Gatherings: the l-o-n-g and the short of it

The cheerful old complaint has it that school teachers and church celebrants alike have a bell to start, but a teacher also has a bell to stop. More than a few church goers might from time to time have felt like commending that idea to the church. And here comes the news that Mormons will be spending less time at church each Sunday after their earthly leaders’ decision to reduce the requirement for being considered ‘‘active’’ members of the faith from three to two hours.

It would be easy to portray this as suggestive of a subsidence of stamina or stoicism in this age of decreasing spans. Which does make churchgoing sound a bit joyless and is therefore potentially an unfair reflection of the experience.

In any case the church leadership acknowledges that a three-hour Sunday schedule can be ‘‘difficult’’, especially for parents with young children, and elderly members, new converts.

So the shorter Sunday worship block is reflective of a more ‘‘home-centred church’’ which presumably means trusting the congregation to use that freed-up hour well.

Time management has become an issue that that tests not only individuals, but as organisers of business conferences, commemorative ceremonies, school prizegivings, lectures and a host of other occasions where people come together with a common purpose but perhaps not quite so common individual circumstances or timetable tolerances.

There’s always been a natural tension between delivering a nourishing event and avoiding the twin perils of packing an experience too densely with demands on concentration, or infusing it with time-taking, rambling, aimless components in the name of refreshment, while the audience tries (or not) to fend off a mounting sense of the passage of time.

It doesn’t seem to be all that common any more for an exasperated crowd to start that traditional sign of collective impatience, the slow handclap.

But if the expression of impatience is uncommon; the feeling of it often times is.

Lesson being? There’s much to be said for having a point, getting to it as quickly as is reasonably possible, and being acutely aware as you go about it of the value of brevity.

So perhaps this editorial could have been shorter. But brevity is a tricky thing. Even amid this mood for practical reform, the church isn’t softening what seems to have long been a discomfort with the shorthand name Mormon for what is more properly called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

A name which, we’re told, carries the ‘‘singular and essential power’’ that isn’t to be discarded.

So they’ve recently stripped the discomforting ‘‘Mormon’’ from what will now be called just the Tabernacle Choir (pictured left).

But there’s still a prosaic problem. What’s the adjective by which we can describe this church? We have a Catholic this, a Jewish that, an atheistic something and a secular something else. But Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saintsian surely isn’t a goer.

(Incidentally, this has long been an issue with our friends from the United States. Their preferred adjective isn’t United Statesian. It’s American, which appropriates a whole continent. Some might call that over-reaching.)

‘‘There’s much to be said for having a point, getting to it as quickly as is reasonably possible, and being acutely aware as you go about it of the value of brevity.’’