Let me anticipate a couple of likely questions and answer them now:

1. No, I don’t know whether they would open the partition if enough people were present before the meeting started.

2. Yes, the average attendance in this ward obviously required more space than the chapel itself had to offer.

We have the opposite reaction in our ward. We also have two overflows. The first one usually opens during the opening hymn; the second right after the sacrament. Kind of nice to see the chapel being expanded due to demand regardless of the tardiness of the participants. We welcome all who want to worship, inlcuding chicks who wear pants to church.

This inane policy will probably be changed in a couple of weeks.

I don’t understand the idea behind the policy: if you are late, no Sacrament Meeting for you! It seems more like a reward. I say, make the latecomers sit on the stand and give the talks–I think that would be more effective to solving the problem.

I was in a unit that closed the Chapel doors for the Sacrament and would not serve the Sacrament in the halls in an effort to punish latecomers. Then they let them in after the Sacrament, to be subjected to the walk of shame to the front of the Chapel for the available seating and having to listen to the talks. I thought it was very stupid at the time, but maybe it was better than the one you just encountered.

I don’t know if this is on topic or not, but in my ward, it drives me crazy that we open the overflow at all. There are HUGE gaps in the pews and the overflow is full. We could easily accommodate all of the people sitting in the overflow in the pews with the rest of us. It’s almost like we’re afraid to sit close enough to someone else to actually get to know them.

As for the tardiness thing, I am definitely in favor of NOT serving the sacrament to the foyer. If you don’t have enough respect for the ordinance to arrive before it starts, then probably you need to repent and arrive on time so you can receive it the following week. The only exception I would approve to my no sacrament in the foyer rule is for those people who are out there because they have a child that needed to be removed from the chapel.

So I guess my final thesis is this:
Close off the overflow until the chapel really is full.

re: 7, Arriving late to sacrament is not something a person needs to repent of, is it? That’s just hyperbole on your part, right?!?!? Getting to sacrament meeting late may be poor form, careless, thoughtless, annoying, customary etc. but it’s not really a sin, is it? After all, the sacrament is not even a saving ordinance. In fact, it’s a quasi-ordinance at best. (One can be exalted w/o ever partaking of the sacrament.)

I’ve never heard of a ward locking the door to the overflow partition when there were people who wanted seats and there really were no seats left in the chapel. (I assume you really mean an overflow area, not an area that is being used for another ward’s class or access across a building that lacks adequate hallways.) But my experience tends toward Ron’s: the chapel isn’t really full, but folks come late and open the partition and sit in the back anyway. I’d be curious, Orwell, was the chapel really full? Does the ward really do what you say it does, or is that just someone’s perception because the ward is determined to fill the chapel, avoiding both the gaps that are found in nearly all sacrament meetings and the distance created by unnecessarily opening overflow areas?

One of the dumbest things I’ve read. Sacrament meeting is made for the member, not the member for sacrament meeting.

Close off the overflow until the chapel really is full.

Our ward fills up every seat in the first overflow, as well as the chapel, every week. We’ve opted to open the overflow before the meeting starts. The overflow is already half-filled by the time the meeting begins. But I remember when we weren’t so big, and we’d only open the overflow curtains on an as-needed basis, and it was much, much more distracting to the meeting than late arrivals…

I think there is sufficient incentive to get to the chapel on time because of the cushioned seats. When you’re an elder and you meet during the third Sunday block you can sit on the same sweet cushion for three hours straight without ever having to re-warm a spot.

I mean, what if the missionaries are bringing an investigator family and the family is a minute late, because they couldn’t find the chapel?

“padded relief society seats”

Thank you for recognizing that all padded seats at Church ARE Relief Society seats! How those chairs keep escaping I’ll never know, but please return them to the RS room ASAP. No one else deserves them.

I’d love to see a stake leader come in 30 minutes into the meeting just to “observe”. This happens all the the time in our stake. The stake leader has to meet with the bishop or a member (or a MP ordination), decides to come to the meetinghouse, isn’t planning to attend sacrament meeting, but arrives 20 minutes before the end of the meeting.

Yes, you’d think a stake would put a fast stop to this…

Rbc, my BB has made sacrament less boring.

Taking a cue from Martin Luther, someone should nail the text of Doctrine and Covenants 46:3-5 to the door.

When I was bish, we would let the chapel fill, then open the overflow. After I was released, the new bish did not like the “noise” of opening the curtains and put a stop to it. It was the chapel or nothing. One helpful Elder opened the overflow one Sunday so that people could take part in the meeting. The bish locked the curtains after that. He also instituted a no passing the sacrament in the foyers policy.

The SP couldn’t figure out why attendance dropped. At one point he considered changing the ward back to a branch. My philosophy, “If you open it they will come.”

re: 30, it’s orthogonal. I completely agree it’s evil to deny the sacrament, whatever salvific effect it may or may not have, because a worshiper arrives a little late or has to leave the chapel before the ordinance is administered and finds herself marooned in the foyer.

