Latter-day Saint FAIR-Cast

Evangelical Questions: The Sacrament by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about the sacrament. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand. Before I get into that let me remind you of the FAIR Conference. I will be speaking on Friday, August 4 at 10:30 Mountian time. I would be delighted to see you there in person, but you can also sign up to stream the event. It’s free to stream, but you do need to sign up at https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/conference/august-2023. I will be talking about issues of sexual abuse in church settings. And, before we get started, I’ve been wanting to address a question that comes up a lot, but I haven’t been able to find the right spot to do it. Maybe I just need to do a Q/A video – hit me with questions in the comments if you’d like to see that, but for now, I want to briefly answer this one because I get it frequently. The question goes something like, “My grown child has left the church and joined an Evangelical church and I want to use all this information to talk with them, but they do not want to talk with me about this topic. My faith is such a huge part of who I am, so it seems like I’m being kicked out of their life. What should I do?” The short answer is: What you should do is respect their wishes. I know that’s not the answer you really want to hear, but it’s the only one that makes sense, and here’s why…No one likes being given boundaries by other people. I don’t like it, you don’t like it. It stings. That’s okay. But a boundary is someone telling you to, “stay in your lane.” The idea of “staying in your lane” directly implies the idea that you have a lane in which to stay. You’re not being kicked out of their life. I know it can feel that way. But try to focus on the relationship you do have with them and work with what you’re given. In this scenario, parent-child, it is a very long game, and it makes sense to do the work to figure this out. Perhaps it doesn’t make sense in other relationships, only you can decide that. But in this scenario, you might just have to dig deep into every bit of emotional maturity you can muster and preserve the relationship. All right, that was me slipping into mental-health education a bit, but I hope that was helpful for you. Moving on. Today, we are talking about the Sacrament, which Evangelicals know better as communion or the Lord’s Supper or the Lord’s Table, and Catholics know better as the Eucharist or the Holy Mass. My favorite alternative name for it is a term that pops up a few times in history, “The Love Feast”. But they all are referring to roughly the same thing, though obviously with some very different understandings of it. Our text comes from Matthew 26:26: And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. Before about 5 years ago…Latter-day Saint friends, you can laugh at me for this all you want…I did not know that the main worship meeting of the week was called Sacrament Meeting. And I remember when I heard that phrase I thought, “How odd! I wonder what they think “sacrament” means?” Commence laughter, I’m not offended. In my own defense, I will say that part of this is because I spent about 10 years in the Anglican world where the word “sacrament” can refer to several things: it can be the taking of communion, but things like baptism and marriage are also considered sacraments. I think the LDS word there is more specific, as we would call those ordinances, but we mean the same thing. Anglicans (and Catholics, and others) also have something they call “Sacramentals” which are considered, “sacred signs” (LDS friends, don’t run too far with that word here, they’re using ‘signs’ differently.) But Sacramentals are something like oil that has been blessed to use in healing, or making the sign of the cross, or holy water. These are things that get really misunderstood by outsiders, but they’re functioning very similarly to how some of the ordinances function for us. (There is an episode I want to do on water as symbol – how it’s used in our faith for baptism and in the initiatory, how it’s used as “holy water” in other places. But that’s some deep geek-level stuff and I think I will try to spare you from that. Maybe. We’ll see.) I’ll start by describing the differences an Evangelical would see in our Sacrament meeting, and include the differences we would see in theirs. And then we’ll go a little deeper and examine on the theological level what is purported to be happening during the sacrament or communion, and we’ll even look at the Catholic side too simply because it’s helpful to illustrate some of the differences in theology. Evangelical friends, if you were to attend a Latter-day Saint service on a Sunday morning you would probably be surprised to see that what we call “the sacrament” is pretty familiar to you, even if it’s not 100%. The elements are blessed and passed, which would feel very familiar to you. Latter-day Saints are taught to use this time in 2 ways. First, it is considered a renewal of the covenants we have made – I have an episode coming up on covenants so I’ll kick the discussion of what that actually means for us down the road. Some Evangelicals are very familiar with the idea of Covenant theology and none of this would be new to them, others have only the vaguest idea of what that could even mean. The second thing we are taught about this time is it is for focusing on Jesus Christ. There are 3 things that stand out that are really different though. 