An August 2024 Church Handbook update includes instruction inviting “Young Women class presidencies to organize youth to minister by welcoming visitors and members as they enter the chapel.” Does this baby step represent leadership’s awareness of the need for Latter-day Saint young women to have some kind of systematic responsibility at the ward level? In Episode 198, Cynthia and Susan discuss this change in the context of research detailing historic shifts in religious engagement for Gen Z men and women. This episode also revisits a previous exploration of the question many of the Church’s children are asking: “When will girls be able to pass the sacrament?”
Notes & Quotes:
ALSSI Episode 142: Messages to Our Daughters | Part 1—About Girls and the Sacrament
In a First Among Christians, Young Men Are More Religious than Young Women, by Ruth Graham, New York Times, 9/23/2024
Church Handbook 29.2.1.3, Time Before the Meeting
The Power of Godliness: Mormon Liturgy and Cosmology, by Jonathan Stapley
Letters from Love with Elizabeth Gilbert
Recent study finds nearly 1,000 BYU student survey respondents identify as LGBTQ, by Lindsey Reese, The Daily Universe, 3/11/2021
“Young priesthood officers needed a regular duty to perform. Their canonical duties—’to warn, exhort, expound and teach and invite all to come to Christ’—were certainly still in effect but were also impractical to systematize among young boys. Participation in the weekly ritual of the Lord’s Supper was something meaningful and regular for the boys to do.” —Jonathan Stapley
