NOM

LDSinc. will no longer hold Saturday evening General Conference sessions.

https://www.deseret.com/faith/2025/11/1 ... onference/

Wonder what the cost-benefit analysis was that convinced them to drop that one.

For now.

Maybe under Oaks we won't see a repeat of before where it was an on-again, off-again, one thing one week, another thing the next Saturday evening conference session.

I do feel like conference lasted far too long so eliminating one session kinda helps. Reflecting back on my conference experiences, the "short" 90 minute sessions had a better feel as well. They really should move to a 90 minute format for all sessions in addition to dropping the Saturday evening session.

My experiences with the 120 minute format are typically:

• Start getting antsy, impatient, and/or bored to the point of experiencing physical pain. Looks at watch. OMFG we're only 43 minutes into the session!!! How? HOW could this be??!?!?
• This dude is droning on and on and on and on and on and on...
• If I hear their lips smack one. more. time...

My experience with the 90 minute sessions is that they feel like they go by fairly quickly. If the concern is that a 90 minute format wouldn't give enough people an opportunity to talk, here's a novel thought. Make the talks shorter. You don't need 13-15 minutes to get your point across. We live in a society with a shortened attention span, most people are tuning you out after the first minute or two anyway.

You can still have eight speakers or whatever, just talk for 9 minutes instead of 13-15 minutes.

I love it when believers celebrate this kind of stuff:

True Believer wrote:HOORAY!!! Less Church!!!

I remember believers professing that two-hour church was an answer to prayers; I thought: "Why didn't you pray for ZERO-hour church?"

When they tried getting rid of the Saturday night session once before, many women objected because it completely gets rid of any kind of women’s session where we can have more than 1 out of 20 women speak. First of all, way back, women’s session, YW session, were not considered part of conference. And the RS session was all women speakers. Regular conference had no women, but at the RS session we got to hear from the full RS general officers. But women were clearly not equal. So, women objected. So, long story short, they made women’s session part of conference and had men speak for longer than the women got to speak. Then they just got rid of it completely. So, now instead of actually hearing from our women’s leaders in a session without any men, and a YW’s session without any men, and probably primary session too, but I don’t remember much stuff from before correlation, we get the hear from a grand total of two women from primary, YW, and RS. Let’s go back to when women had a voice in their own organizations even if not in conference because at least we had more of a voice than we do now.

We should get to keep the women’s session and get rid of one or two of the 4 male droning on and on and on sessions. Maybe give RS one session and auxiliaries a second one and get rid of all the male Q12, Q70 speakers on Saturday and give non priesthood holding members a voice. But why do we have to hear two or three times from church president and only two women per conference? And why do we need to hear from any seventy? Half the adults church do not have priesthood, so why not respect their representation.

But the GAs think they need to give the (6,000?) seventies all a chance to speak in conference. Why? If the GAs want to hear them, the GAs can go to whatever they are going to be speaking at. But give women a real voice in conference, not the token we currently have.

Conference should only entail one day. And that day should be Sunday.
The sisters get the morning session and the brethren get the afternoon session. Each is a 90 minute session.

If you can't get it done in 180 minutes, you're being redundant or superfluous.

I think the primary reason is all of the apostles, who have to preside and talk at all of these conference sessions, are really old.

2bizE wrote: ↑Sat Nov 29, 2025 12:10 pm I think the primary reason is all of the apostles, who have to preside and talk at all of these conference sessions, are really old.

I agree, it is probably a long long weekend for 80-100 year old men who have been doing it for 30 years and are just plain tired.

Well, I have a solution for them. They can stay home and let the women speak and preside at one or two of the meetings. After all, the women are much younger and have not been doing it for 30 gawd awful years, so they are fresh and enthusiastic. I am pretty sure that half the church would appreciate this solution and if they give the husbands permission to go fishing during that session or two, the whole church would be happy. But the top leaders think they are SOOO important that if they are not there, nobody thinks it is important

2bizE wrote: ↑Sat Nov 29, 2025 12:10 pm I think the primary reason is all of the apostles, who have to preside and talk at all of these conference sessions, are really old.

I would also venture to say that scope creep is a factor as well.

Each of the Q15 feel they need to have a chance to speak on what is on their mind at a given time. Then you have groups that they feel need to have their say. So you have the Relief Society, The Young Men's the Young Women's, the Primary, the Presiding Bishopric, I am sure I am missing a sub group or two. A few of Q70 so they feel included, Plus we have to get everyone to agree that they like who is in each position, and report on the status of the church statistics and finances. Oh, there will be some pet people that high ups also want to give a chance to be seen. and on and on...

If you don't keep it in check, you end up with several dozen people (who all talk slow) all listed as needing a chance to talk for a few minutes. So you have to keep expanding the program to cover all the various special interests until it finally gets too unwieldy and someone at the top has enough sense to say "We need to pull this back."