1) Most of the time in an Evangelical Church no special priesthood is required to bless the Sacrament. In theory, anyone can do it. In our Latter-day Saint tradition, ordinances require someone who holds the priesthood. It’s hard for me to think of other times in which this would come up, but during the pandemic lockdown everyone was doing church at home, and if you did not have someone in your home who is a priest, then you are instructed to spend that time pondering the sacrifice of Christ but to refrain from taking the elements. That will sound very weird – and very Catholic – to Evangelical ears. But for Latter-day Saints, priesthood really matters, we’ve talked about that on this channel a couple of times already, and I have more planned on that as well. 2) Most Evangelicals use grape juice or real wine for communion. Latter-day Saints use water. In my lifetime more and more Evangelical churches have switched from using grape juice to using wine. It’s sort of considered a little bit edgier of a thing to do, and they like that. But Latter-day Saints have had their own journey through what to use as well. My initial guess at why water was used was something like: Latter-day Saints avoid alcohol, even socially, so maybe this is them just trying to stay really far away from something that looks like alcohol. But, I was surprised to learn later that the Word of Wisdom makes a provision for using wine during Sacrament. Doctrine and Covenant 89 gives us, “Inasmuch as any man drinketh wine or strong drink among you, behold it is not good, neither meet in the sight of your Father, only in assembling yourselves together to offer up your sacraments before him. And, behold, this should be wine, yea, pure wine of the grape of the vine, of your own make.” Latter-day Saints use wine in the Sacrament well into the 19th century. In fact, in 1861 Brigham Young sent 309 Mormon families to settle in southern Utah, where they could produce, among other crops, wine for the sacrament. (That’s in Leonard Arrington’s book Great Basin Kingdom – which is very good and worth a read.) By 1906 the temperance movement is really starting to come into its own and by that point, the Word of Wisdom had been around for 70 years. The Saints had been given a generously slow onramp to living by the Word of Wisdom, so during that on-ramping time, alcohol and tobacco use was not unheard of among the Saints. But by 1902 the on-ramping time was coming to an end, and shortly after that, in 1906 the First Presidency and the 12 begin using water in their Sacrament meeting in the temple, and the rest of the church soon follows suit. So, yeah, we use water. 3) The third difference Evangelicals would notice is that it’s quiet while the elements are passed. Well, it’s not quiet. I’m in this fantastic ward with lots of young families with babies and toddlers. Just because of the area where I live is brand new, high-density housing, which tends to attract younger families just starting out after college. So, if you’re in a ward like mine, it is actually not remotely quiet during Sacrament. Delightfully so. But, what I mean by that is that there is no music playing. In an Evangelical Church, for the most part, during that time their band would be playing music, sometimes contemplative, but frequently loud worship-rock music. That should give you a good overview of the practical differences in how we practice Sacrament, but let’s take a look at the theological differences. In the Protestant/Catholic world, there are 3 ways to think about what is happening in communion. The first way is the Catholic version, and if you’ve never heard it before, or if you can think back to the first time you heard it, it sounds weird. But this is an extremely sacred doctrine to them, so we’re going to treat it respectfully. In Catholic theology, at the beginning of the service, the bread and wine are just common elements. There is nothing special about them, they were made in perfectly ordinary ways. They lay on the altar and look like the bread and wine that they are. At a specific point in the serve, often indicated by the ringing of a bell, the priest says the words of consecration, and the elements become the actual body and blood of Christ. They sill look and taste like bread and wine, but they are not. They are the body and blood of Christ. This idea is called transubstantiation and it is an expression of their desire to take the words of Christ literally when he says, “this is my body, broken for you, take and eat.” This practice has a lot of meaning for them and it deserves respect. But it is very different from the typical Evangelical view. In the typical Evangelical view the communion bread and wine remain bread and wine and only become the body and blood of Christ symbolically. But there are 2 versions of