Weird Situation I’m in

[Anonymous]

SilentDawning wrote:

I, on my mission would have tried to make the room fill with the Spirit as best I could with the view of changing their minds, but I was idealistic. I believed everything literally regarding the sons of Mosiah and the power of God to change minds through the Spirit. I think that is one reason I am a less-active Mormon today…

I know this sounds more orthodox than I usually am, but just because you didn’t “feel the Spirit” doesn’t mean someone else might have. (The less orthodox me says most people don’t really know what the Spirit “feels” like and conflate it with emotion.)

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1. The FP and Q12 pictures we viewed had all white people even though we are supposed to be an international church. How could we be an international church and have so few leaders from international areas?

2. The FP and Q12 picture also had no women in it. Aren’t women leaders? (I told my friends that we are working on that with changes in which groups of leaders handle the decision-making at the congregation level. My female friend replied ‘Shouldn’t that already be happening if your Church is true?’)

Fair points. We seem to talk the talk of being a global church, but we don’t always act or look like it.

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3. The Apostasy period seemed like a long time for people to be without the truth — how is that fair? (spoken by the Catholic friend who believed the church never left the earth after Peter).

4. My catholic friend made a reference to the scripture that starts “thou art Peter and upon this rock shall I build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” — she felt this meant there would never be an apostasy. Therefore the idea of restoration makes no sense if the line of prophets/popes continued unbroken until the time of Joseph Smith or even the present.

I’m a former Catholic and I don’t believe the gospel was ever lost from the earth either, and I do believe the Catholic Church does have some claim to being the one true church. That of course begs the question for the need for a “restoration.” There are apologists (like Givens) who might posit that the truths of the gospel were not absent but were more like separated. The core belief that Jesus is the Christ certainly endured and there were people who believed in Him the whole time – and it doesn’t take much digging into history to figure that out.

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5. How do you know Joseph Smith was a prophet? (Moroni’s promise was the answer we gave –BOM/JS/Church is true). This isn’t didn’t satisfy as the female friend felt that everyone feels they have felt the spirit regarding their church.

That answer doesn’t work for me either and I agree with your friend. The CoJCoLDS does not have a monopoly on the Spirit, and again I’m not sure most people know what it is or what it’s really “saying.”

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I have to confess, I did enjoy the discussion. I enjoyed hearing my faculty colleagues share their thoughts, their razor point questions, their ability to get straight to the key issues, and their soft-landing kindness at the end of the discussion.

I do tend to enjoy civil discussions on almost any topic, the church and the gospel included. It doesn’t have to always be about being “right.”

[Anonymous]

DarkJedi wrote:

I’m a former Catholic and I don’t believe the gospel was ever lost from the earth either, and I do believe the Catholic Church does have some claim to being the one true church. That of course begs the question for the need for a “restoration.” There are apologists (like Givens) who might posit that the truths of the gospel were not absent but were more like separated. The core belief that Jesus is the Christ certainly endured and there were people who believed in Him the whole time – and it doesn’t take much digging into history to figure that out.

For the TR question

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Do you have a testimony of the Restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ?

I usually nuance it as more of a personal restoration than a global restoration. Have I “restored” the gospel in my life. After all, what does it matter if there has been a global restoration if I haven’t had a personal one and what does it matter if I’ve had a personal restoration but there hasn’t been a global one?

But here I’m sure the church is referring to presence of authority/PH.

[Anonymous]

I am glad it went the way it did. I am a firm believer in talking about what others want to discuss, especially if there is no interest in or intent possibly to convert. Sometimes, “do no harm” is a perfect approach and outcome.

If your friends say good things to others about the experience, even if those others aren’t interested in converting, that is a net positive.

[Anonymous]

nibbler wrote:

DarkJedi wrote:

I’m a former Catholic and I don’t believe the gospel was ever lost from the earth either, and I do believe the Catholic Church does have some claim to being the one true church. That of course begs the question for the need for a “restoration.” There are apologists (like Givens) who might posit that the truths of the gospel were not absent but were more like separated. The core belief that Jesus is the Christ certainly endured and there were people who believed in Him the whole time – and it doesn’t take much digging into history to figure that out.

For the TR question

Quote:

Do you have a testimony of the Restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ?

I usually nuance it as more of a personal restoration than a global restoration. Have I “restored” the gospel in my life. After all, what does it matter if there has been a global restoration if I haven’t had a personal one and what does it matter if I’ve had a personal restoration but there hasn’t been a global one?

