Latter-day Saint Life

An Atheist Visits, 'Grades' LDS Church Service

It really doesn’t look like a typical church inside. It’s more of a community center kind of place. There’s a chapel off to one side, and lots of meeting rooms, offices, and the like. I went into “confused visitor mode,” which I often do when I go to a new church, and wandered around looking lost. I wandered upstairs, where there were offices for church officials, classrooms, and some kind of prayer meeting going on, and some guy asked me if he could help me.

I told him I was new, had no idea what I was doing or where I was going, and I was waiting for the 11:00 am service to start, so I was just wandering around. Turns out he was the president of something or other (of the Washington Park Ward maybe? Mormons have a lot of presidents of things), and he introduced me to the Washington Park Ward’s former bishop and two very young missionaries who held the title of “elder.”

Now, in other churches, a bishop is a very high ranking official who might make you kiss his ring or genuflect or some such, but in the LDS church, a bishop is just a volunteer who serves as a sort of guide for the ward. A ward is a group of people who meet together in prayer.

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