It's that time of the month when the morg has both the Priesthood(Elders and up) meet with the Relief Society. It's the fifth Sunday of the month. So what was the subject this time???

Proper garment handling and care. Followed with garment check procedures 1 through 5.

If I hadn't resigned I would have been able to attend that.

I'm glad I have no idea.

I'm sitting in it right now. We're learning about the church's new service website, www.justserve.org. It's actually a good concept by making it easy for people to find opportunities to volunteer. The problem is, most people in our ward are so burned out with callings that they don't have time or energy to volunteer.

When I was TBM the message of service was constantly hammered on in RS. I would look around the room and see women who had a gaggle of kids, a job, a home, husband, etc. to manage.

I would think "how dare they lay a guilt trip on these women to do more service! That's all they do day in and day out is serve other people. They do without, and feel guilty if they take time or spend money on themselves. Mormonism is a cruel task master to the mothers and women that are trapped in their lair.

this +1000!!

a TBM acquaintance of mine is pregnant with her 8th child and run to exhaustion caring for her large brood. She has one small calling which she can barely manage and she seems to constantly berate herself for "doing such a poor job" and "being so selfish that I took a small nap today."

I took that shit for years in RS, nothing was ever enough, and I had nothing left to give.

There are already sites out there like this. Volunteermatch.org comes to mind. I guess the church just wants to control their own site.

What a snow job justserve(dot)org is!

When I was active, having a calling and making all the meetings, plus working and going to school, was more than I wanted to have to handle, so no way would I be looking for something else to do.

I used my home town zip code and got a list of 101 'opportunities'. Then I typed in 84057 (Orem), and was told there are no projects! The exact language: "No projects matched the search criteria."

Does this mean that outside the morridor, people are suffering and need help, but that inside the morridor, things are fine?

Exactly. And the focus isn't service per se, but rather to show the community that mormons are good, down to earth folk that like to help out.

As a concept, I thought the idea of helping people find opportunities to volunteer locally was a good idea. However, by the end of the meeting, it had just become one more expectation for burned out members to fulfill to burnish the church's image.

I only got 1 with my szip code! The Idaho Youth Ranch Thift store!

It's all about PR and appearances.

When it was first introduced months ago, even some TBMs

seemed a little put off as to why the church was putting

a bunch of money into the JustServe.com project when the same

concept was ALREADY WORKING WELL IN THE AREA FOR FREE by

using the "Craigslist.com" website features for Volunteers

under the Community section!

I am sure many more potential volunteers will look at the new

church website than Craigslist though, so I stop murmuring...

My husband attended church and the lesson was on the new policy. They even showed the church's PR video. I think my husband might be shunned over what he said.

Is there a YouTube video of it???

Out of curiosity, what was the member's response? Did they see a problem with denying ordinances to children?

I put in my zip code. Nada. I expanded the search to the 75 mile search, 4 projects.

This will go the same way as mormonsandgays.org. Both are websites organized to project an image of Mormon involvement int he community. Neither have anything to do with what the church actually is.

In college, lo these many years ago, I was called to coordinate community service. I thought it was a great idea, so I went out and made connections with a couple of prominent and progressive charities. When I went back to the bishopric to tell them what I'd arranged, they said "good. Now go and do it." In other words, they offered no help. They did not announce the opportunities from the stand or in meetings; they encouraged no one to participate; and then provided no resources. I was left to phone people who were already busy with church assignments and had no interest in undertaking new responsibilities. They knew that the church would give them absolutely no credit for helping an outside organization.

So that was the end of that. I ended up joining one of the charities at a high (college) level and doing stuff I'm proud of, but not one other Mormon joined in.

Anyone who thinks the church values community service enough to cut people slack who engage in it is smoking illegal substances. Doing your visiting and home teaching will always be more important to the church than serving your fellow human beings.

Well okay, the church didn't value community service enough to relax expectations for callings. However, the church does value community service enough to arrange for members to wear brightly colored shirts if there will be cameras rolling at the event.

The college ward did not offer us free yellow shirts. If they had, perhaps a couple of people would have helped me work for Amnesty International.

It was, obviously, a liberal Mormon community. They thought in theory that service was a good idea, but there was no institutional support. Obviously, in other places I might have been excommunicated for assuming a leadership role in AI.

Were there any news crews anticipated at the service activity? It's not like the church to pass on free publicity.

Service with Amnesty International would give members a chance to connect with the broader world and actually participate in activities that would have a tangible, positive impact on the lives of others. It's unfortunate they missed out on that opportunity because they couldn't work it into a schedule packed with church obligations. Even sadder is that the church wouldn't at least support you in helping others become aware of the opportunity.

It was about the sabbath day in my ward. I ignored it heartily.

My wife at one time was on the Relief Society Board. She was assigned the task of coming up with a service activity. So she did some research, and decided to donate blankets & clothes to a charity in the area. She went back to report, and they shut her down. They told her they were going to send care packages to the missionaries for the service project instead. She had already committed to helping this organization, so she did it all on her own. Apparently, the church's definition of service only includes helping other Mormons out, and helping the church out.

I was there. It was about sabbath day observance and stuff

Mine was another repeat of the lame Sabbath Day observance lesson we had last time. Seriously. It was a rerun. I would have left early if it weren't for the opportunity to offer a dig at Bednar's comments about a lack of gospel modeling in homes.

Of course I did all this while playing on my smart phone...