Sunday, January 15, 2017

Citizenship in the Ward

I spoke in the Lynnfield LDS Ward today. What an amazing ward! While I found many parts of their services edifying, perhaps the most startling was how early their chapel filled up. I showed up about ten minutes early to the building. At my ward, that would be a near-empty chapel, but in Lynnfield the chapel was pretty full and the overflow was already filling up. I almost wanted to ask if the congregation was really full of Mormons, as nobody seemed to abide by "Mormon standard time." In the end they had to open up into the cultural hall.

The other speaker in the program covered the material really well, so I just had to not mess it up too badly. That's always nice. My assigned topic was "reaching out to our community, strengthening our ward family, then outward." The Bishopric member pointed me at Elder Perry's talk, which focused on Alma, Peter, and John Taylor as examples. I over-prepared as usual, but since I wanted my wife's feedback I actually delivered some of the talk to her the night before. I think that really helped hone the message, and it helped me get rid of things I thought were interesting but that weren't as central. I think the talk ended up covering things pretty well.


Here's the notes, or you can look at the Google doc: