Stake Conference

Last week was stake conference.

A lot of people don't go to stake conference. I've known that for a while, but this year our stake president really pointed it out to us. The week before he visited our sacrament meeting to urge everybody to go, citing some sort of statistic about how many usually go compared to the number attending sacrament meeting on an average Sunday. Then during the general session of conference, he talked about how he would like to have the perfect stake; how cool it would be to have buses show up to take us all to establish Zion or something like that, with our temple recommends as our tickets. But only 1 out of every 3 adults in the stake has a current temple recommend, and 4 out of every 5 stake members weren't at conference. That is, 33% of adults have a recommend, for which they must attend their meetings to be worthy. And some members who don't have the recommend still attend regularly. But only 20% attend the Sunday morning session of stake conference.

We are told that partaking of the sacrament is the most important thing we do on Sunday. And maybe that's part of why some people think skipping conference isn't such a big deal; they aren't administering the sacrament, so we're already missing the most important thing anyway. But the way I see it, if we are regularly required to skip the sacrament, there must be a good reason for it.

So if something is so important that it's worth skipping the sacred ordinance of the sacrament, isn't it important enough that we should make it a point to be there?