The case for ‘low-production’ church

A year ago this Mother’s Day, my sons started a fist fight on the stand at church. My 7-year-old was using his Yoda voice to sing “Mother, I Love You” during the Primary musical number and my 4-year-old, concerned for the performance, was (audibly) telling him to stop. Eventually, my 4-year-old had enough. He punched his brother, sending him tumbling off of the stand. Several delighted boys in the vicinity joined in, putting a stop to the program as teachers scrambled onto the stand to break up the brawl.

I was mortified, of course, but several of my fellow congregants assured me it was the most entertaining sacrament meeting they’d ever attended. The truth is, sacrament meetings — our congregational worship service in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — are not known for being entertaining. We don’t have paid clergy and sermons are given by members of the congregation on a rotating basis. In fact, we don’t even call them sermons, but “talks” — and “talking” is really a better way of describing what happens at the podium than “delivering a sermon.”

So, imagine my delight when I stumbled across a post on X from Adam Coleman expressing his frustration with overengineered church experiences.

I told him that I knew of a church where he’d be safe from being overly entertained. If you’re not looking to be entertained at church, a Latter-day Saint sacrament meeting is the place for you.

I remember attending my first sacrament meetings as an investigator and noticing the lack of … pizzazz. I had formerly attended both Catholic and Protestant worship services. Here in Sunday meetings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, there was neither the sense of divine mystery that characterized my experience with Catholic mass, nor the fiery preaching of my days in a Baptist congregation. There was the administration of the sacrament, composed mostly of baby-punctuated silence, and then a few addresses from fellow congregants with varying levels of public speaking ability.

Yet, like Coleman, I was not looking to be entertained. I just wanted the Lord. And I soon found that the lack of pizzazz made his presence unmistakeable. When the speakers are not flashy and the music is confined mostly to hymns accompanied by the piano or organ, you can be confident that the peace and joy swelling within you is not a function of anyone’s talent, but of God taking notice of you in the pews.

The stillness and silence of more pared-back worship services can create space for contemplation and allow us to hear God. It’s precisely the simplified conditions that allow for meditation to take place, as people consciously bring their minds and hearts back to a common anchor point (the speaker, the song, the words, the ceremony).

Other believers have expressed similar fondness for the value of more traditional services. When church services become more about “performance for an audience,” Christian leader the Rev. Parisa Parsa describes the risk of losing “some of the essence of tradition and therefore of the practice of faith.”

“Namely, the idea that this is a ritual that is about the needs of a broad group of people, and therefore not every part of it will speak directly to you or keep you perfectly entertained.” In those quiet moments, the Rev. Parsa says, people can take away an important lesson about “sitting with some boredom, discomfort, or reflections that hit you unexpectedly” while participating in a traditional service.

Perhaps experiences like mine, the Rev. Parsa’s and Coleman’s are not the exception. Demographer Lyman Stone has found that more contemporary worship styles, like praise bands and PowerPoints, do not affect church attendance rates. Stone, a research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and Lutheran, analyzed the data for his own denomination, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. He found not only that more traditional forms of worship attracted similar attendance to contemporary worship styles, but that contemporary worship styles were less popular than traditional styles among younger Lutherans. As Stone quips on X, “hard to overstate the extent to which ‘contemporary music’ is just not what the kids want anymore.”

So what does help churches grow? Somewhat counterintuitively, churches grow faster when they involve more commitment and sacrifice. According to Stone, “academic research has found that churches with greater member commitments in terms of financial giving, volunteering, and attendance at extra activities during the week tend to grow much faster.” He adds, “Put plainly, churches grow when their members are deeply committed to them.”

For some, “high demand religion” is more of an accusation than a description — a label that has become coterminous for some with authoritarianism and cults. But disparaging religious practices that require sacrifice and commitment from their members may be throwing the baby out with the authoritarian bathwater. As with many other areas of life, such as parenting , high expectations are a feature and not a bug, so long as they are accompanied by unmistakable nurturance and love. And when it comes to religious practice, high expectations make for a more meaningful experience for many.

Pastor Paul Carter describes how, in his own ministry, lowering expectations led to some counterintuitive outcomes. Carter, the lead pastor at Cornerstone Baptist Church in Ontario, began pastoring at the height of the seeker-sensitive movement, which sought to get people in the doors through low-expectation, highly entertaining Sunday services. The goal of these types of seeker churches was to slowly transition the “unchurched” into contributing, ministering Christian disciples.

Carter recounts how over his five years in the seeker movement, he never once saw this happen. “I don’t remember encountering anyone who had been previously unchurched, who came to one of our accessible and relevant Sunday services, who became a true follower of Jesus Christ, who transitioned into a … multiplying and ministering disciple.” Instead, he said, the opposite often took place. Lower expectation and shorter services provided a “soft landing” for those on their way out of full religious activity.

Jim Davis and Michael Graham elaborate on this counterintuitive finding in their book “ The Great Dechurching ,” drawing on research from political scientists Ryan Burge and Paul Djupe. Davis is an evangelical pastor and Graham is the executive director of The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. While praising the desire for churches to have a “large front door back into the church,” they warned against minimizing or ignoring the doctrinal and practical demands of true discipleship. According to the authors, “the data shows that if we hold back in our discipleship, we could instead become a last stop through the back door as people aren’t given what they need to follow Christ in an increasingly difficult culture.”

Over at The Atlantic, Ryan Meador writes about Davis and Graham’s book : “What if the problem isn’t that churches are asking too much of their members, but that they aren’t asking nearly enough?”

Meador isn’t arguing that the demands of discipleship are what keep people committed. Rather, he’s positing that the personal transformation necessary to draw life and joy from our religious commitments requires practices that actually draw something out of us — inviting us to reach beyond our current status quo and calling forth resources that can only be found as we make sacrifices for God and one another.

A religious experience that fails to call forth this level of sacrifice, Joseph Smith famously taught, will “never” have the “power sufficient to produce the faith necessary unto life and salvation.”

The meaning and joy we seek from religious experience in the first place is not something that can be given to us, it’s something we must do and become. And entertainment-oriented worship may not be the best way to facilitate that kind of becoming.

My love for the humble, sometimes-quirky worship of sacrament meetings has grown as I’ve more fully embraced the healthy demands of religious practice. I see my attendance today aimed less at being taught by my fellow congregants and more at being taught by the Savior through them. In this light, whatever might be lacking in production quality or human talent can be more than made up for in the perfection of Christ.