Sacrament Meeting

A visitor walking into a Latter-day Saint sacrament meeting for the first time is usually struck by how little there is. The room is a plain hall with a raised stand at one end, no altar, no cross, no candles, no images and no stained glass. Nobody wears vestments. There is no processional, no creed, no responsive reading and no set liturgy apart from two fixed prayers. The man conducting is a member of the bishopric in an ordinary suit, and he is a dentist or a bus driver from Monday.

The service runs about an hour and follows a simple order: an opening hymn and prayer, ward business, a hymn while the sacrament is prepared, the sacrament itself, and then two or three talks given by members of the congregation who were asked a week or two earlier, on a topic the bishopric set. Anyone may be asked, including teenagers, and the quality varies exactly as one would expect. The congregation sings, accompanied by an organ or a piano and nothing else, and the singing is enthusiastic rather than trained.

The absence of professionals is the point rather than a limitation of resources. In a church with no paid local clergy, the people who speak, pray, play, conduct and administer the ordinance are all members of the congregation being addressed, and everyone present expects to take a turn at each of those things over the course of a life.

The sacrament is what the movement calls what other Christians call communion or the Eucharist, and it is the reason the meeting exists. Latter-day Saints do not regard the bread and water as changed in substance, and do not use the language of sacrifice; the ordinance is understood as a renewal of the covenants made at baptism, and as a weekly act of remembrance.

The mechanics are performed almost entirely by teenagers. Young men of sixteen and older, ordained priests in the Aaronic priesthood, break the bread and then kneel to read the two sacramental prayers. Those prayers are fixed word for word, given in section 20 of the Doctrine and Covenants, and if a word is misread the young man is asked to begin again, which is one of the very few points of exactness in an otherwise informal service. Deacons, boys of twelve and thirteen, then carry trays of bread and small cups of water along the rows. Everyone present may partake. Children take it, visitors take it, and no announcement restricts who may.

Water replaced wine over the later nineteenth century as the Word of Wisdom came to be enforced more strictly, on the warrant of an 1830 revelation stating that it mattered little what was used so long as it was done with an eye single to the glory of God.

On the first Sunday of most months the assigned talks are set aside and the microphone is opened to anyone in the congregation who wishes to speak.