Remembering the Time Commitment of Mormonism

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During both Lent and Advent, there is a large time commitment required for an organist to be at church. I have longer choir rehearsals, meetings with musicians, worship meetings, and so forth. The closer I get towards Easter and Christmas, the more stretched I feel. In the busiest season, my schedule looks like this:

Sunday - Church (2.5 hours), Hymn Selection (0.5 hours)
Monday - Private rehearsal (1 hour)
Tuesday - Private rehearsal (1 hour)
Wednesday - Choir practice (2 hours)
Thursday - Private rehearsal (1 hour)
Friday - Private rehearsal (1 hour)
Saturday - Program run through (0.5 hours)

9.5 hours a week during the busiest season. Consider that this is also on top of doing things with family, friends, and a full time job. Needless to say, I feel very stretched. Always, the week before Christmas and the week before Easter I eat out almost every meal except for breakfast, I feel like I'm running to the church constantly, and there is always a list that is incomplete.

Then I remember what it used to be like (I had three musical callings which kept me very busy):

Sunday - Church (3.5 hours), Choir (1 hour)
Monday - Family Home Evening (2 hours), private rehearsal (1 hour)
Tuesday - Private rehearsal (1 hour)
Wednesday - Private rehearsal (1 hour), spouse at mutual (2 hours)
Thursday - Private rehearsal (1 hour), spouse at committee meeting (1.5 hours)
Friday - Private rehearsal (1 hour)
Saturday - Private rehearsal (1 hour)

16 hours a week during a normal week. That was on top of all things of life. Because I had four children at home, my private rehearsal time started in my basement with headphones at 10 PM. I had to wake up the next day to go to work at 5 AM. I ate terribly, my then-wife and I ate out all the time because we didn't have any time. We were handing off kids left and right, running here and there. We were insanely busy.

Where did we find time to grocery shop? Where did we find time to do yard work? I'm amazed that we survived. But when I look back at what we were doing with our lives, we were both incredibly stressed out, both of us were gaining weight (from eating out constantly or just grabbing snacks on the way), we were not getting sleep, we were drifting apart, and we were getting sick constantly. We were miserable all the time.

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(continued)

Today:

- I am active in my church life
- I have a full time job
- I am a single parent of four children Friday, Saturday, and Sunday
- I am a single parent of one on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday
- I have a part time job of about 5 hours per week and 10 hours during the busy season
- I have a time consuming hobby
- I do about 2 hours a week in community service work

Even with these time commitments, I'm still able to find time for myself. Tuesday nights I go to a Science Fiction group and hang out. I go to bed and 8 solid hours a night. I get at least an hour to decompress at the end of the day and read or watch something. Saturdays I spend most of the afternoon playing with my children. Outside of two weeks a year, I'm not feeling stretched. I'm quite relaxed. I can eat healthy, cook my meals, and do what I need to do while still being heavily involved.

What gets me is that the average Mormon family has a much higher commitment level to the church. Yet even then, that doesn't count for all the other things that they are required to do like scripture study, seminary, home/visiting teaching, and so forth. When I look at it, I was very active in my three callings and I still didn't have enough time (6 hours of sleep) to get everything done that I was commanded to do. Things fell by the wayside and I felt so guilty for letting my scripture study slide as my children became older. I was (when younger) a great home teacher, then I wasn't.

What is saddest to me is that there isn't much being accomplished. Most of what we were doing as Mormons was merely busy work. What I do now enriches my community, my children, and myself. I'm growing as a person constantly. When I was Mormon I was shrinking.

[Red Ryder]

Hey Doc!

I've loved your posts over the years talking about your new church and perspective from behind the organ and musical programs your involved in. Ironically the family oriented church takes the most time away from family.

Tell us about your time consuming hobby?

[Reuben]

I think the time that active LDS members commit to the church is mostly put into maintaining the organization. And it's a high-maintenance organization. So I'm not surprised at all that your new church requires a lot less.

As evidence, I give the following.

