You know how how there are rumors occasionally flying of some letter from the First Presidency that some people say their bishops and stake presidents have said exists or reads to them, and others say their bishops or stake presidents have confirmed that no such letter exists? I’m in the middle of that right now, but it’s not for anything that important. However, I must know! I must! (Even though it changes nothing.)
So does anyone know if there is a letter from the First Presidency that says that it is up to the discretion of the respective stake presidents whether to have the full 3-hour block on Christmas Eve day? I have some friends and family who say there is such a letter, and their wards are indeed only having sacrament meeting. I have some other friends who are quite certain that no such letter exists, and their wards are having the full block, not because their stake president decided to do it that way, but because no letter exists.
(My ward is having the full 3-hours of meetings.)
My Bishop said that the First Presidency offered no direction on holding the entire block of meetings (I don’t recall if that message came by letter or not), after which he said, “We will therefore be having all three hours of church on the 24th.” (My ward starts at 2:00 p.m.)
My wife and I will attend Sacrament meeting only on Sunday, as we will be at my parent’s home at 5:30 p.m. that evening for a traditional Christmas Eve dinner and reading about the Savior’s birth from the Bible.
Our Bishop told us the decision had been left to individual Bishop’s discretion by the First Presidency (though he didn’t say if this is what he had heard directly or what the Stake President had said). His decision was one I appreciate. We are having only Sacrament meeting, and it will be two talks about the Savior along with the Primary and Ward Choir singing Christmas hymns. Some of my favorite Christmastime meetings have been these types of meetings, so I’m looking forward to it.
We’ll then head over to our in-laws for our traditional dinner, which will be early because they’re only attending Sacrament that day even though their ward is meeting for the full block.
This is actually what most the people I know have all three meetings are doing. And I remember how empty my primary class was last time Sunday fell right before or after Christmas.
I would do what many seem to be doing and attend sacrament meeting only (because I’m going to my parents’ house as soon as church is over), but we have sacrament meeting last. It wouldn’t get me home any sooner. Alas.
I had a conversation about this with my step-dad over dinner tonight. He is the stake clerk and would be privy to such a letter. He said that no such letter exists.
He also implied that the first presidency prefers us to have all of our regular meetings, but I don’t know how much of that was just his own opinion.
We’re having sacrament service, at 2:00, and then, get this, a light reception after, with snacks, desserts, etc.! We’re going Protestant 🙂
We decided on sacrament only due to staffing of classes, but the idea to have a “chat and chew” afterwards was a brilliant idea on the part of our 1st counselor in the Bishopric. Gives those who want to a chance to mingle and talk, and those who need to leave can do so.
I have no idea about a letter and haven’t heard about one either way, but my ward is just having a slightly-longer sacrament meeting in the middle of our usual block.
We are having the full three hours, but our church starts at 9 a.m. Most people don’t have Christmas Eve plans before noon. I think it is a good way to keep the day more Christ focused.
As to the question as to whether or not there is a letter …
There doesn’t have to be *a letter* in order for stakes to instruct bishops to use their discretion, and not all instruction received by stakes comes in a formal “letter” that is also sent to the bishops. Stake leaders receive instruction from the GAs all the time.
I don’t know if any such letter exists, but it could very well be that no formal letter exists but yet there are members who assume that because the SP is granting discretionary authority, he must have a letter telling him he could do that.
According to my bishop, there was a letter LAST YEAR when Christmas Day fell on a Sunday.
This year, the stake says that in the absence of such guidance, the bishop has no right to alter the meeting schedule, and so we are doing the 3-hour block.
Our ward Christmas choir sacrament meeting presentation has to be before then, because of folks leaving. It was yesterday. I had set up my Gospel Doctrine schedule so this week would be free, and now I am having to/getting to write a special lesson about Christin the Old Testament.
No letter, I am on the High Council in our Stake and there has been no letter to-date which means there is not going to be any letter, and it is very clear that the Bishop can only modify Sacrament meeting at the discretion of the First Presidency via letter through the Stake Presidency and since no letter has been received, then the 3 hour block holds for this coming Sunday and also the next. #9 is right. There was a letter in 2005 as I saw it for myself as I was in the Bishopric and our Stake President has only ever made changes to meeting structure when he receives a ‘Letter’ from the First Presidency.
#10 is right. I am the exec secretary for our ward, and there was a letter last year, but none this year. Our Stake President wrote a letter to each ward saying that there was no such letter, and in the absence from further direction from the FP, the 3 hour block will be held.
