Moroni indicates that there is much that happened in the practice of the church that relied upon the spirit. This suggests that the church meetings were not highly structured, but allowed for a degree of flexibility. Moroni does not indicate that there is, for instance, a fixed time for singing. For Moroni, singing was a part of the church service, but one that followed the spirit rather than a structure. It is probable, however, that singing did occur in most church services. In the ancient world there was not the overabundance of sounds that compete for our hearing in the modern world. Congregational singing would be a very human way of expressing joy and artistic feelings in a communal situation. Still, though it is probable that singing occurred “oft,” it was probably not as predictable in its arrangement as the modern pattern of opening hymn, sacrament hymn, closing hymn (and optional inter-speaker hymn) with which we are abundantly familiar.
Synopsis of Nephite Liturgy: There are two time periods for which we may be concerned with the practice of Nephite “church,” or their liturgy. The first period is prior to the coming of Christ to the New World, and the second period is the time following that appearance.
In the pre-Messianic-appearance liturgy, we begin with the continuation of the Law of Moses. Nephi I builds a temple that is modeled after Solomon, and one would expect that there was an attempt to continue to Mosaic sacrificial rites that would be associated with the temple. Lehi sacrifices in the Old World, so he was familiar with sacrificial forms and could teach those to his descendants in the New World.
The change in the location to the New World has two important effects upon the Nephite practice of the Mosaic Law. The first was that the conception of priesthood necessarily changed. The Nephites did not have the lineage connection to the priesthood that was typically presumed for the priests in the temple in Jerusalem. Therefore they had to adopt an alternative link to the authority of God, just as did any other group of Israelites separated from the temple. The Nephites would have used the same understandings of priesthood that allowed rituals to be performed in Qumran, and even in the temple when the king replaced the Levites with his own line of priests.
The second major change occurred in the different animal catalog of the New World. The specifically indicated animals could not be sacrificed because they did not exist. Therefore, some symbolic shift must have occurred in early Nephite liturgical practice to retain the form of sacrifice while altering the specific species sacrificed. Similar alterations almost certainly occurred in the location of sacrifices and the structural form of sacrificial locations. Just as the Old World Israelite locations of worship imitated forms available in the surrounding cultures, we can expect that the Nephite structural forms were altered to adapt to the culturally accepted sacrificial locations and forms of the New World. Thus we find in Nephite cities Mesoamerican temples, not Solomonic temples.
There are some slight indications of an understanding of ritual purity in Nephite practice, though such concerns do not show forth as clearly in the text as they do in the Old and New Testaments. This may be due to the fact that Mormon is writing after four hundred years have diminished ritual purity as a concern due to the new covenant of Christ.
During the pre-Messianic-visit times, Book of Mormon authors use scripture in ways that suggest the expectation of recognition. This suggests either widespread literacy (which is doubtful) or more probably, the frequent reading of scriptures in public worship. This public reading was part of the Old World practice, and would be a natural continuation in the New World. The difficulty of teaching reading and writing, as well as the difficulty of mass-producing texts, would lead to oral citation as the best means of establishing an understanding of the scriptures. When Abinadi is before the court of Noah, the citations to scriptures are frequent, and intermingled with commentary. There is simply an expectation that the hearer (or reader, in our case) will be sufficiently familiar with the text that no citation (and no reading!) is required. It is therefore same to assume that early Nephite liturgy included some frequent public reading from the scriptures. Given the types of citations extant in the Book of Mormon, the most popular text would have been the brass plates.
The pre-Messianic-visit religious organization already had a minimum of two types of officials, priests and teachers. These two offices continue through to the post-Messianic-visit era. In spite of the continuation of named positions, there must have been some change in the function of those positions when the Nephite religion shifted from a communal expectation to a sub-community at the time of Alma the Elder in Zarahemla. Alma the Elder reforms the religious community and effectively creates a divisibility between church and state that had not existed prior to that time. Even after that time, the division was not absolute, but the point is that is was possible in the post-Alma creation of a church where prior to that time no such separation would have been conceived.
A similar shift appears to revolve around the practice of baptism. Nephi clearly understands a baptism, but it does not seem to have much presence in the text until the time of Alma the Elder. Certainly, the form would have been known, but Alma appears to begin to use it as an initiation into the church. The early baptismal rite consists of a promise of cleansing through the coming atonement, and as an initiation rite into this new church.
After the visit of the Messiah, there was more continuation than there was change in the religious life of the people. The major changes were the cessation of the practices of the Law of Moses, and the introduction of the sacrament. It is possible that there was a conceptual linkage between the previous sacrifices as a pre-cursor to the ultimate sacrifice of Christ, and the sacrament that remembers that sacrifice.
After the visit of Christ, there is an additional priesthood organization of the twelve that is added to church organization, but the church continues as a viable sub-society within the larger community. Priests and Teachers continue to be priesthood offices in the Christian church. The post-Christ church teaches doctrine. While there is no official mention of the public reading of scriptures, this is probably assumed as part of the public teaching of the members of the church. Although Moroni emphasizes that meetings were led by the Spirit, there were at least two prayers that had specific forms. It is quite probable that the baptismal prayer also followed the form set down in 3 Nephi.
Textual: This is the end of a chapter in the 1830 edition.