Loving the Church more than Loving Christ

[Anonymous]

SilentDawning wrote:

Interesting experience — my daughter has invited one of her friends to meet with the missionaries. The girl’s parents are OK with her taking the lessons, although they have indicated one thing that concerns them is the fact that “Mormons seem to love the church more than they love Christ”…I’d never heard that before, but I have seen those tendencies in certain wards, particularly with the hero worship we often see at church, the phrase “the church is PERFECT but the people aren’t” (oooh — that one gets me), and church-u-monies I hear during testimony meetings a lot…After reading Rough Stone Rolling, I believe this tendency may have been a result of the constant assaults the church received in its formative year. I suspect that JS and BY may have taught a lot of church love in addition to Christ-love in order to keep the whole church together, people loyal, etcetera…That is one thing I hope to never do when I return to full activity at some point… to leave others with the impression that I love the church more than I love Christ…In what ways do we show others that we love Christ more than we love the church?

Not only that but for a long time the Church was largely isolated from the rest of the world mostly in Utah and nearby states and didn’t have much competition with other sects locally so this probably contributed to the LDS culture evolving to generally regard the Church organization as if it is the be-all and end-all in life along with the idea that the Church leaders speak directly for God. The Church has actually changed significantly since it was originally founded but much of what being LDS is all about at this point such as temple marriage and other ordinances and many of the temple worthiness points basically don’t have anything to do with what Christ originally taught according to the Bible, it is mostly about obedience and loyalty to the Church and upholding established LDS traditions.

In fact, you won’t even read about many of the current tenets of LDS doctrine and practice in the Book of Mormon itself. Even though the Church likes to tout the Book of Mormon as being another testament of Christ, for practical purposes it looks like it has mostly become a way to try to get people to accept the Church as a package deal based on Moroni’s promise and/or the chain of reasoning that if it came directly from God then that supposedly means the LDS Church is God’s one and only true church on the earth. So it doesn’t surprise me that people from more of a traditional Christian background would hear some of this and think, “How can these people seriously claim to be Christian?” when the main things they hear about if they visit and/or listen to the missionary discussions is how great and special the Church supposedly is, temple marriage, Joseph Smith, living prophets, priesthood authority, the WoW, etc.

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