Service Sundays

I am occasionally asked how to organize teaching family members (children and adults) how to serve. Interesting question though it is, I think you will find my answer even more intriguing. You see, I believe that like most other worthwhile goals in life, service needs to be regularly and pro-actively taught to family members. In this way it will take hold in their souls and become an auto-response feature of their mind when opportunity arises.

That being said, I would like to share a process I have successfully used to see if it might also find root in your heart. We know a lot about life, but mostly we know that we are too busy to do much more of anything on the weekdays. Saturdays seem too busy, too, to be of much good for pro-active training. But Sundays! They are just right in length, shape, and focus to be perfect for teaching family members about service.

Let’s put together a plan. There are four Sundays in the month (with an occasionally fifth Sunday for an interesting diversionary service project). If we were to systematically assign a service topic to each Sunday of the month, then we would, without much trouble and hassle, know exactly in what direction we would be heading.

On difficult Sundays, we would skip the service project, with a plan to return to our routine when life settles down again. On the slower Sundays, we could lengthen or add interest to the assigned topic to fill our lives with good.

First, let’s label each Sunday of the month:

First Sunday – Visit the Sick

Second Sunday – Write a Letter or Email

Third Sunday – Do Family History

Fourth Sunday – Support Missionary Efforts


Second, let’s brainstorm about potential activities that would be appropriate in your life’s situation. For instance, if you are newly married or have a young family that couldn’t easily travel on Sundays and/or that has short attention spans, you might.

First Sunday – Visit the Sick
Write a Hope You Get Well card and mail it off. You might include hand drawn pictures by the children, if they are old enough to participate and show interest in your project.

Record a Primary song and after calling someone in the hospital, play the recording for them to hear.

Second Sunday – Write a Letter or Email
It is important that stationery, stamps, and return address labels all be conveniently kept together for this project. A young married couple, for instance, might take turns deciding who will be the recipient and also be in charge of doing the writing that month with the other person adding his or her signature.

Third Sunday – Do Family History
This Service Sunday is for getting to know your ancestors. Pick one name each third Sunday of the month, post a photo on the refrigerator, and learn four things: The full name, birth date, birthplace, and the spouse’s name. Familiarity is the first step to a desire to serve those on the other side of the veil.

Fourth Sunday – Support Missionary Efforts
Choose a missionary to make your own and write him or her every month for the term of their service. Ask for a picture to post on your refrigerator to help your children form an attachment to “your” missionary.

This will increase your family’s desire to serve missions, too, as part of their life’s plan.

If you have a family with a spread of children from young to adult, with more driving ease and time on your hands, you might:

First Sunday – Visit the Sick
Choose someone in the ward that didn’t show up to church because of confinement, say a broken leg or a recent surgery. Visit them with a small token of appreciation; say some homemade cookies or a loaf of sweet bread.

One such family in my neighborhood does just kind of project and I’ve been a recipient of their frosted sugar cookies from time to time.

Second Sunday – Write a Letter or Email
Someone in your family is older, single, lonely, or just needs love. In each case, a friendly letter or email is just what might brighten a day. Choose from immediate and extended family members that could use a word of cheer.

You might even rotate this assignment among your family members on a rotational basis. “John, you get to choose who we write a letter to tomorrow for our Service Sunday project. Who will it be?”

Third Sunday – Do Family History
This service project is difficult because it is so large. With larger families, it might just be enough to have a Sunday family history dinner with a framed photo on the table “dedicated” to Great-grandpa Otto Albert Spjut who returned to his native Sweden to preach the gospel when he was in his seventies.

If you assign one ancestor to each third Sunday of the month, you will be able to get through the children’s grandparents in the first four months and their great-grandparents in the next eight months, thus have a year’s plan in place.

Then, in subsequent years, you can expand out to far-reaching ancestors. Our goal here is to acquaint the family with the name, the area where they lived, and one significant aspect of their life.

Fourth Sunday – Support Missionary Efforts
Because I’m currently serving in the Provo Missionary Training Center and know that some of our missionaries are converts with less than enthusiastic support from home, I can also tell you how much a letter means to a missionary.

Find out the current addresses of the missionaries in your ward or branch and write one or two of them each month. The benefit of getting a missionary’s letter in return full of testimony and stories cannot be matched.

If you are an older couple with fewer or no children at home and hours of empty time on Sunday, you might:

First Sunday – Visit the Sick
Become comfortable with visiting your local hospital. If I were in this situation right now, I would take a stack of books and head right to the chronic pediatric ward of my hospital where children are tucked night after night away from home for a variety of reasons. I would then spend an hour reading to them.

Second Sunday – Write a Letter or Email
Choose someone in the ward or stake that needs a cheerful note of good will. Once a month, mail this note with either your own name or even better, an alias.

During one particular season of a friend’s life, her young son received regular anonymous notes of encouragement when he was struggling to read. It made all the difference in his desire to continue to try.

Third Sunday – Do Family History
This particular kind of service can be overwhelming. You probably already have boxes and stacks and binders and feel lots of discouragement. I have found it best to set aside a certain period of time, during the lull of the day, to focus on one particular person.

Right now, my chosen person is my father. My chosen project is transcribing his missionary journals and scanning his missionary photos. My plan is to print this project to give to all his grandsons when they turn sixteen so they can see the service of their grandfather and retain their desire to serve a mission, too.

Having a specific goal, even though it may take a long time to finish, makes this service Sunday a fun one, too.

Fourth Sunday – Support Missionary Efforts
It might be profitable to begin discussing you how will serve a mission, no matter your current circumstances and learn more about how the process works. Spending just a few minutes on the fourth Sunday of the month will make it less over-whelming and more appealing. You will be able to grow into the process instead of being over-taken by it.

Service Sundays can be the favorite time of your Sabbath. Don’t make it a pain, don’t make it too long, and don’t worry if you skip now and then. But have a plan to teach your family members about service and watch them grow into it naturally until they come up with their own ideas and give freely without prompting.


Photos by sxc.hu. Used with permission of iamim and novepages.
©2010 Marie Calder Ricks/www.houseoforder.com