this. These make up numbers 2 and 3 of out list of ways Protestants and Catholics think about the Sacrament. Some Evangelicals would say that the bread and wine are simply there as a memory jogger. Jesus asked us to remember his death, and he asked us to use bread and wine, so we do this and remember him. But there is nothing happening more than memory or recall. There is nothing efficacious in it. It’s not doing anything other than helping them remember. This is probably the more common view, or at least it has been historically, things are shifting here too. The other possible way Evangelicals `view the element is what gets called, “The Real Presence.” Which is sort of a halfway point between communion-as-memory-jogger and Eucharist-as-literal-flesh-and-blood. In this view, they see Christ’s presence in the elements, though the elements themselves remain bread and wine, but Christ indwells the elements in a special way that brings Christ’s presence to the one who eats it worthily. For Latter-day Saints, none of those categories are even discussed much. Instead, we believe that what is happening in the Sacrament is the renewal of covenants. Before I was baptized into the church, I attended Sacrament Meeting for a long time, months, and I made a decision that I wanted to participate by receiving the bread and water. And as far as I know, no one had any problems with that, but I also understood the theology was clear: I had not yet made covenants, so there was nothing to renew. My participation in eating and drinking was something else – a desire to express my faith and hope that I could become part of that community. But that was my own personal meaning. The actual point of the Sacrament entirely has to do with covenant keeping. There is so much more to talk about on this topic, I know that doesn’t seem possible, but it’s true. And this is a topic we will come back to again from a different angle a couple of months from now. Thank you for joining me all of this. I’ll be back next week and we’ll continue working our way through the New Testament. More Come, Follow Me resources here.   Jennifer Roach earned a Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and a Master of Counseling from Argosy University. Before her conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints she was an ordained minister in the Anglican church. Her own experience of sexual abuse from a pastor during her teen years led her to care deeply about issues of abuse in faith communities. The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – Matthew 26; Mark 14; John 13 appeared first on FAIR.

Evangelical Questions: The Rapture by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about the rapture. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand. Before I get into that let me update you on the FAIR conference. Some new details for you…I will be speaking on Friday, August 4 at 10:30 Mountain time. I would be delighted to see you there in person, but you can also sign up to stream the event. It’s free to stream, but you do need to sign up. Initially, my topic was going to be the history of the relationship between Evangelicals and Latter-day Saints (spoiler: Lots of ups and downs), and I still hope to give that talk someday, but instead, I’m speaking on an area that I have a huge personal and professional interest in: Sexual Abuse in a Church Context. My plan is to talk through the 5 most common questions that come up on this subject, especially for Latter-day Saints. Some examples are, “Does our church help abusers hide from the law?”….”Is there a higher-than-average number of abuse cases in our churches compared to similar groups?” I’m also working on a huge Q/A page of about 30 questions regarding abuse. I know this is not everyone’s favorite topic, but I have some really interesting original research to present as well as some historical context to add to the whole question. Okay, moving on. This week’s topic, the rapture, comes up in Matthew 1:23 (JST): Behold, I speak these things unto you for the elect’s sake; and you also shall hear of wars, and rumors of wars; see that ye be not troubled, for all I have told you must come to pass; but the end is not yet. You will notice that the word, “rapture” is not in this verse, but it’s not in the Bible at all, it’s a word Evangelicals use to describe a concept they see in the Bible. And by “rapture” they mean an event at some future point in time where all believers in Christ will be, “taken up into the air” and then will begin a 7-year period called, “The Great Tribulation” which is a time of great sorrow, and after that time, Jesus will return. This is them leaving Earth to go to Heaven without dying. God pulls their physical bodies out of our atmosphere and into Heaven. You won’t find this taught directly in the Bible. You can look for it, it’s not in there – though certain people take verses and apply them to the concept, even though they’re vague and could describe lots of things. And this belief is huge for American Evangelicals. How did this happen? Let’s start with some historical context. If you go back in time about 250 years and asked the Christians