But here I’m sure the church is referring to presence of authority/PH.

I nuance the answer as well, but probably more generally. I hadn’t thought of it in terms of me personally before, although that would seem to work.

I think the TR questions are very carefully and exactly worded in order to allow everybody who possibly could go to the temple to go – setting aside arguments about such things as the WoW and tithing being included (IOW, if they really wanted everybody who could go to go, those questions wouldn’t be in there). While I agree that most people asking and answering the question about the restoration likely do interpret it as authority/priesthood I’m not sure that’s the real intent of the question. Note that I think part of the reason people interpret it that way is because some leaders have taught the idea because it’s needed to bolster the point – I personally don’t believe in that aspect or that we have any special authority nor do we need it (and Catholic priests might have more authority). I should also note here that the “new” questions revised that question by removing the word “firm” – which I think is significant. The question also doesn’t specify gospel.

What Joseph was trying to do was pretty common during his time. He was looking for a church that looked like the ancient church because, if Protestants are right, the Catholic Church was/is corrupted but the ancient church was not (sort of the “if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck, it’s a duck” argument). This “restoration” of the ancient church wasn’t Joseph’s idea, it was part of religious thought at the time and isn’t absent from our day. Some of our historians (Bushman and Givens for example) would term Joseph as more of a gatherer of truth than a restorer – the truth was already here, it was just fractured or separated. That is how I nuance the answer. I do believe Joseph did gather much of the truth, but wasn’t finished and some of it wasn’t really truth (hence the restoration is ongoing). Yes, I believe Joseph was successful in restoring the ancient church to great extent (but I don’t necessarily believe other churches don’t have these same truths).

[Anonymous]

I agree that it seems to have gone well.

I also admit to having a certain amount of impatience with the current more discussion focused “discussions” (instead of the presentations from my era). To me it seemed that there was a series of step level stairs with gates and increasing commitments. To me it seemed counterproductive to teach the later and bigger commitments if the “investigators” had not yet committed to the earlier and easier steps.

I felt/feel that the missionary program as it is currently designed is for the purpose of delivering numbers and I suppose I am pretty results driven.

[Anonymous]

But how can it be results-driven when the missionaries aren’t leading toward commitments? I honestly felt the past missionary discussions — the ones on 5X7 booklets were very good. When we had an investigator with questions, and they had a ton of questions, we would answer a couple questions at the start and then let them know that we would likely answer a lot of other questions as we made our presentation.

Normally investigators were OK with it. If people refused to read and pray on the first discussion, we knew they weren’t golden and needed to make that commitment. It all made a lot of sense. As I got more into the mission, I found I was able to craft the canned presentation to the needs of the people I was teaching. I would weave in scriptures and concepts as they seemed to fit the discussion, to the benefit and interest of the investigator.

[Anonymous]

That is a great ideal – but most of the missionaries on my mission quoted the lessons word-for-word and didn’t deviate significantly to answer questions that weren’t in the lessons. Speaking in a foreign language complicated that issue greatly – which is something that isn’t mentioned much in these kinds of conversations. Often, two foreign missionaries didn’t have the ability to deviate from the scripted lessons with confidence.

The current lessons still are focused on progression and ultimate baptism. They simply allow the missionaries to tailor the approach to the investigators individually. What you did on your mission would be perfectly appropriate now.

Frankly, I love the new structure – because it fits me and my personality much better. I think that is a major factor.

(I would make some changes if it was up to me, but that is more a function of returning to the original way of using the Book of Mormon than anything else and would be a new discussion, so I won’t go into it here.)

[Anonymous]

I was re-reading this thread. The benefit of aging is that you can read a past thread and enjoy it as if it’s the first time Just kidding, my faculties are all there (no pun intended), but I was intrigued about what I wrote.

I want to add a follow-up comment. One of my concerns, as well as the concerns of others here was being unfair to the missionaries. This was because the professors weren’t really there to be taught or to consider conversion.

When I saw the missionaries on the following Sunday, we chatted briefly about the discussion experience. I said I hope they didn’t feel that I wasted their time. The senior companion said “I would rather be in discussions than doing anything else”.

So, the comment someone made previously “How can you waste a missionaries time? What will they be doing otherwise, tracting?” seems to fit the bill.

I simply thought I would share his reaction. Makes me feel a little better about the discussion.

[Author]

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