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So tonight at dinner my 9 YO daughter says we don’t have apostles in the church. We explained we do. She says apostles are special witnesses and have seen Jesus, so we don’t. We said “How do you know whether they have?” (although I was thinking “hmmm”). She said, “No way. If they saw Jesus, they’d tell everyone about it.” Ken asked what about Joseph Smith. She said he wasn’t an apostle; he was just a prophet. I pointed out that the Apostle Paul saw Jesus in a vision, and everyone called him an apostle. She said not her. It doesn’t count. I’m not sure where to take her from here. I would love for my kids to really understand their religion, but her comments about the apostles not seeing Jesus . . . Maybe they haven’t.
Wow, sounds like you are kind of stuck. I can’t imagine you want to really push back hard to convince her the current set of apostles all talk to Jesus in person every day in the temple, just so you can later deal with the fallout of her probably not believing that anymore at some point as an adult. That would be a very sticky situation as a parent. Darn kids. They grow up and start having some pretty darn good ideas. 
Did you ask how she knows that you have to see Christ to be an apostle?
Pulling out the dictionary…the word Apostle means:
Quote:1. one sent on a mission: as
a : one of an authoritative New Testament group sent out to preach the gospel and made up especially of Christ’s 12 original disciples and Paul
b : the first prominent Christian missionary to a region or group
2 a : a person who initiates a great moral reform or who first advocates an important belief or system
b : an ardent supporter
3: the highest ecclesiastical official in some church organizations
4: one of a Mormon administrative council of 12 men
Merriam-Webster
Props to MW for getting the Mormon definition in there!My take is that perhaps we don’t limit the title of “apostle” to only those who have specifically seen Christ. Few have, in fact, you could argue “no man has seen God in the flesh”, but maybe not go there yet.
The Living Christ document is also a good study for her. The closing says:
Quote:We bear testimony, as His duly ordained Apostles—that Jesus is the Living Christ, the immortal Son of God.
Actually, they aren’t claiming they’ve “seen” Him…they are claiming they’ve been ordained to testify of Him, whey they do.She had the term “special witness” from somewhere – must be Primary. So, she had already heard something and decided she didn’t believe it, whatever it was. She’s definitely got a lot of sass in her, too. She’s not an obedient do what she’s told type. She is very skeptical and perhaps even cynical, certainly for a 9 year old. I wonder where she gets THAT from? Brian beat me to it. 
I’m waiting to see how long until Young Hawkgrrrl 2 registers and starts posting online. Your daughter probably has a strategy already developed for manipulating you when she’s a teenager based on Myers Briggs analysis. So at dinner, she was talking sarcastically about Easter like she didn’t know what it even was (confusing it with Christmas). Both her brothers were shaking their heads. So I said we’d read the chapter in John on the resurrection. Suddenly she knew the whole story (to get out of reading it). Anyway, we read it together since there’s no church here this weekend (due to Asia having a week delay for Gen Conf). When we read the verse about Doubting Thomas, it was just the perfect answer to what she was saying the other night: 29 Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.
So we talked about how it’s not faith if you’ve SEEN Jesus. She said, “Yeah, but it is faith that it’s not a mirage . . .” I tell ya, the girl is relentless in her skepticism! But still a perfect answer to the situation. I was pleased.
She was equally skeptical when we were cruising the Ganges last weekend. We were next to the cremation place where they burn Hindus to release them from the cycle of rebirth to Nirvana, and the tour guide pointed out where the fire came from and said that the same fire has been burning for a thousand years. She leaned over to me and said, “Yeah right! Like they’ve never had slanting rain here!”
Somewhere your parents must be laughing so loud it’s sinful. Hats off to you. I can’t imagine my 9yo coming up with that. 
I guess the apples don’t fall far from the tree. My mom leaned over to me in the temple once and said in a loud stage whisper: Way to pass the buck, Adam! And once in Relief Society when she was visiting us, we recited the YW theme since they had combined opening exercises. The last quality they list is Virtue. My mom leaned over and said that didn’t used to be in there, but they wanted to curb the teen pregnancy! Fwiw, we were watching “While You Were Sleeping” last night (before I flew back to Nevada today on my own), and we had to explain what a testicle is to our 9-year-old. She is extremely interested in all things sexual right now – to the point of totally embarrassing her older sisters. Parenthood can be SO fun at times!!
A text from my older son (junior in high school) today: “I thought Christofferson’s talk served nicely as a preface for Nelson’s remarks. But it’s good to know that Nelson can attack straw men a la Hoyle’s fallacy.” I figured roll with it and wrote back: “Apparently they didn’t teach the big bang in surgeon school.” He replied: “Or evolution.” One of my friends quoted that big bang statement from conf. on Facebook and I had to make a comment about how I didn’t think blowing up a printing press is the proper way to create a dictionary, but I wouldn’t put it past God to produce a dictionary out of an exploding print shop if He put his mind to it! I was also reflecting on how I was recently talking with my Bishop about the recent Church statement on racism – he mentioned how the current leaders have inherited a difficult position with sanitized history etc. We also talked about some “non-traditional” ideas being promoted in books (Deseret) and how some members of our ward express non-traditional ideas at times in classes.
Do I have it good or what?
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