Name: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Marion Ward)

Location: 5-9 Cutting Road, Marion, South Australia

Service time: 9:30am, Sunday

Dress code: Suit up!

Family friendly? Yes, if such a thing is directly proportional to the number of crying babies.

The best thing: Post-worship soup. (Doesn’t happen every Sunday unfortunately, but since the day was referred to as a ‘Soup Sunday’, you can be sure it’ll happen again.)

The worst thing: No mention of Joseph Smith. At all.

Rating: ✞✞✞

Since my early teens, when I saw the episode of John Safran vs. God which took us to Salt Lake City in search of fabled magic underwear, I have longed to get to the bottom of Mormonism, that much-pilloried American off-shoot of Christianity. Aside from the masterful investigative journalism of Mr. Safran, various things over the years have informed me about the Church of Latter-Day Saints:

That episode of South Park The time I went to the Joseph Smith Birthplace Memorial in Vermont, but it was closed and all was dusk and snow and greyness, and though no-one was in sight, there could be heard an eerie choral singing coming from no particular direction. (Probably the ghosts of ill-prepared Mormons who wandered out into the cold New England wilderness, forgetting to bring their warm, magic underwear.) The Book of Mormon, Broadway musical and further chance for Trey Parker and Matt Stone to ridicule humanity for its follies. The time I ordered a free copy of The Book of Mormon (the holy book, not the musical) from lds.org, had it delivered to me by two missionaries, and then proceeded to never read it.

After all that, needless to say, I still didn’t really have much of a grip on what the Mormons were all about. So finally, this past Sunday, with much excitement and wearing my most modest skirt (pants on women during church-time is apparently a no-no), I went with my partially lapsed Mormon friend to my first LDS service.

Accompanying one of their own, and therefore part of the team by association, I cannot attest to how welcoming the congregation would be to the casual church-goer. I got the royal treatment though: handshakes galore! I even got to meet some ‘Elders’ – those taking part in the traditional Mormon two-year-long missionary trip, something that is expected of all young men, and encouraged in young women.

The service itself was very familiar. Surprisingly, disappointingly, so. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a Christian church service considerably more than your average atheist, but I didn’t realise just how Christian the Mormons were. I was expecting tales of Joseph Smith and the golden plates (and hoping for a sermon on the virtues of polygamy), but no. We sang very typical Christian hymns, and listened to very Christian-sounding talks from members of the congregation.

Having said this, there were some little differences. For example, the fact that it is members of the congregation, and not a head church figure, who do the sermonising. While this is admirably inclusive, I worry this could be a case of the blind leading the blind… If I want to hear Bob’s interpretation of the Parable of the Sower, I’ll ask him afterwards during coffee and cake. When I go to a service, I expect some bona fide, authoritative preaching.

Special mention should be made of the first speaker however, a teenage boy who presented us with an up-to-date parable about a man (God) who sacrificed his child (Jesus) in order to save a train-load of people (we lowly sinners) from crashing off a bridge into a river. This story, strikingly similar to the Trolley Problem, had me wondering whether god is a consequentialist or a deontologist for a happy few minutes, before concluding that chances are, he’s neither. (Since whatever god does is supposed to be the right thing, he probably lies outside the realm of ordinary ethics.)

Other little quirks included: sitting down during the hymns, crossing arms to pray instead of clasping hands, and partaking of water with the bread, instead of wine, which was available to all those who had been baptised in the Mormon faith (no need for Confirmations here – once you’re in, you’re in).

After the service, it was time for everyone to go off to Sunday school, in one of the several classrooms within the church building. As I am in the 18-29 age bracket, and very much unwed, I joined the YSA (Young Single Adult) group. (What happens if you reach thirty and are still without a significant other? You join the ‘Single Adult’ group, which is where you remain until the shame eats you alive.) Waiting for it to begin, we were talking to one of the young women there, and she made a joke that the class was really just a way for the young people to find a spouse (along with the many, many and varied other social activities that the Church organises for its members). We all laughed. Yet considering the proportion of ladies wearing six-inch heels there, one must suspect a grain of truth in her words.

The lesson revealed another distinguishing feature about Mormonism: the strong emphasis on doing, not merely believing. (And when most of them have gone on a two-year long mission to far-flung corners of the Earth, you can’t accuse them of not putting their words into practice.) According to the study leader, it was not enough to merely believe in god, you had manifest your belief in action. Some titters went around when someone mentioned the Catholic Church with its belief-is-sufficient stance, but then it was concluded that the Catholics were not so bad, relatively speaking.

The day concluded not with Arnott’s Classic Assorted, but with soup: two long rows of slow cookers full of delicious soup. Amen.

– Katie O