Must be nice to be in a ward that has the luxury of bothering with such trivial matters. Our ward would love to worry about turning people away because they have the audacity to show up late. We’d quickly become a branch and then a dependent branch and then whatever is smaller than a dependent branch.

#27 has the best idea yet.

I completely agree it’s evil to deny the sacrament, whatever salvific effect it may or may not have, because a worshiper arrives a little late or has to leave the chapel before the ordinance is administered

So it’s a sin to deny latecomers the sacrament, but not to arrive too late to partake of it? Am I reading your #9 and #31 correctly?

Yes, Stephen (32)! When I was pre-teen my Utah ward was large enough and the chapel small enough that latecomers were seated on the stand. And on folding chairs placed in the aisles. and on chairs that filled the foyer.

re: 33

Interesting question. I don’t think either is a sin, but welcome further guidance. I didn’t mean to suggest the person responsible for denying the sacrament on the basis of tardiness or limited chapel seating capacity is guilty of a sin. It’s a dumb, punitive approach and a mistake, imo, but I don’t know that it rises to the level of sin. And, I probably overstated it a bit by aping DKL’s “evil” description. Dumb, shortsighted, unthinking, overeaction, silly, arbitrary, stupid, nutty might better describe the policy at issue, at least for me.

As I said before, in my ward we’d love to be able to be so glib as to turn folks away for nothing more than being a little tardy. In our ward hearing the second set of overflow doors slide open is music to most of our ears, since it doesn’t happen every week and is a vast improvement over where we were 2 years ago. We welcome the brief, slightly irreverent interruption. (We have a small chapel so the second set of overflow doors being opened does not mean a ward bursting at the seams and in need of being split. Perhaps one day, but not in the near future, alas.)

Peter LLC So it’s a sin to deny latecomers the sacrament, but not to arrive too late to partake of it?

This is a silly question, and if you thought clearly about this, you’d see exactly why. Unless the bishop is willing to interview each member in the foyer to determine the worthiness of her reason, excluding the latecomers from the sacrament abuses his authority as a judge in Israel, and he will answer before the bar of God for it.

There are obviously enough people regularly attending this unit that whether they’re late or not, the leadership should plan appropriately to accomodate everyone. The solution to this problem is to simply have the partition doors open with chairs set up BEFORE sacrament meeting starts. Then there’s no noisy disturbances of the doors opening and chairs scraping on the floor as they are set up.

I wish we had this problem!

We have sacrament meeting last, instead of first. This inspired process takes care of all of the issues raised by this post. Now people are only late to priesthood and relief society, which is not a bad thing anyway because they only miss opening exercises (and who really needs opening exercises).

Yeah, I hear you MCQ. I prefer it that way myself. My only problem with that arrangement is that Sacrament Meeting is more prone to go overtime than EQ.

I didn’t read the comments yet so forgive me if I am repeating what someone else has written. If I understand your post correctly, the chapel was full, and anyone coming late had to hang out in the foyer. Now, what if all of those people came on time? The chapel would still be full, and the overflow would have to hang out in the foyer.

That is the stupidest idea I have ever heard (or read). It actually makes me mad. What a way to breed contempt.

MCQ – #43. Sacrament meeting last is of the devil when you have kids and/or you have a primary calling. You can’t drop off your kids in their class until their teacher shows up, but you can’t go take care of your calling until your kids are dropped off so everyone is milling around waiting for everyone else. Then your kids make it through 1 1/2+ hours of Primary, they’re uber-excited to tell you everything that they did when you pick them up from Primary but you have to shush them and somehow get them to sit still for Sac. Mtg when they really just want to go home. The horror is doubled when your ward has to meet from 2:30-5:30 with Sac mtg last b/c of an overcrowded bldg.

When I was a small child my family lived in a very small town in Alaska. Apparently being punctual was a problem and my mother was to give a talk on being prompt to meetings. Of course you can all see where this is going. I had nosebleed problems, and that day I had to change three times before church. Needless to say, we were late and my mother was quite embarrassed.

Because I am the organist, I hate getting there less than ten minutes to start. I do have some fun with prelude though. When I was also serving as the song leader in primary, I would play one primary song during prelude and the children could earn a prize in opening exercises if they knew which song I had played. I’ve also sneaked in some really nice old hymns that are not in the current book.

The policy in the original post is harsh and not at all Christ like. He would probably hang out with those in the foyer since they most likely sacrificed more to be there a la the widow’s mite. They probably have dealt with screaming/ obstinate kids, struggles to make it back to the fold, transportation problems, wondering if they are well enough to make it through the day, etc.

[...] DKL, commenting on Orwell’s post “The Ten Foolish Virgins Go to Sacrament Meeting” (on a ward where the partition at the back of the chapel was intentionally locked so the only overflow seating was in the foyer) at Mormon Mentality: If Jesus went to that ward, He’d walk right into the chapel and vaporize the overflow partition by shooting energy blasts out of His eyeballs, and then He’d head straight to the front of the chapel and choke the bishopric — not unto death, mind you, but just enough to rattle them a little. And after that, He’d apologize to everyone for their troubles and cancel the remainder of the meetings for the day. Now that’s the power of God. [...]