A plea for vulnerability in our church meetings
Our meetings today do not let us minister effectively to each other.
I recently asked the question of whether talks at stake and ward conference are “better” than talks in a normal sacrament meeting (I wrote about it here). I got one answer that surprised me, because it colored a little outside the lines: someone responded by asserting that they feel the Spirit in every meeting, so it doesn’t matter.
My instinctual—and, fortunately, unspoken—response was: Nope. You absolutely do not feel the Spirit in every meeting. That’s not a thing.
We have a tendency in the Church to speak in unachievable absolutes. We all want to appear to be faithful and obedient. When we’re asked to give a talk or teach a lesson, it’s implied that we will teach the concept from the perspective of understanding it fully, believing it thoroughly, and following it completely. When we teach the Word of Wisdom, we try to sound certain about knowing why the commandment was given. When we teach about compassion, we describe how we became so compassionate. When we talk about families, we tell about our own achievements as parents and how we made our own families a success.
These façades of perfectionism create a culture of disbelieving each other at church. I don’t believe that you drink deeply of the Spirit in every meeting; nobody does. I don’t believe you when you claim to know why every commandment exists, or why church history unfolded the way it did. I don’t believe you love everyone all the time. I don’t believe you get answers to every prayer. None of this is criticism; we all make these claims. I know I do, even when they’re not true about myself.
How can we believe each other, if we don’t even believe what we’re saying?
We have a decision to make.
On one hand, we can continue to sit together every Sunday and keep up the charade. We can keep pretending that each of us has everything together, and that we're living like Christ in every way imaginable. We’ll imply, in every lesson we teach and in every comment we make, that we’ve achieved perfection all on our own. We can use church meetings primarily as a venue for describing our own supposed righteousness to others. It’s what we’ve been doing for decades. You do it, I do it, we all do it. All of it.
And if we continue this way, we’ll always be stuck rehashing the same gospel pleasantries. We’ll never be able to evolve our faith forward, individually and collectively.
Or, on the other hand, we can open up. We can be vulnerable with each other, and show that we don't have it all together. We can show our wounds and allow each other to heal them. We can say out loud that there are some things that we struggle to believe and do, and in doing so we can find the other people that inevitably feel the same way. We can meet people where they’re at, instead of assuming they meet some arbitrary threshold of perceived righteousness.
In the words of John Ortberg, Jr.:
It may not quite reflect the maturity of “Thy will be done,” but it is better to be an honest mess before God [and our fellow women and men] than a dishonest “saint.”1
Vulnerability is intrinsically tied to humility (understanding our place in God’s broader plan) and to meekness (understanding how much more we have to learn). Brené Brown, the leading voice on vulnerability, teaches us that owning our imperfection is not giving up, but is rather a key to moving forward:
Understanding the difference between healthy striving and perfectionism is critical to laying down the shield and picking up your life.2
What does this look like in our meetings? It might mean making a comment in Sunday School, explaining how we struggled with what was said in a certain conference talk. It might mean teaching a lesson, and telling the class that the topic is something we haven’t mastered yet, and are still working on. Or it might mean making spaces where people feel safe saying those kinds of things, by actively saying things that would encourage that vulnerability. This gets more to the heart of ministering—in its broad sense, meaning attending to someone’s needs—than much of what we do in the formalized ministering program.
We may even need to reevaluate how we construct our meetings. In Sunday school in my ward, we sit in rows of chairs facing the teacher, like we’re in a theater watching a movie. There are dozens of people in the class (I’m in a large Utah ward), but you can’t see many other people’s faces. The room setup primarily promotes one-to-many communication, like a broadcast, with the teacher addressing the class. People in the class can make comments, of course, but comments aren’t discussion—they’re more like broadcasts back to the group. There are too many people, and in too uninviting an environment, for vulnerability to come naturally.
If we can’t (or won’t) change our meetings, then we need to find the people we can be vulnerable with, and the settings we can do it in.
It will be uncomfortable at first. This isn’t something we’ve been taught to do at church. But I think we can, and being open and vulnerable will deepen our discipleship, our empathy for each other, and our ability to be like Christ. We don’t have to do it alone. That was never the plan. In the immortal words of Ron Weasley, “Maybe you don't have to do this all by yourself, mate.”
Ultimately, we need to do this if we’re going to move forward together. Vulnerability isn't just a step towards faith, it's the leap that transforms it.
John Ortberg, Jr., from “Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You”
Brené Brown, from “The Gifts of Imperfecrtion”. I left my typo in that book title because it seemed appropriate.
Good thoughts Roger. I'm wondering if this is something you see more of in the US than here in Australia, but we certainly do see some of this toxic perfectionism here. But, I think that we Aussies are generally more laid back and more willing to laugh at ourselves than the average American.