I’ve lived in wards where the culture is to suspend activities for Relief Society, Mutual, Cub Scouts, and Activity Days during the summer. Other wards have maintained the same schedule year-round.
I see positives and negatives to doing both systems. As a kid and teenager, I loved having activities continue. As an adult who’s in charge of planning an implementing those activities, I’m happy to have a break. What does your ward do and what is your preference?
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6 Responses
I love that other churches don’t have Sunday School when public schools are not in session. That would be wonderful!
Although I voted to continue year round with activities, I would love to have just sacrament meeting during the summer months.
I recall as a child being unhappy that activities were curtailed during the summer. After all, that’s when I thought I most needed them — when I didn’t see my school friends every day. I still feel that way. Though we should encourage families to miss church activities when family activities conflict, to simply abandon the program and leave children and others untethered for the summer months makes no sense to me.
Besides — what great times for cub scouts, achievement day girls, etc., do to a lot of fun summer activities together! By September it may be too cool for a good water fight. Even one that starts out as a project to bring all the white plastic chairs from the building out to the parking lot for a good washing.
I agree with anon. It seems counterintuitive that activities would be canceled during the summer when children and teens would more likely benefit from having them since school and all of its corollary activities are not happening. I think a break from church activities would make more sense around the winter holidays than the summer. I get that there are a lot of vacations happening during the summer, but I think things could be planned with the understanding that there will always be someone gone. And maybe doing activities a little less often, or having it understood that it’s perfectly fine to cancel to accommodate leaders’ vacation plans, would deal with that.
My ward always did all of the activities all summer. It never even occurred to me that some wards canceled activities for the summer.
As a kid I think I would have voted for certain meetings to be put on hold, and definitely would have voted for some activities to be put on hold just because my dad used to require me to go to any and all youth activities even if I had planned something else, and even planned big family events so as not to conflict with certain church ones. Not everyone’s parents are like mine were though.
There was that whole summer that I was grounded and the only non-family things I was allowed to go to were church and youth activities. That summer, the activities were a Godsend…even the ones where we cleaned the tents before and after girl’s camp. Right now I’m thinking the same thing as Anon and Amelia though. Family events should definitely be prioritized first, but some families are dysfunctional or aren’t able to do much in the way of summer-time recreation and the kids really need the support system that the youth programs offer.
I’ve never even heard of meetings being lessened and/or cancelled during the summertime. It seems both magical and un-magical. Depending.