VIDEO: Pastor’s FIRST TIME Inside Mormon Meeting House

Pastor’s FIRST TIME Inside Mormon Meeting House – powered by Happy Scribe

I wonder if it’s okay for me to look behind the curtain, see what’s there.

Hello, Saints. My name is Jeff. I am a pastor exploring everything I can about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints. And on this journey, there are a lot of firsts. In fact, right now, I’m in the process of reading through the Book of Mormon for the first time, but I’m taking a break from that to experience another first, and that is to go into a Latterday St church building for the first time. I have a local friend who’s going to get me in, give me a.

Little bit of a tour, and I.

Have no idea what to expect because I literally have never been inside of.

A meeting house before.

So let’s go check it out.

All right.

I am in a very heavily populated.

Area of a St. Louis suburb right now, and in order to get to this Latter Day St church, I’m having to go well off the beaten path. And that, to me, is comical for two reasons. One, because where I’m from, there are churches everywhere, literally. And second of all, it’s comical because when I’m in Utah, there are Latterday Saint churches everywhere. Like, literally everywhere. So the fact that I’m here is pretty funny. There it is. It’s so weird that I’m not in Utah. All right, so I’ve been to general Conference, I’ve been in the Assembly Hall in Simple Square, but I’ve never been into a meeting house, so I’m going to take a quick tour, check it out. Okay, first impressions just seems like a church foyer similar to what I would.

See in a Protestant church. Nothing overly fancy, which I’m totally fine with, but already seeing Latterday Saint imagery. See, from what I understand, a lot.

Of Latterday Saint churches are very similar.

In their layout, maybe even identical, but every Protestant church is a little bit different. That being said, most Protestant churches are a little bit on the smaller side and they’re a little bit more modest, unless you go into an old historic building like Lutheran church or not Protestant.

But a Catholic church.

Clearly they’re going to be a little bit more ornate, but this feels really similar to a lot of Protestant churches that I’ve been in.

I will say that our foyers are.

Typically a little bit bigger than this, but maybe as I’m wandering around here, I’ll find another area where there’s more of a meeting space. But it seems like the best place for me to go from here after just walking in is the chapel.

So let’s go in.

So once thing that my Protestant friends probably wouldn’t know is that there are no pastors per se in LDS churches, that each ward or congregation will call on people to do talks on Sunday morning. And where this would be where I would normally preach sermons from in a Latter day Saint context, this is where different church members give their talks to the rest of the people in their ward. It’s a hyminal.

This one time I went to a.

Latter day St bookstore, and they were selling these.

I think I said that the picture.

On the front was a temple.

There’s a temple. Or that might be a tabernacle. I think it’s a temple on there. So probably different songs.

And I have been corrected by you in the comments section that that is not a temple. Those are pipes from an organ.

So thank you for that.

But yes, I have seen this before.

So one of the things that’s missing here from a context I’m used to is sound equipment. Usually in Protestant churches, there’s very visible speakers and microphones. A lot of times we have bands, so you’ll see amplifiers, things like that on stage. Drums. Most churches have drums in them. And I’m not seeing that. I’m also not seeing what you would call like a sound booth or a crows nest, depending on how the church is oriented. There’s nothing like that in here. And for my Protestant friends, you will agree with me that sound is usually a pretty big part of what we do because of the number of different things that require sound. If you helped out with media and sound in any Protestant churches, you know that you live in the sound booth a lot of times. So that’s something that I don’t really see here. I mean, I see some speakers kind of up in this area, but I’m not seeing flown speakers or a lot of sound equipment, which is unique and different from a context that I’m used to. All right, so I’m looking at the signs and all the doors. I’m seeing cultural hall.

Not sure what that is. Let’s check it out. Oh, it’s a gym. Cultural hall. Interesting name for it. Yeah. Gymnasiums. Something that we definitely have in a lot of Protestant churches, though not the smaller ones. So if I was driving down the road and I saw a church this size, I wouldn’t expect it to have a gym. But the church I grew up in had a gym. A lot of churches like to have gyms, probably for a lot of the same reasons. It’s just a nice place to gather, to have parties, to do sports, get togethers. I’m guessing here. I wonder if it’s okay for me to look behind the curtain now. It’s just a stage backstage. Nothing fancy. It’s just a stage. All right. This is interesting. The members closet. This must be pretty important because members and church members, this is their closet. Okay, so church members are evidently responsible for cleaning the church. So, members, you get your own closet, and you probably get your own broom and your own bucket and mop, which is great. Everybody needs to pitch in, right? Cool. All right, so this is really unique, the fact that there’s a family history center, genealogical library.