• Fast and Testimony meeting, wherein members spend almost all their time convincing each other of the LDS church's truth claims and goodness. God and Jesus often get air time, but almost always in the context of their personal involvement in the speaker's life, which strengthens the church's claims to divine intervention at every level.
• Discourse on the Word of Wisdom, which usually spends 80% of the time justifying how the WoW forbids certain substances, some of which are actually good for you. The WoW's largest effect, which only a few progressive members ever bring up, is to enforce the boundary between inside and outside, which strengthens commitment to the organization.
• Discourse on tithing, whose main blessing is increased personal investment, which strengthens commitment to the organization.
• Hours upon hours spent indexing, searching out ancestors, and sitting in the temple, whose main blessings are increased personal investment and reification of Mormon metaphysics, which both strengthen commitment to the organization.
• Discourse on behavioral standards of all kinds, of which 25% help keep people from making some of the worst mistakes in life, 25% help people get from "not wicked" to "actually good," and 50% are only virtue signalling and boundary enforcement, which strengthen commitment to the organization.
• Discourse on the pseudo-history of the LDS church, the fact that it's the One True Church, how we know it, gratitude for the blessings of such, etc.
• Discourse on the LDS church's unique doctrines, what we know, how we know it, gratitude for the blessings of such, etc.
• Discourse on spiritual feelings, which are trained to confirm the LDS church's truth claims, and have neutral utility at best in other contexts.
• Youth activities, which, even when they're not spent on further indoctrination, serve to bind the youth more tightly to the LDS church via strengthening their relationships with LDS friends, so they'll be more likely to stay.
• The fact that when I stopped believing as YM president, I avoided teaching over half the lessons because I couldn't find much in them that would help the young men actually become better people.
• The fact that when I was released and was seeking self-improvement in the discourse at church, I found only a little, and almost nothing that was free of an attempt at manipulating me into accepting it or tying it to a truth claim that would strengthen commitment to the organization.
• All the time spent planning and implementing all this stuff, which keeps the LDS church running and strengthens commitment to the organization.

If we were to strip the activities, discourse and administration down to things that only built community and helped members become better people, we would end up needing less than 25% of the time we currently spend to do it.

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I think the time that active LDS members commit to the church is mostly put into maintaining the organization. And it's a high-maintenance organization.

I agree. The high-maintenance is often just indoctrination which is fascinating.

In other sense every church is high-maintenance in that it is held on the backs of volunteers. While there are professional positions in my church which is roughly the size of a ward (195 active), there are only two full-time employees and four part-time employees. Many callings are pulled into one position:

- Bishopric (3 people), Sunday talks -> 1 full-time priest
- Bulletins, correspondence, membership, appointments -> 1 full-time administrator
- Choir director, ward music coordinator -> 1 part-time music director
- Organist, pianist, hymn selection, instrument maintenance -> 1 part-time organist
- Young men's, young women's, and primary presidents -> 1 part-time youth director
- Financial clerk (plus a lot of stuff handled at the COB by CPAs) -> 1 part-time CPA

Heck, you can eliminate cleaning the church, we contract out cleaning to a janitorial company.

BUT, if you think of all the other callings in the church outside of these, everyone generally has a job to do. People still organize parties, events, funerals, weddings, leadership (we have 12 leaders), Sunday school teachers, children's teachers, coffee hours, hospital visitors, communion ministers, readers, choir singers, bell ringers, etc.

Everyone still has a job, it still is run on the backs of volunteers, it took me a bit to figure out the big difference and thanks to your post I think I have it.

#1 - Indoctrination is not a requirement, nobody is REQUIRED to attend Sunday School, there isn't an organized family night with correlated material, youth group meets usually once a month (dinner provided) rather than once a week.

# 2 - People choose what they do, which allows people to coordinate their time that best fits their schedule. This lends to people working in what they are well-suited and interested in doing, and at the same time allows a family to figure out what works for their schedule. That has helped me figure out what best works. For example, I visit the sick on Tuesdays in the hospital: that night I don't have children at home and correspond it with the time I spend at the hospital doing my other volunteer work there.

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Tell us about your time consuming hobby?

I re-read my post and it sounds like something actually interesting! It totally isn't.

My time-consuming hobby is music, but it has expanded. Outside of my normal 30 minutes of practice (on top of my rehearsal for services), I started teaching a few more students, organizing larger concerts (I'm bringing three outside organists to our area this year), coordinating "Pipe Organ Encounters" events (introducing teenagers to the pipe organ), teaching a class on classical music appreciation, and expanding into choral and instrumental composition.

[Reuben]

Tell us about your time consuming hobby?

I re-read my post and it sounds like something actually interesting! It totally isn't.

My time-consuming hobby is music, but it has expanded. Outside of my normal 30 minutes of practice (on top of my rehearsal for services), I started teaching a few more students, organizing larger concerts (I'm bringing three outside organists to our area this year), coordinating "Pipe Organ Encounters" events (introducing teenagers to the pipe organ), teaching a class on classical music appreciation, and expanding into choral and instrumental composition.

I fail to see how this is uninteresting. :p

[Reuben]

# 2 - People choose what they do, which allows people to coordinate their time that best fits their schedule. This lends to people working in what they are well-suited and interested in doing, and at the same time allows a family to figure out what works for their schedule. That has helped me figure out what best works. For example, I visit the sick on Tuesdays in the hospital: that night I don't have children at home and correspond it with the time I spend at the hospital doing my other volunteer work there.

SilentDawning over at StayLDS.com is always going on about this, and comparing how he runs his charity with what he calls the "conscription model" of volunteerism. I think you're both right.

[moksha]

Tuesday nights I go to a Science Fiction group and hang out.

Great to have an activity which nourishes the soul!