Two weeks ago, I skipped my own church services and instead attended a Christian community church with some family members.
Because it was only a week since I had provoked the Jesus police over a broader definition of the word "Christian," I wondered how it would go. Would our differences be all that really mattered?
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It never came up. As it turned out, we had a lot in common — way more than we didn’t. The music didn’t hold my attention much, the seating was equally torturous and the preaching ranged from the mildly interesting to the criminally boring. In other words, it was exactly like my church.
I did notice one glaring difference, something no amount of theological quibbling could explain. It was the noise. There wasn’t any at the community church. Not from kids anyway.
As we entered the building, most of the children were siphoned off to a kid meeting somewhere else in the building. The adults went into the worship service unencumbered by diaper bags, coloring books and snacks.
Mormons worship with our kids, at least we do for the main meeting. Moreover, we have a lot of kids. In newly developed neighborhoods, the kid-to-adult congregation ratio is five to one.
At my LDS ward, Sacrament Meeting can sometimes be a bit loud. Well, it’s pretty much always loud. OK, it normally sounds like somebody Tasering monkeys in a parking garage.
But I like it that way. Having been Mormon my entire life, it’s amazing what I can filter out. In fact, I’m something of an expert. I sometimes go an entire meeting without consciously hearing anything from the pulpit except "amen."
But if you’re not accustomed to turning your heart and mind to the Lord while some kid is yodeling for Cheerios or punching a sibling, the volume of Mormon worship can be a little disconcerting.
It was just the opposite at the community church. I heard every word from the pulpit. Not a single hoot or scream interrupted the sermon. And nobody made an issue out of going to the bathroom in their pants.
Truthfully, I found the quiet unsettling. How was I supposed to think about salvation absent the usual ambience of someone neutering a wolverine on the next pew? I couldn’t.
Even worse was the realization that the silence had stripped me of my most effective church coping tool. Without the covering sound of someone beating a donkey, I couldn’t mutter under my breath.
This was serious. Not being able to purge my annoyance made it entirely possible that the pressure would build in my skull until it shot out of my ears or I had a psychotic break. And that can be really noisy.
But there is a God. At least there was on that particular Sunday. Just when I started to believe that there was no way to reconcile such disparate worship services, it was time to sing.
They fired up electric guitars and drums. They hollered into microphones and banged away on a piano. I felt right at home.
Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/notpatbagley.
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