I can still remember turning 12. At least the church parts of it. After I turned 12, my dad ordained me to the Aaronic priesthood, and then I got to pass the sacrament.
And I continued to pass it for the next two years.[fn1]
Passing the sacrament was an important part of my development as a Mormon. It provided me with a tangible connection to the church. My participation in the church stopped being passive, the receipt of knowledge and culture, and started being, well, participatory. I felt a certain amount of pride, a certain amount of responsibility, and even a certain amount of ownership over my church experience. I remember intricately figuring out who would go where, negotiating the pews to make sure that everybody got the sacrament, watching the priests, waiting for them to stand up so I could return my tray.
And lately I’ve been thinking, what if Beehives passed the sacrament, too?
Over the last several years (and almost certainly much longer), there’s been a lot of discussion of women’s and girls’ places in the church. It’s been reflected in everything from calls for priesthood to calls for pants.
Now, pants is easy (albeit culturally disapproved). Priesthood is probably a lot harder (requiring a revelatory change).
And girls (and women) passing the sacrament? It’s not as far-fetched as it might appear.
Yes, administering the sacrament is a priesthood responsibility. D&C 20 lays the responsibility for administering the sacrament squarely at the feet of the apostles and priests. Importantly, D&C 20 also explicitly provides that teachers and deacons do not have authority to “administer” the sacrament.[fn2] Thus, it must be that preparing and passing the sacrament are something other than administering the sacrament.
That makes sense, of course: we don’t require priesthood to hand the trays of bread and water down the pew to our family members, friends, and coreligionists.[fn3] In fact, modern prophets have recognized this. In a 1928 letter to a mission president, President Grant wrote that it was only “custom” that priesthood holders pass the sacrament, and that he’d have no objection to “worthy young brethren” who didn’t have the priesthood passing the sacrament if there weren’t boys who were ordained.[fn4]
And until the early part of the 20th century, women often prepared the sacrament table. It wasn’t until 1950 that the Presiding Bishopric shifted that responsibility to teachers.[fn5]
The requirement that those who pass (and, for that matter, prepare) the sacrament, then, is purely a matter of policy. It’s long-standing policy, of course, but policy nonetheless. And policies can, and do, change. In fact, in the mid-80s, Elder Packer explained that
Procedures, programs, the administrative policies, even some patterns of organization are subject to change. We are quite free, indeed, quite obliged to alter them from time to time. But the principles, the doctrines, never change.
Let me reiterate that: administrative policies not only can change, but sometimes should change. And the requirement that those who prepare and pass the sacrament is a policy, one subject to change, one that doesn’t need some type of revelatory impetus for that change.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that a ward or stake can abandon it, sua sponte. The policy is clearly laid out in the Handbook.[fn6] But it doesn’t have the weight of scripture, or even of doctrine. It is purely the result of policy decisions that have been made in the last century or so, and have been carried forward to the present.
So should the church let girls and women pass the sacrament alongside boys and men? I think it’s worth very serious consideration. It is an easy way to include some of those who currently feel excluded, a way to validate their membership and their participation.[fn7]
So allowing Beehives[fn8] to pass the sacrament would represent a significant administrative change to the church. But the status quo is purely a cultural policy. And sometimes, policies feel permanent by virtue of being the way we’ve always done things. But it’s worth reexamining what we’ve always done, especially where, like here, the policy is one that is not required by scripture or prophetic utterance, and one that can easily and costlessly be changed.
[fn1] My Southern California ward had enough young men that I suspect I rarely passed anymore after I turned 14. I’m not sure about that, of course, but it’s at least really likely.
[fn2] To be completely clear, D&C 20:58 says, “But neither teachers nor deacons have authority to baptize, administer the sacrament, or lay on hands” (emphasis added).
[fn3] In fact, in 1899, Apostle Francis Marion Lyman addressed the First Sunday School Convention, and gave a Q-and-A-style address. In it, he said,
Question: Have members not holding the Priesthood the right to pass the sacrament?
Answer: You pass it to one another, do you not, all the time, all you sisters and all you brethren? Then why ask the question? The administering of the sacrament is not passing it to the people. The administering of the sacrament is when the brethren offer the prayer in blessing the bread or water. That is the administration of the sacrament. That cannot be done by Deacons, nor by members of the Church who do not bear the Priesthood.
Francis M. Lyman, “The Administration of the Sacrament in the Sunday School,” Proceedings of the Sunday School Convention 74, 77 (1899) (emphasis added).
[fn4] William G. Hartley, From Men to Boys: LDS Aaronic Priesthood Offices, 1829-1996, 22 J. Mormon History 80, 130 (1996).
[fn5] Id. at 130-31. For more on women preparing the sacrament, see Kristine Wright, “‘We Baked a Lot of Bread’: Reconceptualizing Mormon Women and Ritual Objects,” in Women and Mormonism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives at 82 (Kate Holbrook & Matthew Bowman, eds. 2016). For even more discussion on how the church started centering its liturgy in the priesthood bureaucracy in the twentieth century, you’ll have to check out J. Stapley’s forthcoming The Power of Godliness: Mormon Liturgy and Cosmology.
[fn6] For the record, though, even the Handbook recognizes the artificiality and disconnect of requiring priesthood to take the sacrament from pew to pew, but not to pass it within the pew: “After a priesthood holder hands a sacrament tray to a member, others may pass the tray from one to another for convenience.”
[fn7] I already know what two objections to this will be. One is, I (or my wife/daughters/sisters/mother/etc.) don’t feel excluded and, in fact, don’t actually want to pass the sacrament. And that’s fair. There’s no reason you or your loved one would have to pass the sacrament. But that the issue doesn’t resonate with some people doesn’t somehow invalidate those who would feel this as both an explicit inclusion and a blessing.
The second is, It will make the boys feel less special, and the boys need this to form an attachment to the church. That makes zero sense to me. My pride in passing the sacrament was based on what I was doing, not on the exclusion of others. It was an honor to pass the sacrament, an honor that didn’t diminish when the next boy turned 12 and was ordained.
[fn8] Technically, by “Beehives,” mean girls and women who are at least 12 years old. Why 12? It’s what we already do for boys, and it marks an important age in the life of Mormon boys and girls—it’s the age at which they graduate from Primary, and the age at which they can do baptisms for the dead.