That being said, we had some renovations in the chapel a while back, and for about three weeks in a row, we only had sacrament meeting. I don’t know that we had any guidance from the brethren about that one.
No letter this year.
Our bishop missed bishopric meeting yesterday, but left instructions for us to solve the ward’s problems in his absence.
Accordingly, we decided (1) to eliminate all meetings except Sacrament meeting for the rest of the year (depending on how that goes, we may do the same for all of next year, and perhaps decrease Sacrament meeting to 60 minutes, instead of 70), (2) install a big screen television for Superbowl Sunday, and have refreshments, (3) to send back to Salt Lake the membership records for anyone who hasn’t attended church for a month or so (which should increase our attendance and retention percentages), and (4) to reduce tithing to 5% (should not affect our budget allocation, since that turns on Sacrament attendance, which may increase with our other forwardthinking solutions (see 1 & 2, above).
Our bishop’s response? “Nice try.”
Most wards in my stake are doing sacrament meeting only. Our meeting will be 1.5 hours. My brother up in SLC is having a 1 hour meeting only. My parents are getting the 3-hour block and thus have decided to attend church with my brother and his wife.
We’re only having 2 hours of meetings the next week. A sacrament meeting and then a combined PH/RS meeting, no SS.
It was announced in my ward yesterday that we will be doing the 3-hour block both this Sunday (Christmas Eve) and the following Sunday (New Year’s Eve). We meet at 11:00am. Valencia, California.
The St. George ward I belong to will have an abbreviated SM – only 1 speaker, no more than 30 minutes. My Bishop wants to get everyone home to spend the holiday with their families instead of meetings. i liked his comment, he said “that’s what we’re all about – families. Let’s shorten the meetings for the holiday.”
So what would happen of the Bishop did cancel the last two hours? Is the FP going to revoke the ward’s franchise license?
Naia:
I am giving a GD lesson based on the my O Tannenbaum post over at my blog. I think it is a good way to tie a traditional Christmas symbol in with important doctrines in the Old and New Testament, each symbolized by a tree.
Are we the only Christians that attend less church on Christmas?
AFAIK, we’re having the entire 3 hours. But I’ve heard the auxillaries are all just going to bring food. My husband’s in the EQ presidency, and they’re talking about cooking some pizzas.
“I teach them correct principles, and they govern themselves.”
gst, I think less church on Christmas is a good idea when 2/3 of church would consist of classes that would be completely unrelated to Christmas (which is what happens most often because teachers don’t seem to want to deviate in any way from the lesson schedule). Now, if the lessons in the various classes were Christmas-related, I’m all for all 3 hours of church. Sadly, such happenings are definitely in the minority. If church isn’t going to have anything to do with Christmas, I think it is much more appropriate to only have the one hour.
I’m actually game for even more church because I like to seek out some random Protestant or Catholic church to attend their Christmas Eve services. I used to bemoan the lack of LDS Christmas Eve services, but then I realized the other churches do such services pretty well, and it gives me a chance to do something a bit out of my norm, so it’s actually a good thing.
I don’t know about the rest of the manuals, but the primary manuals all contain lessons for both Christmas and Easter.
If church doesn’t have anything to do with Christmas, then we should cut it down to nothing, including during the rest of the year.
Susan M, yes, that’s true. But outside of Primary none of the manuals do. It is fair game to have a Christmas lesson, but the teacher would have to depart from the scheduled lesson and prepare it him or herself. Most don’t (at least in the wards I’ve been in; I hope others have had better experiences).
gst, with some creativity, we can find a Christmas relationship from any lesson – tithing, the importance of getting an education (what the YW lesson in my ward will be on Christmas Eve), etc. However, wouldn’t it be better to make it a bit more direct?
For my Gospel Doctrine lesson, I am going to talk about Christ in the Old Testament, and will spend a good bit of the lesson talking about Handel’s Messiah, which will get us reading much of Isaiah.
Our stake president spoke in sacrament meeting yesterday, and he said that they had received “direction” (he didn’t necessarily say “letter”) from a member of the Seventy/Area President indicating that it was up to the individual stake presidents to determine how best to handle the situation. For what it’s worth, we’re having all 3 hrs in a 11:00 am Lehi stake.
My bishop didn’t mention anything about a letter, but he did come out a couple of Sundays ago and say that we’d be having all three hours of meetings on Christmas Eve.
