Originally Posted by BlueK
5 people are on the top side of your scale, 4 are at the bottom. And 5 are right down the middle. If you want to apply some objective analysis, you have to conclude it's pretty much a wash, as a 5 is as neutral as you can get. We do need better temple prep. I'm with you there. I'd love it if everyone could answer 8-10. I get it that much of the temple message is symbolic and not obvious. And yet...
My wife and I must be real oddballs. She grew up in not the ideal LDS environment. Her dad is not a a member and three of her four siblings are inactive. She's had a few hangups and doubts about the way some things are done in the church and how other church members act. Growing up outside of the model LDS family situation she has seen how others react to those who aren't so ideal. Actually, I did too, as my parents were divorced when I was 12. It got old hearing about how we were a broken family and there was something wrong with us. To be honest, most of the members in our ward were mean and nasty to us when it happened.
But this happens, IMO largely because in the church the basic purpose of the gospel we fail to teach or fail to learn because we're so busy worrying about the proper behavior. We get so many messages about what we're supposed to do and not do, and guilt seems to be a major tool that is used either purposely or maybe unintentionally. If you fail in your home teaching this month you must be scum. You're a loser if you don't have your year's supply, blah, blah, blah. Of course you're a loser if you're a wife beater, child molester or porn addict. But that's by far not the only thing we use the guilt motivator for, and I'm pretty sure we overuse that method.
And yet, the temple is totally not like that. To my wife, despite some of her life long questions and concerns, the temple was a great experience. Why? because to her she saw the pureness of the gospel rather than all the fringe stuff we get caught up in. It was like the temple brought out the part of the gospel and the church that in her core she felt a part of, rather than the three-hour sunday block, the mid week activities and meetings and all the cultural stuff that she hasn't always felt a part of.
Yes, the temple presentation is different, but I think it's unfortunate if we don't get the real message of it. We see a movie about the creation and why we're here. We see the fall of man and learn why we need a savior. We make covenants that help us get back to the presence of God. I guess I'm weird for thinking the temple actually is the one clear message we should be teaching in the church, which is that all we need to do is make our covenants and do our best to keep them. Everything else will be fine because of the atonement of Christ. Once we get that, home teaching, tithing, and everything else we are asked to do has more meaning because we see it as part of our imperfect attempt to keep our end of the covenants we make. Those individual things become the means (sometimes the imperfect means) to the end rather than the end itself.
We fail our members when we lose sight of that. We fail when we teach any one aspect of the behavior we're supposed to follow without teaching how it fits into the big picture. We fail when we don't teach enough about the savior and what he did for us so that our love for him and our faith in him is what motivates us to not want to drink or to do our home teaching, rather than the guilt trip from a church leader or parent. We fail when we don't teach the joy of doing good because we want to use our agency that way. Instead, any lesson about agency seems to focus mostly on all the horrible consequences of using it unwisely. We seem to be so focused on administration and organization and trying to influence and sometimes even strongly influence or force the proper behavior, that we forget to teach the basic tools that allow people to want to live the right way, such as faith in Christ or learning to recognize and follow the promptings of the Holy Ghost. A lot of times I think the rules take away from the importance of using agency and listening to the Spirit to figure out the best thing to do. For example, heaven forbid would a guy in his 30s try to attend a YSA ward or activity. It's against the rules! And yet, when he is in tune with the Spirit and feels like he should be somewhere at a particular time he meets his EC there even if it's where "the rules" say he shouldn't be.
I'm very much in favor of being more open about the way we teach the importance of the temple. Unfortunately, it's not really at the center of our emphasis like it should be. If we taught youth more about covenants and less about all the individual dos and donts, we'd probably have a generation more able to see the big picture which would allow them to make their own good decisions rather than getting hung up on why it's hard to keep all the rules and then drop out because they don't understand the importance of one or two of them. To me, temple preparation fails because we look at it as a 3 or 4 week class in Sunday school. In reality, temple prep should be EVERYTHING we do in church. If you can go a lifetime of church activity and get totally thrown off at the temple, then it's not the crash course a couple of weeks before your temple trip that failed you. It's all your years of church teaching that did.
Sorry for sounding so hard core. I recognize I have a strong opinion on this and I respect the opinion of others, but it makes me wonder if we don't almost have two separate churches -- the church of the temple and the church of the three hour block. I'm definitely a temple guy rather than a three hour block guy. Maybe I'm just weird, but I get a whole lot more spiritual boost out of 90 minutes in the temple than I do in 3 months of Sacrament meeting and Sunday School. I wish we did a better job of unitiing the two aspects of our worship. My ward has recently had three different investigators decide not to come anymore after the shock of all the noise and irreverence in our Sacrament meeting. The bishop felt we needed to spend an entire three hour block recently teaching and talking about the importance of reverence in church. I'd say things like that as well as the actions of the members are at least as much of a problem as having a "weird" temple ceremony.
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