Maybe I'd like my ward more if I had cancer

We know how to mobilize when people are sick or having a baby. But we don't know how to care for those whose challenges happen in quiet.

Earlier this year I attended Melissa Inouye’s funeral. It was one of those great funerals; it was a celebration of Melissa’s life. There were many, many friends and colleagues there to celebrate, and a great deal of family.

If you don’t know Melissa, she was a Church historian who focused on international history. She was easily recognizable as the “Bald Asian American Latter-day Saint Woman Scholar,” and if you didn’t see her other places you might have seen her on BYUtv. She contributed to the Church’s magnificent Global Histories, which venture outside of the Church history of pioneers and Utah, into the history of the Church and its growth in all parts of the world.¹ She also spoke up about race issues and gender issues in the Church; her books Crossings and Sacred Struggle are must-reads. She bravely fought cancer for seven years before it finally took her life.

Five days before she died, Melissa did an interview with the Salt Lake Tribune, with the stipulation that it would not be published until she had passed. The thesis of the interview, if there is one, is when she said:

I have a rock-solid testimony of the local Mormon ward.

This sentence caught me off guard. Here is a Church scholar, a gospel luminary, on the brink of moving forward past this mortal life. Here’s someone who understood love and inclusion deeply, who fought through her own marginalization, and who was now succumbing to her physical trials. And the message she wanted to leave behind was… about wards, apparently.

But why? A major element of evolving my testimony forward through questions and challenges was gaining a better understanding of what elements of our religious practice are the “gospel,” the eternal, and the God-given—and which are the “Church,” the administrative things. For example, our Heavenly Parents, and Their love for us, are eternal. The custom of taking the sacrament with your right hand is administrative; you’re not going to hell for taking the sacrament with your left hand.

And conceptually, wards are administrative. They’re geographic boundaries. Wards are a way to designate congregations without complicating things: you’re going to go to church with whoever happens to live around you. Ward boundaries can be goofy sometimes, and seemingly arbitrary, but the system works. It’s pragmatic.

And because of that, I don’t have a rock-solid testimony of wards, like Melissa did. My take on those administrative, not-core-to-the-gospel parts of our practice is that you don’t have to have a testimony of them. They just are, and they might change. Ward boundaries change all the time, and if your testimony is rooted in a certain configuration of your current ward, you might have a problem when the boundaries are realigned. Like if you had a testimony of the three-hour block, then maybe it was problematic for you when it changed to two hours. Or if you had a testimony of the Boy Scouts program being tied to the church, then you were disappointed on that one too. A testimony, in my mind, is for the things that don’t change: There is a God, Jesus Christ died for our sins, and we will live again after this life.

That’s why Melissa’s statement was jarring.

She tells a little bit more in the interview about what she meant. Specifically, she relates this story:

I remember during the pandemic, especially the early pandemic, we had just been in our ward for a few months, so I didn’t know people that well. And I remember looking with resentment at the ward organist. She was up there without a mask, spewing COVID into the air. And I thought that she was probably someone I didn’t want to get to know.

This speaks to me, because I had almost this exact same experience in my ward. Regardless of which “side” of the whole COVID/masks/vaccines/etc. thing you fall on, I fell on the side of mask-wearing and caution; at the time, my father-in-law had lung cancer and had been given six months to live several years before, and we knew that if he caught COVID it would likely be fatal. When I showed up to church and was surrounded by people without masks—even after the prophet urged us to wear them—I was deeply hurt. The people in my ward didn’t know I was wearing a mask to try to keep my father-in-law alive. They didn’t ask.

But here’s where Melissa’s experience splits off from mine. She tells about when she was diagnosed with cancer and went through chemotherapy, and her ward stepped up in a major way. Including this COVID-spewing woman who played the organ:

We’ve just gotten so much help and support from a variety of people with different capacities… it turns out she became one of the absolute champions of my family during my illness. She was actually just here this morning [which would have been five days before Melissa passed].

As Latter-day Saints, we’re good at this. When there is a clear temporal need, we rise to the occasion. When there’s a baby born or a funeral, the casseroles abound. When someone is moving, we show up with pick-up trucks. We know how to respond to these sorts of things. We’ve trained for this.

And I understand what Melissa is saying here. It’s easy to love someone when they’ve served you so much. It’s an opportunity to see people at their selfless best.

But as Latter-day Saints we don’t know how to respond to other needs our fellow ward members may have. We don’t know how to serve someone who is going through a faith crisis. We don’t know what to do with ward members struggling with depression or anxiety. Most of the time we don’t even know these things are going on. They’re less obvious, and again, we don’t ask.

I know a sister who made the hard decision to stop attending her ward because she’d experienced major challenges to her testimony (this was before my family had moved into that ward). I understand that people run into these challenges, and leaving the faith and culture and community of your childhood is a big decision. But the heart-breaking thing was that this sister later related that when she stopped attending Sunday meetings, nobody visited her. Nobody asked her why she had stopped attending. The spiritual equivalents of casseroles and pick-up trucks—incidentally, the things that we could really call “ministering”—didn’t show up. It was simple for her to stay away, then, because her ward had made disconnecting easy.

