The Church Splashpad

My wife and I recently taught Primary in our LDS ward.

Singing time went well. The kids learned some beautiful songs, and the lyrics were uplifting.  Not all the songs in primary are always ones I find uplifting, but the ones this week were.  The chorister used sign language to help the children learn and remember the words. It was sweet and sincere.

But the current LDS second-hour schedule allowed only 25 minutes for Primary class. That is the same amount of time the new Church second-hour schedule will have for everyone once it goes live this fall.  By the time the kids got a drink and settled there was not much time left.  

Even with 10-year-olds, 20-ish minutes was not enough time to do much more than walk through a gospel splash pad. It was more like a sprinkling of topics, scripture phrases, and vocabulary words. We were able to make one or two points, but we ran out of time before there seemed to be space for a substantive lesson.

This is not how Church felt in my younger years. We are losing something, and many seem to not notice, not care, or assume that all is well in Zion.  

Gone are the days, at least in that setting, of swimming in the deep end of the gospel pool. The church schedule structure itself seems to allow less and less room for any degree of depth. What's left feels more like a sprinkler that drips for a few minutes one day a week.

That saddens me.  This is not what Christ offered the world.  

The superficiality is not going to feed hungry souls. And from what I can see as I look around, souls are hungry. People need more than religious vocabulary. They need time, stillness, teaching, searching, repentance, testimony, and real engagement with the Gospel.

Yet instead of being given room to swim and immerse our minds in gospel truth, we are increasingly squeezed into a weekly sprinkling with little chance of thirst being quenched.  

More and more, it seems to be left to the individual and the family to search into the things of God. Weekly religious services may still invite and provide time for limited interaction, but they no longer seem designed to give us a lot of substance.

So maybe the honest reality is that if we are hungry, we cannot rely on an institutions at all to feed us. The religious tools are offering less and less. We will have to seek, ask, knock, study, pray, and go to the Lord ourselves.  

And maybe that has always been the real test anyway.