All or Nothing

Sunday I was talking with my 17-year-old daughter, my youngest child, about the shift to “All or Nothing” spiritual preparation and outcomes for youth in the Church. Before her time the young women had Personal Progress, a program that held a lot of meaning for my late wife and others of her generation. My late wife said that experience of coming up with goals and executing them was a helpful preparation for her life as an independent married woman every day deciding what ought to be done, mostly accountable only to herself for the use of her time. Today, instead of organizing such preparation in the teaching of the church’s young women and recognizing progress in that publicly, the direction is that what youth need to prepare for is to receive the endowment in the House of the Lord, and entering the temple for that purpose as soon as they can be considered adults is the capstone they need, not a lovely medallion.

What then of the 18-year-olds who are not ready to covenant in the temple?

The early American Puritans required a personal conversion experience to qualify for membership in their congregations. Children of members could be baptized but did not qualify as members until they experienced their own conversion. As that second generation grew, it became an issue that many never experienced conversion, so many of the third generation were unbaptized. One way of dealing with that was the Half-Way Covenant: The baptized but unconverted were not full members, but their children could still be baptized.

The ward of my youth in Las Vegas forty-and-more years back was about half people who never came to Sunday meetings, who were Latter-day Saints largely owing to their great-grandparents’ conversion, who liked the church and were glad when the home teachers or the deacons collecting fast offerings stopped by, and all their neighbors knew they were Mormon. Some youth came to church without their parents. About a tenth of my neighborhood was Mormon.

The Latter-day Saint portion of the population in the ward my daughter has been part of all her life is about 1%. Compared with forty years ago, sparsity at this level or more is the norm for much (most?) of the church. Youth from one ward attending three high schools instead of youth from three wards attending one high school. At this low concentration, those saints who don’t choose to gather with the church on Sundays fall off the map. Ministering brothers and sisters and others will keep visiting, but unplanned spontaneous interactions are few. A decade later there is little connection left.

“All or Nothing” wasn’t really the Church’s choice. It’s just the current reality of the situation and being recognized. Anything less than “All” slides itself down to “Nothing.” The only thing tying an un-endowed 20-year-old to her eternal covenants will be her family.