The interesting thing about it (at least to me), was that the sister sitting in front of me kind of got huffy and started shaking her head in dissagreement. This kind of surprised me because really, if you have family coming in or want to just hang out on Christmas Eve, there’s nothing that says that you’ll be going to H-E-Double-Toothpicks if you leave after sacrament meeting. I just thought it was odd to get visibly upset over it.
Regarding Christmas lessons, I teach 15 year old youth and we’re going to have a cookie pot-luck and i’m bringing the milk and we’ll watch an appropriate christmas video. One of the girls in my class suggested it and I thought it sounded like a good idea.
We’re doing the summary, after 5 weeks of build-up, of the Christmas lesson about the prophets of old testifying of the coming of Christ. And I didn’t know for sure, until 45 minutes before giving my lesson yesterday, whether or not we’d be having a full block of meetings on the 24th. So, the summary lesson is mostly already written out.
My bottom line, in Primary at least, is that we get a ridiculously short amount of time to instruct the kids (it comes out to 277 hours of real learning over 8 years, if they show up every week from CTR-5 through Valiant 12, and every class actually involves instruction instead of “Spiritual Hangman”) and they have a lot to learn, and why not have those meetings? Some of the kids in the ward only pray once every third week or so, because that’s when it’s their turn to pray in class.
And they’ll only get half a dozen or so Christmas lessons in church on Sundays, possibly in their entire life (assuming the current content of other lesson manuals can be used to predict future content.) Most of the things I’ve been teaching them about prophets testifying of Christ, I either learned from Jewish people in my family, or learned while preparing this set of lessons. It’s not like we kill the topic of Christmas around the church — kind of the opposite of Catholicism. Same goes with Easter — we talk about it once a year, in Primary, and they devote forty straight days every year to the whole topic.
On the other hand, if I were attending Sunday School and Relief Society instead of Primary, and I knew the lessons weren’t going to be about Christmas, I’d probably go home after Sacrament. I’m prepared for the “none of my kids have shown up today” scenario on the 24th, especially since I lost half my class two weeks ago to a ward boundary change. ^_^
(our bishopric apparently didn’t even think anyone would have a question about the issue — they gave a “since so many people have asked, yes we will have three hours of church next week” announcement on Sunday.)
They refinished out cultural hall floor one Saturday causing the first ward to meet to start having people vomit. So when our ward started the Bishop said we’d be taking the sacrament then going home. I’ve never seen so many big smiles in Sacrament meeting.
I don’t understand that. Just don’t attend that week. My wife and I wouldn’t have attended the full block anyway because of family, our ward only doing Sacrament just means we didn’t have to find a substitute for our primary class.
It seems weird to see all the fuss. In 41 years of church attendance I can’t remember ever having a full meeting on Sunday when Christmas or Christmas Eve fell on the Sabbath. In fact, I’ve been in wards that just did the Sacrament meeting/Christmas Program even when Christmas fell during the week . Do we need a First Presidency letter for everything these days? My family is in a new ward this year and they’re having the long Sacrament meeting only. At least one ward in the building will have the full meeting. To me it’s no big deal. The Bishop makes the call and we go from there. If there’s a family gathering that necessitates leaving church early, so be it. Leaving church early a few times a year to spend quality time with one’s family is definitely not what I’d call a sin…
I teach the 13-year-olds’ Sunday School class. I asked them if they want a Christmas lesson on the 24th or something else. They were plain that they would like my class to be a break from Christmas unless I come up with something completely different from what they will hear the rest of the day.
Two Sundays ago in my ward it was announced, from the pulpit, that we would only have sacrament meeting on the 24th. Last Sunday, that decision was reversed, again from the pulpit. I don’t know the full story yet, but I suspect my stake presidency stepped in to override a decision made by my bishop.
We meet from 1:00 to 4:00. I teach Gospel Doctrine (on the really Christmas-y theme of Ezra and Nehemiah), and so I must be there for the full block. And I expect to be teaching a classroom of less than ten people.
We only met for one hour last year and we will only meet for one hour this year. I think it’s kind of cool. Actually, I could go for that all time.
Maybe skipping out on meetings for whatever reason is a sin. Isn’t attending your church meetings one of the Temple Questions?
Strange they don’t ask you about how much time you spend with your family.
Which could be a good thing, depending on the family.
It is my understanding that Stake Presidents had to get approval from area authorities.