For 30 years now I have been participating in lessons taught in our churches. For the last seven years since returning from my mission I've been called as a teacher, almost without exception. I am being honest when I say there are few things I love more than teaching the gospel of Jesus Christ. These years of lesson plans and Sunday sermons have lead me to a lot of thinking about one question:
Why are many of the lessons taught in our church so awful?
When I say awful, what I mean is--difficult to engage with and ineffective in producing spiritual growth. The contrast these decades of lessons strike with the mind bogglingly gorgeous, inspirational, moving, powerful principles of Christ's gospel is befuddling to me to say the least. We show up weekly to these meetings, sit through three hours of talking, then go home, unchanged. Meanwhile the miracles of Christianity remain before us, untouched. The resources and remedies for our problems go unused. The opportunities we have to connect with others in our community in meaningful and strengthening ways are missed--not always, but often enough. That, to me, is awful.
Today, after a decade of seriously turning this question over in my mind, I had an epiphany in my sacrament meeting--or rather, in the foyer where I was sitting for the last half of sacrament meeting. But before the epiphany, a couple things about me.
I hate Mother's Day. More accurately put, I hate attending church on mother's day. Every year I seem to forget what a terrible idea it is for me to participate in services that day, and every year I go to church and listen to talks about the healthy homes my fellow Mormons grew up in, their attentive mothers, the importance of being a good homemaker, how exciting it is to look forward to marriage and the crowning glory that one day I too will achieve of becoming a mother. I'm even given gifts to preemptively honor my dedication to hearth and home. Every year I go home after these lessons and cry.
This year I was half way though the first hour when I realized that I needed to just leave for the day, but I was asked to participate in a musical number, then give the closing prayer to our last meeting. I ended up staying, gritting my teeth through the entire experience. When I left church, I didn't make it home before the tears came. I pulled over and sat alone, staring into the ocean a while to process some thoughts. Why am I so upset? I asked myself. No one else seemed upset. After a few minutes of reflection I formulated the sentence. Well, I grew up in a home with very distracted or absent divorced parents, then I married a man who guilted me into becoming pregnant, treated me terribly while I was experiencing the miscarriage of his baby, then left me.
Yeah, that would do it.
I'm an artist. I'm a writer. I'm a teacher, a designer, a poet, a lover of the ocean, and a really good friend. I'm also the product of a dysfunctional marriage, the only child in my large family that still attends church, the mother of a miscarried child and a 30 year old divorcee attending a singles ward. This piece isn't about the good things or the hard things in my personal life, though there are plenty of both. It's about a problem that I often experience in church as a byproduct of some of my life experiences. This problem was perfectly illustrated by the experience I had in church today.
I believe that she is happy. I believe that she is in love, that she doesn't understand why people would choose not to experience this journey that she is embarking upon. I believe her when she says that she believes the risk, the pain, the sacrifice is all worth it, and I am happy for her. She is in a beautiful, sacred, special time in her life. That being said, I walked out of the meeting half way through her talk for a reason. That reason is the pain of staying exceeded my nourishment. Also, I felt like I did not belong, and I am tired of feeling like I don't belong. When she was preparing her remarks on marriage, she did not have me in mind. Not all talks can be written for me. That's fair and I can deal, but let me ask you this: who was that talk written for? Who did it help? And (here's the one we never ask) who did it hurt? This is the epiphany I had.
We, the teachers of lessons and givers of talks, fail to ask ourselves one critical question: Who am I talking to?
This is basic teaching skills 101. A lesson on long division is pointless when given to a college level calculus class. The most thoughtfully crafted lesson on the art of origami would be lost on a group that showed up for a guitar lesson. For the guy who just sliced his hand while making dinner, the only lesson he could possibly care about is one on stopping blood flow. This problem isn't just with marriage talks. There are more sensitive subjects than those close to home for me. This is a problem we have across the board in our educational practices as a culture.
Who is your audience? What do they need? Do you know?
If I had to describe the audience that the majority of the lessons I have heard in my life are written for, the list would look something like this:
Untouched by any serious sin.
