On faith: Church meeting houses bless families and individuals

Alfred Gunn

Guest columnist

One pleasant challenge of a fast-growing worldwide LDS Church membership is to provide buildings for its people.

We don’t build mega-churches, so when a congregation — we call them “wards,” and they are geographical — outgrows its meeting house, the ward is divided into two, and each provides opportunities for members to serve in leadership and ministerial roles, from bishop to den mother, organist to Sunday School teacher.

For example, here in Gig Harbor, there have been three wards platooning their meetings in our red brick meeting house at Rosedale and Dorotich streets. Somebody built that lovely building before Marcia and I arrived 21 years ago with our five children.

I understand that, when Bishop LuDean Snow learned the choice piece of land where it now stands was going to be available on the market, he went to his own bank account and withdrew $5,000 to immediately secure it with a down payment.

Members met in a small school building on the site until the church was built.

Today, two wards also meet in a chapel at Key Center. But the time will come when growth suggests the need for an additional and new building in the area.

Years ago, I attended a county government hearing in San Diego County, where The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had purchased a lovely piece of property in a developing residential area.

Some of the neighbors in the area worried about the increased traffic such a building might bring to what had been a peaceful orange orchard until that time. They expressed their concerns and were heard.

Then one man, not a person of my faith, stood and said he had traveled all over the country, and everywhere he went, he saw beautiful LDS meeting houses, well-landscaped and well-kept, always a credit to their neighborhoods.

Another man, not of my faith, addressed the traffic issue with this: “Wouldn’t it be nice if all the churches of America had traffic jams trying to fill their parking lots every Sunday?”

The neighbors’ concerns seemed to melt away, and the county granted the needed permits for yet another meeting house.

Somewhere in the world, the church completes one of these new buildings every workday. I have seen them on islands of the Pacific, where the meeting houses, although smaller than ours here, was the most beautiful building on the island.

When members in Gig Harbor need a new church building, and if they are faithful in their meeting attendance and tithes, there will be no building fund and there will be no mortgage. The building will be approved and erected in a timely manner.

It will be well-built, beautifully landscaped and compatible with its environs, and it will have adequate on-site parking.

Its chapel will have an organ and a piano and padded pews and hymnbooks with hymns of worship. It will have a cultural hall, a gym, many classrooms, a kitchen and a baptismal font.

The building will be dedicated and utilized immediately upon its completion, and it will be totally paid for without a collection plate ever being passed.

It will be opened to all, and our members will invite friends to attend with them and share the joy of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

It will be a house of worship, a house of prayer and a House of the Lord.

Families will be strengthened. Primary children will walk its halls to their classrooms with folded arms. Loving teachers will teach gospel principles, which are in the Bible and the Book of Mormon, and bear testimony that the Lord’s Church is restored to the earth.

Within its walls, Boy Scout troops and early morning Seminary classes will meet during the week, and there, as well as in the homes of its members, generations of young men and women will learn to love God and minister to their fellow men at home and abroad.

On Faith columnist Alfred Gunn, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at Gig Harbor, can be reached by e-mail at alf.gunn@juno.com. For more information, visit www.mormon.org.