Everyone Knows Everyone: The Church as Community
“…willing to bear one another’s burdens, that they may be light; yea, and are willing to mourn with those that mourn; yea, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort…”
Picture a young family moving into a new house on a Saturday morning. They don’t know a soul in the neighborhood. By nine o’clock, a handful of men they’ve never met are carrying their couch up the stairs. By Sunday, someone has brought dinner. By the end of the month their kids have friends, the parents have a calling, and somebody knows their name at the grocery store.
That’s the church at its best. I’ll say it plainly, because people who leave sometimes forget it.
But the same ties that carry your couch can also hold you in place. This essay is about both edges of that: what the ward gives, what it costs, and how someone whose beliefs have changed can keep the good without pretending.
What the ward gets right
In a ward, everyone knows everyone. That’s not a slogan; it’s the design. Callings give every adult a job. Ministering gives every family someone assigned to check on them. Youth programs give teenagers adults who aren’t their parents to look up to. Funerals get fed. New babies get meals. Moves get muscle.
The baptismal covenant in Mosiah 18 asks members to bear one another’s burdens and mourn with those that mourn. A lot of Mormons actually do it, week after week, without pay.
Even if its truth claims are set aside, the church can be a wholesome, productive organization that provides community to children and adults, leadership training and shared values. I do not want to see religion and church institutions disappear. They have crucial roles in modern life.
There’s a benefit to having strong ties that keep people in line to a certain standard.
That’s the believer’s case, and I think it’s a good one. Strong ties keep people accountable. They keep kids out of trouble. They give lonely people somewhere to be on Sunday. For many people, the constraints that come with all that are super useful.
So why would anyone who sees all of this ever walk away from it?
The other edge
Here’s the trouble. The ties are strong because they’re conditional.
You belong in a ward the way a team member belongs on a team: as long as you play the position. The church only allows for simple, standard molds. There’s one approved way to give (tithing), one approved way to look after each other (your ministering assignment), one approved way to think about God, sex, coffee and the origin of the universe. Step outside the mold and the same network that brought you dinner starts treating you as a project.
You’ve seen it. A family stops coming and the bishop sends the missionaries with a plate of cookies. People lower their voices to a whisper when they talk about someone who left, as if it were something shameful the kids shouldn’t hear. The words change: he “fell away,” she’s “struggling,” they “lost their faith.” Some members prefer that unorthodox members either fall in line or fall away.
I call this the double-edged ward. Tribalism is good. It’s also an element of cults and can be harmful. It’s a double-edged sword, and you can’t keep one edge sharp and the other dull. The closeness that makes the ward wonderful is the same closeness that makes leaving it so painful, and so public.
It also crowds things out. When your friends are assigned to you, your service is assigned to you and your giving is routed through the institution, you can go years without ever choosing any of it yourself. Since stepping back, I pick my friends instead of having them assigned to me. I have more time and money to give directly to people in need. Those aren’t complaints about Mormons. They’re things I didn’t know I was missing.
Two camps, and a third way
People who leave tend to land in one of two places. Some stay all the way in, out of loyalty or fear, and live with the dissonance. Others go all the way out, and the ex-Mormon world has its own tribal rules: you never go back, because going back would make you an imposter.
I don’t accept either rule. There are good reasons to keep a foot in the community: the singing, a good lesson, a nephew’s baptism, a friend’s farewell talk. I like to attend when it means supporting family and friends. I just need more distance than regular attendance allows, and I need boundaries. I don’t want to be reactivated. I do want to stay friends.
That’s possible, and it’s mostly up to the ward. A ward that can say “there’s more than one way to Mormon” can keep people it would otherwise lose. A ward that can only say “fall in line or fall away” will keep losing them, and will keep blaming them for it.
What I’d ask of the ward
If you’re a believer, here’s my request, and it’s a small one. When someone in your ward changes, let them change with their dignity intact. Don’t whisper. Don’t make them a project. Say “it sounds like he’s happy where he’s at” when it’s true. Invite them to the barbecue because you like them, not because the elders quorum has a goal.
You don’t have to agree with them. You only have to remember Mosiah 18 applies to them too.
So, back to that young family and their couch. The ward that carried it up the stairs was doing something good and real. The test of a community isn’t how it treats the people who are moving in. It’s how it treats the people who are moving on.
If you want to know where I stand with the church myself, start with To My Mormon Family and Friends. For why I think the church is slowly learning some of this on its own, read Changing Tides.