Fast Sunday and the Fast Offering

On the first Sunday of most months Latter-day Saints go without food and drink for two consecutive meals, roughly twenty-four hours, and give the church at least the money those meals would have cost. The two halves are deliberately joined. Fasting on its own is an act of devotion that benefits nobody else, and the movement's teaching, drawn from Isaiah 58, is that the fast God chose was to deal bread to the hungry. The offering is what turns an abstinence into a transfer.

The money does not go into the general funds of the church. A fast offering is administered by the bishop of the ward that collected it, and he spends it in his own area, on rent for a family facing eviction, on a grocery order, on a utility bill or a medical account, for members and for others. He is instructed to be generous and to keep the recipient's circumstances confidential, and only the surplus after local need is met passes upward to be used elsewhere. In a poor congregation the offerings of the ward may be less than its needs, and the difference is made up from the surplus of others, which makes the practice a quiet mechanism of redistribution across a global church.

Nobody is required to fast. The sick, the pregnant, the nursing, the very young and anyone for whom it would be unwise are exempt without asking permission, and members are encouraged to give a fast offering whether or not they fasted.

The ordinary Latter-day Saint sacrament meeting is a service of assigned talks: two or three members are asked in advance to speak on a set topic and do so from prepared notes. On fast Sunday that programme is set aside. After the sacrament, the meeting is opened, and any member of the congregation who wishes may walk to the front and speak. There is no vetting, no time limit beyond the courtesy of the room, and no clergy in the usual sense to shape what is said.

What people say in these testimony meetings is a genre of its own. Some bear witness of belief in a few formal sentences. Others tell a story about a week, a job lost, a diagnosis, a child, a debt paid by someone who never said who they were. Children are brought to the microphone by parents and whisper a sentence. The meeting can be moving and it can be uncomfortable, and Latter-day Saints will readily tell you about the occasions on which someone used the open microphone to say something the congregation would rather not have heard, which is the unavoidable cost of an open microphone.

The practice matters structurally as well as devotionally. In a church without a preaching clergy, the monthly testimony meeting is the one regular occasion on which the congregation hears its own members rather than an assigned lesson, and it is where a ward finds out what is actually happening in the lives of the people sitting in it.