It was in there just a minute ago. They’re really turning it more into computer lab because you don’t really need all the books and microfilm as you needed years ago. But clearly, family history is incredibly important to ladderay saint belief and teaching and sites like Ancestry.com and Family Search, they exist because of the Latterday Saint Church. And there’s people in there right now actually indexing and doing things to sort of keep all of that stuff organized. But an everyday person can come in here and utilize some of the resources they have if they want to do their own genealogical research. And that is something you will not find in any Protestant church, any other church whatsoever, just because, for pretty clear reasons, family history is important to Latterday Saints. Very unique and pretty interesting. Okay, so from what I understand in this hallway, there’s a lot of classrooms, sunday school classrooms, which is really similar to Protestant church. Let’s check one of them out. Rogue pianos, definitely in churches that I grew up in. Just random pianos around the building and random rooms. Probably one of the reasons why I learned how to play piano, because I was always at church, and there was usually piano somewhere that I could just mess around on.

So if you’re from what I understand, this is the room where baptisms will also take place. So they don’t take place in the chapel like they would in most Protestant churches or even Catholic churches, but they take place here. Here’s the baptismal font, and they’ll open that up and then turn the chairs so that people can watch from here. The baptismal, or the font as it’s called here, is pretty straightforward. It’s pretty much what we would have. And in fact, the church that I grew up in was built around the same time that this LDS church was built. So there’s a lot of similarities, not just aesthetically, but even the baptismal kind of reminds me of the baptismal at the church in the sanctuary, which is behind sort of a stained glass window up on the stage. But from what I understand, this is where baptisms take place, and anybody who holds precise authority is able to baptize. There’s witnesses involved, and sometimes kids will come and gather to watch. But I actually thought at one point that you could only baptize in the temple, and clearly that’s not the case. And here’s where it happens, in a local meeting house, the Youth Battalion.

That’s an interesting name, I guess, for the young people, the teens. In most Protestant churches, we will call them youth groups, youth group. And they actually will have their own kind of pastor that are usually called youth pastors, and they’re kind of responsible for youth services. So youth is a big word that we use, though. Battalion is unique. And somebody was explaining to me that this is something that came down from church leadership, and it’s a little bit more of a tie to an anticipation of Christ’s return and the role that the youth would play and the preparation for that. All right. So as I’m making my way sort of around the hallways, it feels like I’m back where I came. But that’s not true. I’m only halfway around the building. It’s sort of divided in half, and it’s mirrored on each side. And that’s to accommodate multiple wards. Pretty unique. I don’t know any churches that are set up that way, so it’s an interesting configuration. All right, so I’ve now been in a Latter day St church. What were my thoughts? What were my impressions? Well, on one hand, like a lot of things, there was a lot of similarities to my context.

There was a chapel sanctuary, which is a little bit unique, but not too different from a smaller Protestant church. There were classrooms, sunny school classrooms. There was a gym. That’s something you’ll also see in my context. But some of the things that were unique, that were different, where the baptismal was located and the way that the building was sort of configured, because this is a steak house. In other words, not a steak house, but it’s a steak house where it’s sort of central to this region and various awards that meet, which is why there’s also the Family Research Center and a few other things like that. It had as much of a community center feel as it did at church, which a lot of Protestant churches feel that way as well. So now that I’ve been inside of the building, now I know a little bit what to expect when I actually go to church, which is going to be a completely different video. Thank you to my Latterday St. Friends who gave me access to this building and were giving me sort of behind the Saints tour so I could show you everything I was learning and come back for more videos.

If you want to like this video subscribe, do all the things and come back for the video when I actually go to church, because that’ll probably be interesting. So until next time. I’ll see you later, Saints.