As a teacher, one of the fundamental rules of teaching is to ‘know your students’—not necessarily in the sense ‘know them personally’, but to have an understanding of who they are.
Imagine you’re teaching a lesson on “temples”, for instance: even teaching from exactly the same manual, the lesson will usually be fundamentally different in tone and content if you’re teaching:
- primary kids
- young men / young women
- single college students
- married college students
- new converts
- an adult family ward class
- a high priests group
Why? Because each group is at a completely different stage in their lives, and has a completely different background of gospel knowledge and practice. Each group will have a different outlook on what the temple represents to them personally, thus good teachers will adjust the scope and approach of the lesson based on who the students are.
Now, imagine you’re a teacher and are asked to prepare a lesson on ‘temples’…but didn’t know what kind of student—young or old, married or single, etc—the class was composed of until right when class started.
Or, even worse, had a class that contained people from ALL of the above groups, so that no individual tailoring of the lesson could be done.
Welcome to the ‘problem’ of LDS General Conference—where the Church’s General Authorities are asked to give a lesson on a gospel topic to a large Church population that includes young and old, married and single, new members and old…and find a way to make it meaningful to everyone.
GA’s in this position have basically two options:
#1: Choose ONE of the above groups to tailor a specific message and address them and them only. (This is usually announced right at the beginning of the talk with “I’d like to address my remarks today to…”)
#2: Speak about the gospel topic in very, very general terms.
If you look through past Conference issues of the Ensign, it’s easy to pick out example talks where it’s obvious #1 or #2 was chosen.
#1 presents a problem because it tends to exclude all members other than that subgroup to which the talk is addressed. #2 presents a problem because talks that are ‘basic’ enough so that new members and kids won’t be lost or overwhelmed, will tend to turn off older members who are already well familiar with the basics.
It is possible that the length of General Conference (eight hours for women, ten for men) is in part a ‘solution’ to this problem. (And this may very well be the only place you’ll ever see anywhere where the length of General Conference is mentioned as a ‘solution’ to anything…) It’s unlikely--if not quite improbable--that any one member will get something out of every talk (it’s arguable, in fact, whether General Conference is even designed this way).
However, the more talks on different subjects by different people packed into one weekend, the more likely it is that every member will get something out of some talk somewhere over the course of those 4-5 sessions.
Still, it’s obvious that the ‘efficiency’ of 8-10 hour conference weekends (based on some abstract “spiritual enlightenment per hour” metric) will be lacking, and perhaps always will be, as in order to find those ‘gems’, you need to sit through a number of other talks that don’t speak to you (often deliberately, as they are aimed at members of other subgroups).
(One can easily argue that this is just how the gospel is—even in scripture study, one must pore through a number of scriptures that don’t ‘speak to you’ in order to find those few that do. Perhaps discussing gospel topics in terms of ‘efficiency’ according to any metric is missing the point. I can certainly go along with this…)
If we accept ‘efficiency’ as a legitimate metric, is there a ‘solution’ to General Conference—something that would make the GC experience more beneficial to more people in the long run? More ‘efficient’ as it were, in terms of helping people have more spiritual experiences per hour of GC talks?
The most basic solution is to ‘divide and conquer’. We divide the different subgroups of members mentioned above into different classes during the Sunday block hours for a reason: teachers should be able to adjust their lessons to be more ‘targeted’ and appropriate for each group. No one suggests, for example, that letting young men/young women have their own Sunday School classes apart from adults is a bad idea—ditto having new members attend a simpler ‘Gospel Principles’ class versus normal Gospel Doctrine. Every ward has members at different stages of spiritual progression, thus are deserving of different levels of gospel education.
Why not have General Conference do the same thing? We already break out priesthood holders for one session (and either Relief Society or Young Women for a separate ‘session’ the previous week) for this exact purpose: addressing those groups with messages targeted to them specifically.
Along these lines, instead of having four ‘general’ sessions, have one session devoted to new members a la “Gospel Principles” class, where General Authorities discuss gospel basics. Maybe have one ‘general session’ for everyone, have a ‘young men/young women’ session, an ‘adult member’ session, and perhaps a ‘Church leaders’ session for those in higher leadership positions. (Many stake conferences do this sort of thing, now…)
Each session would still have the assigned mix of apostles, seventies, and other auxiliary leaders--and guest choirs--and in all aspects would be more or less conducted the same as they are now.
In this new format, most members would hear fewer talks over fewer hours then at present (and could always catch up on the others online or through the Ensign, of course), but the talks they hear would be more closely aimed at things relevant to their current life situation.
(Many talks, such as Pres. Faust’s forgiveness talk from last conference are relevant to all, and would be in a ‘general’ session. But anyone familiar with conferences in recent years can point to a number of talks that are clearly—often specifically noted to be in the intro—aimed at people other than themselves. Why not help those talks find a home where they can still find their desired targets without hurting the ‘efficiency’ of General Conference weekend, which just tempts people to fall asleep or skip the session entirely?)
Suggesting General Conference needs 'fixing' is dangerous territory for some. Still, I think there's merit in analysis and discussion of strengths and weaknesses. Without turning this into a 'gripe session', what are the good and the bad in the current General Conference format and how can it be improved?