The origin of Sacrament Programs is one of the great mysteries of our time. During the middle ages, people believed that the mere existence of a sacrament meeting would cause sacrament programs to spontaneously spring into existence. This theory was called spontaneous generation and was similar to beliefs about where all animals and plants came from. At around the same time that Louis Pasteur performed his famous experiments disproving spontaneous generation for animals, Robert Moxley, a British vicar, performed his “closed church” experiments in which he kept one church closed and locked and another unlocked. He noticed that the sacrament programs appeared in the unlocked church but not in the locked church. Eventually, they would appear in the locked church, but only after having been unlocked for some time.

Some Sacrament Programologists currently believe that all sacrament programs arise from previous programs through a process of slow change in which some announcements die and are discarded, and other announcements arise by repurposing the letters and words from those that died. Some parts are more constantly in flux such as the so-called “speakers” (whose purpose is still not understood by science). Other Sacrament Programologists argue that this theory can’t account for the sudden and massive changes that occur every few years, and seem to always occur after certain events such as the splitting of a ward. It’s unknown what causes these large changes, but SP-ologists are hopeful that within the next few decades they will have observed enough of these changes to test their theories. These are exciting times for the field of sacrament programology!