Ultimately, most of us don’t have cancer.² Our Relief Societies and Elders Quorums are queued up and ready to help when the temporal needs show up, but we just don’t see the same outpouring of love when we’re suffering in quiet.

And, to be clear, the last thing I would want in that situation is for someone to show up with a casserole. I definitely don’t want some well-meaning Elders Quorum president to visit me in my home and ask how my testimony is doing. That’s not what this is about at all. When you don’t feel like you belong in your ward, sometimes the last thing you want is more ward.

It comes back to the idea that our church meetings are typically oriented around a stage 1, “Simplicity” faith stage. This is the stage where everything is simple; everything is right or wrong, ideas are black or white, and people are divided into good guys and bad guys (I’ve written previously about stages of faith here). Our sacrament meeting talks and Sunday School lessons are typically simple in terms of testimony, always affirming, and rarely vulnerable. There are rarely shades of gray; we deal in absolutes.

But there’s one thing I didn’t factor in. In the last five years, I changed. My faith is in a different place now. This isn’t a flex—the stages of faith aren’t a progression, one isn’t better than another (even if it has a higher number). I’m okay with asking questions I wasn’t okay asking before, and even okay when they don’t have a clear answer. I understand that the Church as an organization and a structure isn’t perfect, and neither are its leaders.

And while I changed, my ward didn’t change. The meetings didn’t change. The topics discussed didn’t change, and the way they are discussed didn’t change. I found myself wanting to be having entirely different conversations in lessons on Sundays. I wanted to talk about inclusion, about what it really means to love our neighbor, and about developing a personal, individual relationship with Deity—and the talks and lessons were still about the same topics as before, taught in the same way, with the same questions asked and eliciting the same answers.

This sounds like a bit of a pity party, but stick with me. Our meetings are simply not designed, and our culture is not prepared, for people in a stage 3 “Perplexity” mindset, even though there are many of us. Sacrament meeting is not a good place for exploring the boundaries of a testimony. Elders quorum and Relief Society have people in too many different places with their faith to support real dialogue on difficult topics. And since we don’t model openness—to different faith stages or really anyone who thinks/talks/acts outside our Latter-day Saint cultural norm—we’re not equipped as ward members and as ministers to serve those who see the gospel and the church differently than we do. Instead, we circle the wagons; the stage 1 people are kept on the inside, and the rest of us are kept out.

So, yeah, I do think it would be easier to love my ward if they were going out of their way to serve me all the time. Maybe that’s not rocket science, and it’s probably pretty arrogant of me to think that way. But without that, I’ve reached the uncomfortable conclusion that it’s up to me to find a way to love my ward (and believe me, I tried dearly to find an answer that wouldn’t make this my problem). It’s not their job to appease me, or somehow earn my love.

The reality is that people go to church for different reasons, and expect different things out of it. For many Latter-day Saints, there is comfort and safety in those meetings. Many show up each Sunday for a respite—not for a challenge, and certainly not to open a doctrinal/cultural Pandora’s Box that is more happily kept closed.

For others of us, we crave that authentic connection—our Box has been open for some time, we’ve realized it’s a blessing and that it’s expanded our faith, and we’re looking for others to talk to about it. Hearing the same lessons and talks we’ve heard since Primary isn’t just repetitive, it’s disrespectful to the new faith we’ve uncovered. We’re looking for community around something deeper.

Neither of those is right; neither is wrong. And those aren’t the only two options.

But if my expectation is for other people to always make space for me, and where my faith is right now, I’m going to be disappointed a lot. That’s an easy recipe to have Sundays that are at best unsatisfying, and at worst repellent. If I want to go to a ward that makes space, then I need to be the person who makes space. My job is literally to do what I expect from others: It’s on me to make space for them, even those that I don’t understand or agree with.

This is way harder, but it’s also more, you know, the gospel of Jesus Christ.

What I’ve found works for me is acknowledging that people’s faith can be different (and especially, different from mine). That allows me to have grace and give space to those around me. I’m not perfect at it, but it’s a path forward.

I know there are members of my ward that I disagree with politically. There are members of my ward I don’t have a lot in common with interests-wise. There are members of my ward who would be aghast at the things I write about the gospel, even though they are faith-promoting to me. Weirdly, it’s literally easier to chronicle my faith journey in front of the entire internet than to talk about it at church on Sundays.

I still don’t understand fully what Melissa meant about having a rock-solid testimony of the ward. I do believe wards are important, even if I wouldn’t have thought to describe it as a “testimony.” I believe in building the beloved community, in building Zion. And if building that community includes loving my ward, well, I can get behind that.

My ward members may not know what to do with me, but I don’t think they dislike me. They probably don’t think about me much at all. I’m sure if I had cancer they’d show up with casseroles, or if I needed a tree cut down they’d show up with chainsaws. But I can love my ward even if those aren’t the things I need.

1. She mentions her work on this a couple of times in Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye, “Sacred Struggle: Seeking Christ on the Path of Most Resistance” (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2023), 23 and 160.

2. I’m using cancer as an example here, and I hope it doesn’t come across as flippant (especially in the title). I think by now we all know someone who has died from cancer or its effects.