Great PH Lesson Today on "Come, Join with Us"

The GC talk that was the basis of our HPG lesson today was Pres. Uctdorf’s recent talk, “Come, Join with Us”. The man who taught it wrote a bunch of words from it on the blackboard (“truth, doctrine, language, culture, interpretation, intellectualism, translation, style, experience,” etc.) – all things that cause us within the Church to have problems understanding and communicating with each other. At the end of the list, he wrote “exclusive vs. inclusive”.

He started by almost derailing the lesson – since he mentioned the Ordain Women movement as an example of something that is dividing members right now. After about five minutes of back and forth from men with all kinds of views about that movement, he got control again and said, “This lesson isn’t about whether or not women should be ordained to the Priesthood. I want to share two things from my own life and talk about what Pres. Uchtdorf said in his talk.”

He mentioned that there often are things we believe are doctrine that we find out later aren’t eternal truth or unchanging doctrine. First, he mentioned the idea that black men couldn’t hold the Priesthood at one point because they were less righteous in the pre-existence. He said, essentially, “I’m sure someone tried to come up with an explanation for the ban, and they thought of this answer. They taught it; others latched onto it; it became accepted as doctrine; we finally were told officially that it wasn’t true.” He then mentioned the idea that caffeinated drinks (Coke, in particular) are against the Word of Wisdom and how that isn’t accurate. (which prompted one man to laugh and say, “You mean I can drink Coke?!”)

I won’t summarize everything, but it was a really good discussion about how many things can divide us if we aren’t careful.

He finished by leading a discussion about how our theology is very inclusive, but we, as imperfect mortals, often act in exclusive ways – drawing lines that need not be drawn and making judgments we aren’t qualified to make.

I thanked him for the lesson afterward, and he said, “I’ve never woken up so many times in the middle of the night worrying about how to structure a lesson as much as I did this time.”

The thing is, I have been in this ward for two years now, and I would have pegged him as a fairly typical, conservative member until today.