alive at that time what they think of the rapture, they would no idea what you’re talking about. The idea of the rapture is brand new in terms of history. It’s been around for about 200 years, which in historical terms is brand new. In the 1830’s a guy named John Darby was living in London and working as a pastor for the Plymouth Brethren (they would go on to call themselves the Exclusive Brethren, but you’ve probably more likely to have heard the term Plymouth Brethren.) Latter-day Saint friends I know the thing that catches your attention here is the date, “1830’s”. If you listened to LDS historians at all in your life you’ve probably heard someone talk about the extraordinary outpouring of spirituality happening in that decade around the world, and this is an example of that. Darby is an extraordinary man, he’s given a top-rate education for the day, he comes from a family with means, and he’s set up for success really well. He produces translations of the Bible into English, French, Dutch, and German that are still used today. He initially is ordained as a Catholic priest, but he soon quits in a political protest. Right around that time he is thrown off a horse and has a long convalescence where he begins to develop his signature theology: The Rapture. Darby travels to America several times and somewhere in the 1880’s (there are conflicting dates) he is in Missouri and makes a connection with Cyrus Scofield. Latter-day Saints, this is during the era when John Taylor was president of the church, so the Saints moved on to Utah long ago, but I know Missouri catches your attention too. And there is a “Charles Scofield” in early Utah history during this era, he was a railroad builder. I did a cursory look to see if he is related to Cyrus Scofiled, but couldn’t find proof that he was. At any rate, Darby meets Scofield who essentially takes Darby’s work and popularizes it. Scofield is in the direct line of people who influence the up-and-coming Evangelical movement. So, American Evangelicals get Darby’s theology as filtered through Scofield. And Scofield publishes what becomes the first modern Study Bible. He publishes his notes and commentary about the text right next to the actual text of the Bible. A few versions of this had been done before, but Scofield makes it take off. I mention it here because it’s an interesting slight-of-hand, and it directly impacts how the rapture theology plays out. What Scofield did when he places his notes and commentary next to the text of the Bible does not seem very revolutionary today. You can go on Amazon and find 30 or more study Bibles, some of them quite good. And a modern reader can easily understand that there is a difference in authority between the scripture text and the comments provided by the book’s authors. It’s not hard for us to intuitively see the difference. But in Scofiled’s day, people were not used to that. If it was contained inside a bound Bible, it WAS the Bible. They took Scofield’s interpretations far more seriously simply because he embedded them right next to the actual Bible text. So when Scofield is writing about the rapture in his notes, the Christians reading his Bible at that time are roughly putting his words equal with scripture. The average Bible reader in this era is not yet sophisticated enough to easily differentiate the two. At this time, around 1909, roughly 8% of the US population ever graduate from high school. The majority of people in that era can read, but they’re not going to be sophisticated enough to see the difference between Scofield’s words, and the words of the Bible. And his Bible was huge. It sold 2 million copies by the end of WW2. This is how Darby’s rapture theology got popular in America. Fast-forward to the 1970s and a series of films is made that dramatizes this event. There are 4 movies in the series, they’re called the “Thief in the Night” movies. You can watch them on Youtube if you want. Another series is made in the 1990s that you might be more familiar with – they’re based on the Left Behind books, but the idea is the same, they’re a dramatized version of what would happen after the rapture. I’ll tell you this story. A very dear friend in my first Ward texted me one day and asked, “What is the rapture?” I gave her a brief explanation and she said: My school-age daughter checked out a book from the library called, “Left Behind” because the cover looked cool, but she’s reading it now and we have no idea what they’re talking about. Evangelical friends, you may or may not know this, but Latter-day Saints have no idea what you’re talking about if you’re talking to them about the rapture. It’s not a thing for us. Incidentally, it’s not a thing for most Christians in the world. The idea is rejected by Anglicans, Orthodox, Catholics, and most branches of Protestants. But it’s got firm footing with Evangelicals and over the last 60 years many Evangelical leaders have made predictions of when this event would happen, only to have those dates come and go. The most memorable one to me was in 1988 when a book came out called, “88 Reasons Jesus Will Return in 1988,” and it gave a specific date for the rapture, which