My main image is a photo of my son building hymnbook towers when he was younger. I let him do this and afterwards he told me it was the first time he’d ever had fun at church.

This was my middle daughter and two nieces, who made a facedown massage line to pass the time. I was so sad nobody invited me to join!

The other day I sat down and came up with eight easy ways to make church 100 times better, based on my own personal experience as a person who once loved church…but still needed so, so much more than I received.

My parents are both converts who came from families with mixed religious backgrounds. Because of this, I attended services other than LDS meetings as a child, including my two favorites: Methodist Bible Camp in North Carolina the week of my eighth birthday (coming home to Utah to be baptized in a boring mass stake baptism right after was such a letdown of an experience after my fun week there!), and “The Rock” church, a rock-‘n’-roll Christian meeting in the south that felt more like a fun concert than a stiff and formal church meeting.

As an adult, I proactively toured other local congregations in the mid 2010s during one of my husband’s military deployments. I attended Unitarian Universalist meetings, Community of Christ, the Episcopal Church, and Alpine Bible Church. All of them had different things to offer that my LDS services were lacking. Here are the things they did well that I think we could emulate to make our meetings much more enjoyable and spiritually fulfilling:

1. Hire a full-time religious leader for each ward.

This should be someone who attended divinity school to learn how to be an effective pastor. Rely on that person for the bulk of Sunday worship speaking, not the ward members. While I understand the benefits of letting youth and regular ward members practice preparing talks and speaking in front of everyone, couldn’t it just be a small part at the beginning instead of the whole meeting? For the main sermon we could turn the time over to someone who prepares for religious discourse as their full-time job.

I loved the pastor at the Unitarian Universalist Church. She gave such beautiful lessons and I hung on to her every word. After leaving, I’d think about her sermons and stories for weeks. She was incredible at public speaking because it was her job and she was professionally trained to do it. Why are we so afraid to hire a professional clergy member to give our Sunday sermons? Think of your absolutely very favorite teacher or speaker – what if that person was the pastor and taught you every single week from the pulpit? 

2 Make the music more lively!

Why does holy have to also be so boring and so slow? I understand a reverent hymn right before the Sacrament, but why must we remain boring after that? My first experience with a rock n’ roll church was so much fun. I left feeling invigorated and excited and full of joy and energy. Absolutely nothing about it being lively and loud took away from the messages they were teaching. In fact, I was riveted to every word and couldn’t stop thinking about it afterwards! I was a teenager when I attended this meeting and it’s still locked into my memory as one of the most fun church experiences I’ve ever had.

I even remember the parking lot, because was enormous and packed with cars. If you didn’t get there early for the first meeting, you’d have to turn around and come back to get a seat at the afternoon one instead. People were going way out of their way to attend there – never out of duty or habit. It was fun!

3. Pay for professional childcare for the babies and toddlers, and hire professional youth ministry pastors to run the youth programs for kids and teenagers.

I cannot express what a difference that made for me as a young mom attending meetings solo when my husband was deployed. I normally sat in Sacrament Meetings stressed out and alone, trying to keep three bored kids quiet in one section of a pew for an hour without killing each other.

At other churches, I would drop off my baby with the professional nursery staff before the meeting began, then my older kids would leave with the youth group to meetings geared towards their interests. I would stay in the main assembly hall all by myself to listen to the sermon with no distraction, and I will tell you… It was heavenly. It felt like a break from my 24/7 childcare duties and I absorbed every second of it as opposed to dreading it and just trying to survive.

4. Solicit questions and topics from the members of the congregation so the (professional) pastor can address the topics most pressing to members of the ward.

Too often in LDS meetings we just hear one inexperienced speaker after another regurgitate a talk from the latest general conference. The talk may have absolutely nothing to do with them at that point in their life (like a teenage boy assigned a talk about eternal marriage). The talk may be irrelevant to the members of that particular ward (like a talk about keeping the Sabbath day more holy to a group of farmers who have to work on Sundays to care for their animals and crops).

If the pastor of the congregation knew what common questions and concerns the members were having, that person could study, pray and adjust their Sunday sermons to meet the local needs.

5. Let people clap!

Why on earth do we not applaud when people give a great musical performance? How is showing appreciation for their hard work not appropriate in a religious setting? And when the music is catchy (assuming we get more fun songs) why not clap along to the beat? It’s so much more engaging and energizing to be physically included in the music. 

6. Make our buildings less cookie cutter, cost effective and styled like the 1990s.

We spend so, so, so much money on temples. They are incredibly extravagant with furniture imported from around the world and high ceilings with stained glass and original artwork. Unfortunately, very few people see the inside of a temple on any given week, and certainly not any children or investigators or inactive members.

Why do we spare no expense for a very tiny portion of worshippers? They could do all of the temple ordinances just fine in a bland building, as long as it was dedicated for the work, but imagine if we had beautiful cathedrals for worship that everyone was invited into.

I once attended Catholic mass in Europe. I remember being mostly unimpressed with the service itself because it felt monotonous, but oh my… the building we worshipped in was extraordinary! Every window was a work of art. Statues and stained glass and paintings and a huge, cavernous ceiling that made you feel like you weren’t on earth anymore. It felt like heaven. And best of all, it was open to anyone, all the time. Even if the services alone didn’t appeal to me, just the beauty of the building alone made it a spiritual experience for me. 

Image from K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash.com

7. Have time set aside after services to meet, mingle and serve.

Instead of gathering my kids and immediately leaving at the end, at both the Episcopal and Unitarian Universalist churches we’d gather in a large room for drinks, food and friendship. I enjoyed talking to people and learning about them, and I loved that on certain weeks a group would leave and go to the local food bank to help sort and stock shelves.

I considered the service my ward was doing that week, which was a ward temple trip. We were carpooling to a very expensive and exclusive building to do what was often repeated work for people who were dead. I longed for a service that took us outside of our own religious community and into the general community, but we mostly served each other or dead people.

8. Finally, stop blaming the members of the church if they’re struggling to enjoy Sunday meetings.

When I was a young mom with a frequently absent military spouse, it was hard to survive Sunday meetings with small children. There are plenty of non-military wives who have the same experience because their husbands are in meetings all day and on the stand. I’d go desperately wanting to be spiritually fed but leave exhausted and sad. The only advice and help I received was to come better prepared and look for what I could do to serve others more. This didn’t help me. It shouldn’t be solely on the worn-out individual members to make church a better experience.

Members of the LDS church are highly dedicated to their religion and will continue to attend no matter how boring or bland the worship services are. But just because everyone puts up with it, doesn’t mean leaders don’t have a responsibility to improve the Sunday experience for everyone who attends.