A Bit of History: Building Your Own Meetinghouses

I have often observed – for example in science – that the first generation when things are professionalised and specialised gets the benefits, while retaining the good attitudes of self-help/ amateurism. But with the second generation the inevitable downsides of bureaucracy begin to bite. And soon after – the managers take-over.

I remember the “olden” days of ward budget fund raising, and building project fund raising. Lots of hard work, but lots of good times and testimony building too. Not only was this change to build families, but to equalize the programs of the church between old, established, wealthy wards in the “Mormon corridor”, and the new, smaller branches and wards everywhere else. That was a huge blessing!

My grandfathers both took leading roles in building chapels for their wards – one in Arizona, one in Washington. My parents told us about all the weekends and evenings they spent down at the church building, helping to build it. Those buildings still exist. One was sold to another church, but two still belong to the Church. My Dad even told us specific stories about certain parts of the old 8th Avenue building that only someone who helped build it would know. (We explored those parts secretly later.)
Because of those stories, I feel an extra sense of holiness in that building. I know that they sacrificed in a very real way to build it, and it makes me want to sacrifice too.

This brings back a lot of memories of the churches when I was very, very young.

While there was a lot of sacrifice and trials and blessings, but my mother said she preferred the “new” way where the church paid for it all and professionals did it, because there was too much of a gap between richer wards and poorer wards. Very rich wards tended to hire professionals and have all the perks, whereas poorer wards were lucky to have walls and a roof.

(I can still see something of this today, generally when I visit wards and see what sorts of toys are in the nursery; poorer wards have lots of thrift store cast offs often very old and worn out, whereas richer wards have all new, brain building, latest popular franchise toys that are replaced often).

A few years ago my mother unearthed a typewritten mimeograph of the history of the branch I grew up in, completed the year I was born. It was a tale of carving out a tiny community in a tiny community. They built most of that building themselves. I knew these men and women as the mythology of my childhood. Old Brother Christiansen who would sit like a gargoyle in his wheelchair and pinch you if you got too close. Brother Davis who carved jigsaw puzzle pieces so they would fit where he _knew_ they belonged. Sister Salisbury who taught our youth Sunday school and must have had something to do with Salisbury steak to my young mind. Others who had moved on before I would have come to know them. I grew up there and I knew them and I knew the building they lived in. I dream of that building still sometimes, the baseball diamond behind it, the lawn where we could watch fireworks on the 4th of July, the devil’s own Coca-Cola bottling plant next to it (which surely must have been the only such plant in the world). The deacon pews I sat in, the branch president’s desk with its “Do It Now” bookstand, the drinking fountain I could take apart. The font I was baptized in. They built all that and then I experienced some small part of it all.

Oddly enough, the building I attend now—or would, if appearances didn’t have to be “kept up”—has a strange connection to my wife’s family due to a great-uncle who was formerly the stake president here and put in a ramp to the stand. I found the records from its construction when I was a clerk a few years back and I knew the men and women who had—if not built it, in that place, at least coordinated its building, all the way down to the organ receipts.

The ward building I grew up with was built by its members – and it used to be a very quirky building indeed. The front foyer is an octagon, with classrooms and hallways and the chapel and the cultural hall all leading off it.
The Primary room is downstairs, as is the nursery; the gym is in the deep basement, down three flights of stairs. I used to dream that the stairs continued on forever, past stranger and stranger things, like an Alice-in-Wonderland hole.
In fact, a door at the second flight of stairs leads to ‘the throne room’, where someone built and subsequently left a ‘throne’ carpeted with lime green shag carpet for a long-forgotten road show. It was filled with rubble and the old heating systems otherwise, and accessible only to those who had building keys.
The Relief Society room was the newest addition, and one can access it either by going up two flights of stairs from the Primary room or by going along the hallway where the old stage (for roadshows and other performances) has been converted into a classroom.
Underneath the Relief Society room was the Scouting room, with the knot board my dad made, and the Scout Oath and all on the walls. And across from it was the old indexing room, back from when they took lists of names from microfilm.
The building is much more boring now – but I still remember.
Our pioneer-era Tabernacle, thankfully, has been well-preserved, and is still used for Stake Conferences in our area; every prophet since Brigham Young has spoken at its pulpit. Our YSA stake often does service projects there – or did, until COVID hit.

My mom lived in President Hinckley’s stake when he was the stake president. Some of the “few murmurings” he mentioned in this talk occurred during a priesthood meeting when he had only one meetinghouse in the newly downsized stake he had been called to preside over (they had just finished two new buildings before the boundaries were redrawn), and a few of the brothers at that meeting complained about still more money they had to contribute for new buildings. My mom’s dad reminded them whose church this really belonged to, and that put a stop to the murmuring. It’s a favorite moment from my family history, and no one in the family would have known about it if President Hinckley hadn’t shared Grandpa’s name when repeating the story later to people who knew my mom’s family.

E.C., I have to say that’s the best lived metaphor for Mormonism I’ve heard all year.

L. Tom Perry, for his 90th birthday, traveled to every chapel he had personally helped build and gave a fireside at each one. I happened to be at the one in Boston and remember thinking how cool it was that he had personally help build 5 different chapels over his life.