In a recent comment on the Ten Commandments of Speaking of Church, Jim told us about an experiment he once performed with Sacrament Meeting Talks:
For about 1 year, I kept a record of the talks in Sacrament Meeting. I organized each talk into one of three categories – A ) talks that explicitly mentioned the Savior, B ) talks that included some indirect reference to the Savior, and C ) talks that did not mention the Savior at all (except for the obligatory “in the name of…” at the end).
I don’t remember the final numbers, but proportionally, the talks for each category (A:B:C) fell out something like 1:5:4 – and that included monthly testimonies by Bishopric members, ward conference, high councilors, etc.
I never shared my survey with anyone at the time – it was only for my own amusement, since I wasn’t getting much else out of the talks at the time).
Still, I think the results show at least one reason why I wasn’t getting much out of the talks.
Jim’s post gave me an idea. I’d like to repeat and extend Jim’s experiment, but this time, harness the power of the bloggernacle to do it.
Here is what I propose:
I would like as many bloggernacle participants as possible to voluntarily keep track of how often the savior is spoken about in their sacrament meeting talks this Sunday the Sunday of March 12 and then report back here on Monday [March 13th]. In this way we should be able to get a broad snapshot of sacrament meeting talks from many different locations.
I need your help in defining the parameters of the experiment:
1. Should we use Jim’s grouping of talks that mention the savior directly, obliquely, and not at all, or should we use a different system?
2. Should we limit ourselves to just identifying how often the savior is discussed in sacrament meeting, or should we add a couple of other topics like how many talks read from the Book of Mormon vs. the Bible? Or how often Joseph Smith is mentioned or talked about explicitly? Or maybe we should save those topics for future experiments?
3. I’m sure that there are those of you out there who have experience that you can use to help us refine our experiment. What else?
We should define parameters for how to report so that we don’t end up with duplicate data from people in the same ward.
We can use the time between now and Saturday March 11th to get organized. This could be a groundbreaking development in the bloggernacle.