The LDS Conference Talk That Won’t Happen, But Needs To.
The latest inside sources from the LDS Church Office Building in Salt Lake City, Utah, say that 40% of returned LDS missionaries are leaving the LDS church within 6 months of returning home from their missions.
That figure is simply crazy.
For decades, LDS missions have been viewed by the church as a surefire way to create lifetime members from their young men.
12–14 years ago, when I was an LDS missionary, they warned us that 30% of us might experience some degree of inactivity from church after our missions, and warned us that this would be because of our own failings to maintain the same level of spirituality we experienced as missionaries.
Now 40% are leaving within 6 months, and by all indications, they ain’t coming back.
This number doesn’t look likely to reverse course any time soon. The LDS church is hemorrhaging members like a man with a nicked femoral artery fading fast.
But could things actually turn around. I think it unlikely, but it could.
But to be perfectly clear, I believe, by necessity, the only way for the LDS church to turn around its imminent collapse is by pulling a hard reverse on all of their doubling-down rhetoric.
For years, the LDS leadership have doubled down on their rhetoric surrounding prophets, priesthood authority, temples, church history, racism, polygamy, basically anything that common members looking into church history might have an issue with.
This increasingly black-and-white rhetoric has ultimately led to more insular and cult-like thinking within the LDS church, which has created myriad problems for people attempting to leave, many of whom can no longer maintain relationship with their still-LDS family members.
In order to afford the LDS church every benefit of the doubt, I have crafted a conference address for the President of the church to read in this coming October general conference of the LDS church, so the church can get ahead of things now before things crash anymore.
(Anyone reading this from the LDS church’s online spying on members department — yes, that is effectively a real thing —feel free to pass this on up the chain to the top leadership.)
Dear brothers and sisters,
God’s house is a house of order, and we need to address something big; something that may ruffle some feathers, but will ultimately bring greater love, unity, compassion, forgiveness and togetherness to our church.
We have traditionally been a very faith-filled people. The 13th Article of Faith says that we “believe all things”, but a lot of our younger people been done a disservice by having grown up believing that all things in our scriptures or history to be always strictly literal when they might be spiritual. And then when that belief has been challenged later, their faith is broken, because it was too rigid, too inflexible to cope with the changing of a season.
The Doctrine and Covenants says that “all spirit is matter but can only be discerned by finer eyes”, and we hold it as doctrine that a man must be transfigured in some form to see the face of God and live.
So, when we talk of Joseph’s first vision, we aren’t likely talking of a literal appearance in which God the Father and Jesus Christ personally visited upstate New York, appearing to one lone man in the wilderness contrary to Jesus’ own words about his Second Coming. We’re likely talking about an experience like the stoning of Stephen, when the heavens opened for him alone and nobody else could see what he was seeing because he was seeing things with his spiritual eyes.
Likewise, Joseph saw an angel in his house multiple times while everyone else was fast asleep around. They weren’t awoken by any light. Nobody woke up to him talking to the air. For all that we know, it was a vivid dream he received from God while sleeping, but that doesn’t make it any less from God.
Likewise, one of the contested issues that has led some of the young people away is David Whitmer’s testimony to John E Moyle that they were only shown the plates by the power of God with their spiritual eyes, thus implying that they never handled them literally and materially with their physical hands.
But that doesn’t change the fact that all twelve witnesses were literally given the same supernatural vision from God. They were shown and experienced the same thing, whether material or not, and that means something important, even if you’ve never considered it that way before.
Likewise, as far as we know, for most of the translation process, the gold plates were not even present. Nevertheless, Joseph received the words of the Book of Mormon in inspired fashion using the Urim and Thummim and at times a seer stone.
Many have questioned: well, how do we know he didn’t just make it all up? To which we rightly answer that millions of faithful members have received their own witness that the Book of Mormon is the inspired word of God.
Well, given the weight of so many witnesses, would it really even make a difference if there were no plates at all? If Joseph received the whole record word by word by inspiration of God?
Does that make the book any less divinely inspired? Does it make it any less Christian? Does it make it suddenly not worth reading and following and likening unto yourself and living your life by?
We still hold that Joseph and Hyrum lived and died defending the authenticity of the Book of Mormon as a book from God.
We still hold that many great Protestant reformers were inspired by God to break away from Catholicism and pave the way for the restoration of Jesus’ church, which found its fulfillment in Joseph Smith Jr, who was just as much, if not more inspired that John Calvin, Martin Luther, William Tyndale, etc.
And we firmly believe that revealing the Book of Mormon unto Joseph Smith was the marvelous and wonderful work of God in preparing the world for the Second Coming of Jesus.
We have many faithful members who believe the Nephites lived in Middle America, and many others who believe they lived in North America, and we even have faithful members who take a less than literal interpretation of the Book of Mormon and believe it’s all a giant prophetic metaphor for the United States and the world in the last days leading up to the Savior’s Second Coming, and there’s nothing wrong with that either.
Whichever way you look at it, it’s still inspired of God, and one of the best books that we should read from regularly and liken unto our own lives.
There are whole books in the Bible that some modern Bible scholars believe to be entirely allegorical, like the Book of Job, and if the Book of Mormon were likewise, only allegorical, well, that wouldn’t make it any less scripture, any less the cornerstone of our religion, and it wouldn’t make it Joseph any less of an inspired prophet of God.
Joseph himself expressed fear that the early saints would go astray for putting him on a pedestal and outsourcing all their own potential personal revelation and relationship with God to him, instead of seeking God directly and personally.
We believe in a living God and a resurrected Christ who ministers personally to each of us one by one according to our needs. For too long, we’ve acted as though being of one heart and one mind (as Jesus commanded us) requires thinking and believing all the same things. It doesn’t. In an increasingly international church, we celebrate our differences and uniqueness.
The one heart and one mind we are all to have IS the new heart and new mind given to every believer, born again of water and of the Spirit.
It doesn’t make a series of identical robots named Peter Priesthood and Molly Mormon. It simply opens up one’s mind and heart to God, through the pursuit of what is good, beautiful and true.
In other words, we may all be in different places, but we’re on the same journey, going the same direction, towards the same destination, and that matters more than any individual differences of opinion on the geography of the Nephites or the historicity of the temple video or what it actually means to be a prophet.
The gospel truth that matters most of all is that God sent his son that all mankind might be saved.
And the creed that unites us as Latter-Day Saints are the thirteen Articles of Faith penned by Joseph Smith.
As such, we will be heretofore replacing the baptismal and temple recommend questions with questionized versions of the articles of faith, testing your beliefs in and actions according to said articles in your daily life.
Because that is the shared foundation of our faith.
I invite you all to reread, ponder and re-memorize the Articles of our Faith in the next six months until the coming April conference, so that we all might better know our shared foundation. In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.
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Seriously, this is what the LDS church needs if it wants to survive. Hope that helps, LDS church.
