.

Nothing advances faith quite like scrubbing toilets, scraping chewed gum off tables and straightening scattered chairs, at least that’s the party line from a religion that knows the value of sending out a clarion call for unpaid helping hands that are promised celestial rewards for their earthly efforts.

Put your shoulder to the wheel, push along. God, apparently, likes that kind of pushing and pulling. It’s certainly baked into the Latter-day Saint way of life.

You sometimes get what you pay for

The problem with depending on a bunch of amateurs inside the church, especially in promoting increased faith among members, can be exactly that — they’re amateurs. Sometimes they don’t know what they’re doing or don’t know the best way to lead, teach, inspire and motivate.

Consequently, Latter-day Saint gatherings, including sacrament meetings, the faith’s main Sunday worship service, as well as instructional classes of various kinds — such as Sunday school — for adults and kids, can be an utter drag. In some cases, they’re about as boring, as redundant and remedial, as unimaginative and uninspiring as learning and relearning the alphabet.

I’m not saying all of Latter-day Saint doctrines and teachings are simple or for simpletons. Quite the opposite. They can be as deep and mentally and spiritually invigorating as whoever is teaching a class, leading a discussion or giving a sermon wants or is able to make it. It’s not even that the complexities of the church’s gospel are required to be highlighted to make the whole endeavor compelling. What I am saying is that there’s double-barreled difficulty in the church’s approach to engendering greater understanding and faith among its followers by its followers.

The first is that many preachers and teachers inside the church are just plain lousy at it. They may be good-hearted, well-intended and well-prepared, but they’re as dry, drab and dull as the devil.

Someone once asked former church President Spencer Kimball, “What do you do if you find yourself caught in a boring sacrament meeting?” The faith leader responded: “I don’t know; I’ve never been in one.”

Well, with apologies to President Kimball, I have. A whole lot of them. And so have too many other Latter-day Saints.

Thing is, it might not even be speaker Brother Bill’s or teacher Sister Sally’s fault. They’re doing their best. He might be a plumber, for crying out loud, an expert at fixing leaky pipes, not stirring theological rumination. She could be an accountant, not an ecclesiastical educator. And yet, here we are, looking for ways to stay awake.

The second is a different matter, one that’s the church’s own fault — its emphasis on keeping lessons and talks firmly inside the guardrails of narrow and strict doctrine, so much so that they are made to be stale and monotonous. Even monotony can be intriguing if it is presented in a way that allows for varied modern-day application of doctrinal principles.

Getting real with religion

There’s a move among some in the church for more open and honest discussion among members in class settings, discussion that could air and stir differing ideas regarding attitudes about and understanding of paying tithing or following the Word of Wisdom or keeping the Sabbath holy or even saying prayers and seeking divine inspiration. Imagine what candor and authentic expression could do for Latter-day Saints who struggle with, say, the way LGBTQ people in the faith are treated, the way women are prevented from being real decision-makers in church affairs, or how and why certain family members and friends wander in their personal faith journeys.

Instead, this sort of real-life openness and authenticity is, at least in many church circles, discouraged. What is offered in its place are the same basic fundamentals, the canned responses that were taught and clung to a hundred years ago. But that appears to be what some leaders prefer — rudimentary doctrines unrelentingly hashed and rehashed, in classes, in meetings, to the point of numbing the truthful feelings of even the faithful, the faithful who seek further explanation, further answers to grow their faith. Efforts to charge the faculty at church-owned Brigham Young University with more monolithic thinking are evident to those employed at the school who privately express frustration that the aim of leadership isn’t the pursuit of truth but rather the pursuit of compliance.

And that educational aim and attitude can be found in foyers, at pulpits and in priesthood and Relief Society rooms, far and wide, throughout the church — a type of hammering away with the crude tools of orthodoxy and obedience via the swinging of bald-faced boredom upon the minds and souls of congregants.

Maybe the church wants to cull the herd and simply let the hungry, the eager to learn, the defiant walk out of church doors. The defectors then could be replaced by the happily bored, those who find comfort in hearing the same limited messages over and over again, those who do not want discussion or expression, rather the familiar humdrum that reaffirms to them that everything is OK, as long as they don’t ask questions and quietly, dutifully follow along. Sacrament meeting speakers and Sunday school teachers might present no fresh perspectives, spurring no deep thought, just passing along the same quotes and scriptural passages as members have heard a thousand times before. There’s safety in that.

There’s less safety in discussing, dissecting and debating whether the story about Captain Moroni, a Book of Mormon commander, was an account of heroism or a cautionary tale.

I’d prefer lessons that allow for — as I not so long ago experienced in one rare class — exchanges about how Book of Mormon prophet Lehi might have found a better way to teach sons Laman and Lemuel than to hound them about obedience. The way it turned out, Laman and Lemuel hated their more “righteous” brothers, causing a split in the family that led to death and destruction for generations. Somebody suggested that Laman and Lemuel might have feared their brother Nephi, who was supposed to be the righteous one among them, because they’d actually seen him steal brass plates and kill the previous holder of them. Another class member suggested that Nephi may have been a prophet and all, but he was also, and I quote here, “a thief and a murderer.” That was something I’d never heard before, but, yes, it did spawn thought, especially as it pertains to the way to live our best lives these thousands of years later.

All of which is to say, don’t bore rank-and-file members with the same ol’ same ol’, let them, you know, explore and think these things through, and come to their own conclusions. Let them voice what’s on their minds.

A church that consistently has told its members to rely on the aforementioned spirit for direction, that that’s their right, their privilege, can give those same members space to hear and study and ponder various paths to the truth, to find it without being afraid that such exploration will lead to apostasy.

The way I figure it, boredom and its twin siblings, educational torpidity and weariness, are just as likely to chase away members.

Editor’s note • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.