Worship the Lord , Enrich Our Understanding, and Work Together to Bless

Over at thingsofmysoul.blogspot.com there was this commentary (part of which I've pasted and illustrated below) posted on January 22.  It's here if you are interested in reading the whole thing and the ensuing discussion.. I've been to a few Sundays like this. I wish we realized and did this more than we do.

In my opinion, the primary purposes of our Sunday meetings are as follows:  

1) Sacrament Meeting: Worship

2) Sunday School: Doctrinal instruction

3) PH & RS: Community building (including "fellowshipping" activities and temporal matters)

There is room for some overlap, but only within the parameters of the purposes. For example: 

1) It's OK to provide doctrinal instruction in Sacrament Meeting, but that instruction should be about worship-focused things. 

Grace, charity, meekness, forgiveness and any other godly characteristic is fine as a topic for a talk, as long as they are presented as aspects of true emulative worship - but tithing, food storage, HT & VT, etc. are not appropriate Sacrament Meeting topics. Anything can be related tangentially to worship by a good speaker, but it should not be necessary for a speaker to take a non-worship-focused topic and bend it into an appropriate topic.

(APF photo, Chevy Chase, MD)

2) Sunday School should be a school - and I prefer the group discussion model for ALL classes comprised of members who've been attending long enough to have a fairly solid doctrinal foundation. I want real meat in Gospel Doctrine, for example - with those members occasionally cycling through Gospel Essentials (maybe once every five years or so), just to make sure the foundation milk doesn't get sour.

3) PH & RS should be about people - defining and planning service, discussing HT & VT, discussing how to find and reach and inspire others, lessons on those things that really aren't worship-focused but community-centered (like tithing, food storage, emergency preparedness, fast offerings, even temple attendance, etc.), basic get-to-know-you activities, learning from the life experiences of others, genealogy, etc.

Lydia of Thyratira, by Harold Copping