Friday, October 16, 2009

An immovable feast

In much of the Bible Belt, there’s no school activities on Wednesday nights, ’cause that’s the night that churches traditionally hold Bible study. Monday nights, on the other hand, are fair game for school activities. This can be a problem for Mormon students who are effectively shut out of school extracurriculars if they can’t participate Monday nights due to family home evening. However, this seems to me like it could be a nice luxury for the church in those areas—they’ve been handed a free night (Wednesday) for family home evening. Rather than do that, though, wards in those areas fight to hold youth activity nights on Wednesdays, and reserve Mondays for family home evenings.

This leads to a weird situation, though—sabbath observances can be moved from Sunday to another day in those areas of the world where it makes sense to do so (like in Israel, where sabbath services are held on Saturday), but moving family home evening to a night other than Monday just isn’t done. Why?

2 comments:

Michelle said...

This was exactly the situation when we lived in Shreveport, Louisiana. It worked nicely for having YM/YW activities on Wednesdays, but Mondays were busy for the kids. The Stake President actually encouraged families in that situation to start having FHE on Sunday night instead.

Unknown said...

Here they say to do FHE on Monday or any other consistent day that works for you. The Spoltores, for example, do FHE on Sunday evenings because Mondays just never work for them.

My kids are effectively shut out of community sports because they have practices and games on Sundays and if you can't attend those you can't be on the teams, no exceptions.