Rock solid in their faith.
Raised in a happy, healthy home.
Part of an active LDS family.
Republican (probably).
Extremely well versed in scripture and church history.
Desirous of marriage and children at Divinity's earliest convenience.
Heterosexual and disgusted by homosexuals and homosexuality.
Incapable of or disinterested in abstract thought or innovative, authentic approaches to discussion of gospel principles.
Content, maybe even happy.
So... maybe there's a ward somewhere that looks like this, but all I can say definitively is that this sure as hell doesn't describe me. Who are these people? Have you ever met them? Can we do some scientific tests on them to see if they are human? Here's a list for you.
Experimenting with sex, alcohol and drugs.
Struggling in school, work and/or personal relationships.
Experiencing depression.
Dealing with eating disorders.
Struggling with health problems.
Devout LDS feminist.
Family member dying of cancer.
Struggles with mental health or loves someone who does.
Touched by divorce.
Victims of domestic abuse--physical, sexual, emotional, mental (the statistic on this is still 25% of women, by the way)
Victims of rape.
Debating whether they should come back to church next week.
Suicidal.
Unfaithful.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered or queer.
Bored out of their minds.
Confused.
Lonely.
Closet racist.
Had an abortion.
Addicted.
Gave a child up for adoption.
Childless by choice.
Intensely introverted.
Need I go on?
President Eyring once shared this sentiment. "When you meet someone, treat them as if they were in serious trouble, and you will be right more than half the time." It's not just me. We are a church of sinners, misfits, pain ridden, beautiful, stressed out, jacked up, flawed human beings who have this ridiculous habit of pretending like we have it all together, and it's messing us all up.
The congregation I described above? It's your congregation, and mine. For each point listed above I have a name in mind of a Latter-Day Saint I personally know that correlates. The problem is this: we teach lessons about families and honoring the priesthood to the girl who was raped by her father, the Young Men's President. We teach lessons on the importance of missionary work to the young man who is denied the opportunity, despite his righteous desires, because of a weight condition. We lecture the Elder's Quorum about their priesthood duty of selecting a woman to care for and to help them avoid sexual sin to the man who is as attracted to women as you are to a incontinent geriatric.
Do we need to teach the gospel truth? Of course we do. Is our faith composed of true, solid, worthwhile principles? Yes. I for one believe it is. Do we have to teach them the way we have become accustomed to? As if someone, somewhere may struggle with the lesson topic, but certainly no one we know, no one in the room? If we want anyone to get anything out of it, and if we want anyone to stay, we can't. There is a way to teach truth that doesn't hurt so much and that doesn't do so much damage. There's a way to teach truth so that it heals.
For me, the good of the restored gospel does outweigh the pain that comes with it, but this may not be the case for some. If you find yourself unwilling to explore that reality, ok, but don't you dare act shocked and bewildered when this generation of millennials, raised in and deeply influenced by the latter-days, walks away because the lessons we teach are not written for the challenges, realities struggles and pains they face. And for the love of all that is holy, don't send cookies to try to bring them back. The moment for reconnoissance was years ago.
This is what I ask.
The next time you are called upon to teach a lesson, please, see the people in front of you. Think about your ward or your class, specifically. If you don't know a single one, that's a problem too, and you know where to start. Once you start to really see the people in front of you, pray that you will know how to teach these vital, life sustaining, uplifting, beautiful doctrines in a way that your audience will benefit; in a way that everyone can leave edified.
It can be overwhelming, at first, to look on your ward with this new intent. It's hard to see the pain in people's eyes. It's uncomfortable to recognize dysfunction, but (and this part is important) that is what the gospel of Jesus Christ is for. Whatever it takes to access the Atonement, I vote we go with that, and I'm pretty sure alienating those who suffer is not helping in that quest. Step up. Speak up. Wake up, because I'm not the only one. You're not the only one. You're a perfectly flawed human who, like the rest of us, struggles to understand the concept that in Christ's church, nobody belongs more than you.
