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We had stake conference recently and we had a fairly well known GA Seventy visit. The topic was building on the foundation of Christ, and it turned out better than I expected. Yes, this guy was very orthodox and said some stuff that I don’t totally agree with (he is kind of big on accountability and keys). But he also dropped some great tidbits. 1. Addressing the men in priesthood leadership, he repeatedly said “You are not the priesthood.” He did not directly say so but he did imply he disliked referring to men as the priesthood and spent a good amount of time (at least a half hour of discussion/Q&A) explaining that the priesthood is God’s power.
2. He talked about building our houses on the rock. He referenced the Luke 6 version and pointed out that we don’t dig deep into rock. Instead of how we might normally envision it (and he admits he did so himself), the house was not built on a rock surface because if it was it would be no different than the other house. Rather a foundation was dug and a rock foundation was built – and that’s what it means by being built on the rock. Living in an area where many houses have stone foundations (including mine) this makes perfect sense. The rock, of course, is Christ and the gospel.
3. His Sunday talk focused on simple gospel truths and he really stuck to those things without speculation about things like pre-earth and post-earth life. He mostly talked about the atonement of Christ (always saying it that way and not just “the atonement”) and the sacrament.
4. Related to 3, he said the sacrament is not a renewing of our covenants – we make a new covenant every week when we partake.
5. He talked about his divorced single mother professional daughter and how she did the right thing by divorcing her abusive husband. He explicitly stated divorce is sometimes the best option and said we should not let culture and tradition cloud our judgement when in such a situation.
Overall not a bad conference, the “good” outweighed the more distasteful.
I love #1 and #5, especially. :clap: :clap: :thumbup: I’ll be that guy. I’m in a funk, the days are shorter, excuse #273, etc. 1) I can imagine the local ward wise-@$$ will start forcibly correcting people that refer to men as the priesthood for
yearsto come. Told ya I’d be that guy, the local StayLDS wise-@$$. 
4) Semantics? Renewing an existing covenant or making a new covenant that’s the same as an existing one. Was this a part of a larger message where people need to come to church every Sunday to create new covenants because the old ones fade or are broken by sin or something?
I might be that ward wise-a$$. In the past I have broached the subject of why do we say “We thank the priesthood for the reverent manner in which they blessed and passed the sacrament.” Why can’t we just say “Thank you for your reverence during the sacrament” and be done with it? In context I took the new covenant thing to be more related to repentance. We all go and take the sacrament and are beneficiaries of “always having His Spirit to be with us.” Then during the week things happen, life gets in the way, and we come back and make that covenant new again. He talked a little bit about why the sacrament is the only repeated ordinance and how individual it really is. In context it was actually a bit in opposition to the idea we renew all of our covenants with the sacrament, and he did not mention baptismal or temple covenants at all. So, from what I interpreted from what he was saying was we don’t renew covenants at all, we continually make new ones (at least in regard to the sacrament) and get a fresh start.
I have requested in every ward I have attended since I became an independent adult that we don’t refer to men and male youth as “the Priesthood” in any setting. The next step is for the global leadership to stop calling the men’s session of General Conference the “Priesthood Session”. I actually do think that will happen in the relatively near future, given how much the generalmissue appears to be on the minds of the collective leadership.
I was actually impressed that this Sunday the counselor conducting did not refer to the priesthood as having blessed the sacrament and simply thanked people. This guy is fairly conservative/orthodox. There is hope. DarkJedi wrote:
We had stake conference recently and we had a fairly well known GA Seventy visit. The topic was building on the foundation of Christ, and it turned out better than I expected. Yes, this guy was very orthodox and said some stuff that I don’t totally agree with (he is kind of big on accountability and keys). But he also dropped some great tidbits.1. Addressing the men in priesthood leadership, he repeatedly said “You are not the priesthood.” He did not directly say so but he did imply he disliked referring to men as the priesthood and spent a good amount of time (at least a half hour of discussion/Q&A) explaining that the priesthood is God’s power.
2. He talked about building our houses on the rock. He referenced the Luke 6 version and pointed out that we don’t dig deep into rock. Instead of how we might normally envision it (and he admits he did so himself), the house was not built on a rock surface because if it was it would be no different than the other house. Rather a foundation was dug and a rock foundation was built – and that’s what it means by being built on the rock. Living in an area where many houses have stone foundations (including mine) this makes perfect sense. The rock, of course, is Christ and the gospel.
3. His Sunday talk focused on simple gospel truths and he really stuck to those things without speculation about things like pre-earth and post-earth life. He mostly talked about the atonement of Christ (always saying it that way and not just “the atonement”) and the sacrament.
4. Related to 3, he said the sacrament is not a renewing of our covenants – we make a new covenant every week when we partake.
5. He talked about his divorced single mother professional daughter and how she did the right thing by divorcing her abusive husband. He explicitly stated divorce is sometimes the best option and said we should not let culture and tradition cloud our judgement when in such a situation.
Overall not a bad conference, the “good” outweighed the more distasteful.
I had mixed feelings about #1. It is a good point, and I have often thought of referring to the men as “the priesthood” was sort of slangy and not cultured or accurate. At the same time, everyone knows what people mean — they are referring to the men. But now that’s going to be stuck in my mind for the next few years about how inaccurate it is. He sounds a bit Academic in his approach — also distinguishing between making and renewing a covenant.
5 is good as most of us on StayLDS agree that any time people are inoculated against culture, and encouraged to make decisions that are best for them, is a good idea.
Not sure about what “digging into the rock” means. Perhaps overanlyzing it, leading to doubts? Perhaps he meant just accepting the gospel as outlined without question and faith i the way to go.
If he meant that, i have learned that simple acceptance of the church’s version of the gospel (often intertwined with policy, culture and habits)_ can be a recipe for bad health, and emotional misery. I believe one should build their house on the rock, but if the rock isn’t producing the stability it claims, it’s definitely time to reposition yourself or pour your own concrete into the cracks.
I think you might be overthinking #2 SD. He talked about how it says in Luke the builder of the housed “digged deep” and that caused him to think about what it meant to build on the rock. I think he was being very literal – people don’t/can’t dig deep into rock to build a house. Likely being familiar with how house foundations are built (and as I alluded to earlier, stone foundations are very common in older houses here in the northeast US) I think he was just being literal in a realization the “Oh, he dug a hole and built a stone foundation. That makes sense. It does not make sense to build a house on the surface of a big rock.” I don’t believe he was implying any symbolism by the digging itself or any of the rest of it besides Christ being the Rock. I recognize it is hard to take one small part of his talk and make it understandable, but the gist of the talk was building one’s testimony on Christ. FWIW, my house has stood on its stone foundation since the 1860s. I suppose for symbolic purposes concrete would work just as well as rock. I do believe he was correct in his message of building testimony on the rock of Christ because it has been my observation that testimonies built on anything else (Joseph Smith or the BoM, for example) tend to fail. Building on the foundation of Christ is not a stake conference theme often heard so I really did appreciate his focus on Christ, His atonement, and the sacrament.
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