obviously didn’t happen. But some people read that book and sold their homes, thinking they would not need them anymore. Or they ran up huge debt thinking they wouldn’t need to pay it back because they’d be raptured. But there were some significant ones in the 70’s too. I remember being about 10 years old and given a giant button to wear at church that said, “You better get right – before you get left”….meaning you should get right with God before the rapture happens because then your chance will be over. Now, I’m sure my skepticism of the rapture theology is coming through. I certainly don’t think it’s true, and I will admit my bias to you on that. But, I want to acknowledge that this is an important doctrine to Evangelicals. Yes, it sounds crazy to our Latter-day Saint ears, but some of our doctrine and historical events sound crazy to their ears too. So is there anything in this rapture idea where we can find a good inroad for conversation? I’m so glad you asked. Which brings up another really interesting issue here. We’ll use the rapture issue to illustrate. So, the main verse that gets used for supporting the idea of the rapture is in 1 Thes 4. This is Paul writing to the church there because they’re worried. They believed that Jesus Christ would come back in their lifetimes. But, enough time has passed since Jesus’ resurrection and the time of this letter, that some members in their church have died. They’re feeling confused and worried because Jesus has not actually come back yet. So they’ve written to Paul to help sort them out with the question, “How can some of our friends have died if Jesus was supposed to come back before any of us died?” Paul, in his wordy kind of way, responds like this… 13 Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. 14 For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. 15 According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. 16 For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. 17 After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. 18 Therefore encourage one another with these words. In context, you can see that Paul is helping them understand that their dead still matter and that Jesus has not abandoned them or forgotten the plan. He also has not turned his back on their own suffering. Paul is encouraging them to endure the suffering they have now, and the potential future suffering of the tribulation. The entire point of this letter is for Paul to tell them – in this beautiful figurative metaphor of being “caught up in the air” with their dead – is for Paul to reassure them that they will be reunited with their dead, and all of them – living and dead – are in the hands of Christ. People who believe in the rapture take the “in the air,” the Greek word here is just the word that means “the Heavens” or more literally, “The clouds of the Heavens” and make it literally mean the space of atmosphere above your head. They’re taking what it figurative and making it very, very literal. There is an entire area of study called Hermeneutics that is concerned with this. Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation – or how do we get the correct meaning out of a text. One of the rules of hermeneutics says that is you take a figurative word, but apply a literal meaning to it, things are going to go weird. The best example of this is that Jesus gives us the metaphor that he is like a mother hen stretching her wings out to cover her chicks. This is a metaphor – but if we commit a hermeneutical error here, we take the metaphor as literal and start to believe Jesus is a giant cosmic chicken. Now, Latter-day Saints, before you get too comfortable, we do this too. It’s not just Evangelicals. We take vague metaphors from scripture and turn them into concrete proof of something literal. One of the best examples of this is when we say there is proof for the Book of Mormon found in the Bible. There isn’t. Not that anyone else would accept anyway. Ezekiel 37 is a great example of this. We Latter-day Saints read in there about the sticks of Judah and Joseph and apply them to the Bible and the Book of Mormon. And it’s a lovely application of those verses. I can certainly look at those verses and interpret them that way with a lot of gladness. But it’s not actually what they say. It’s an application, but not a literal meaning. We have to bring outside knowledge/belief into that verse to pull out the meaning we’re getting. For your own use, for your own spiritual edification, that’s a great way to apply a metaphor to something it didn’t originally refer to. In the original chapter of Ezekiel, read in context, the 2 “sticks” are the Nothern and Southern kingdoms. That is the literal meaning of the text. It’s a little more complicated for us because we believe in ongoing revelation outside of the Bible, so we can apply the metaphor with some certainty to the Book of Mormon. This is the difference between exegesis (figuring out the actual meaning of a text by only looking at the text itself) and eisegesis (bringing your own ideas and sort of reading them into the text.) It’s totally correct to say, “we read about the 2 sticks and apply that idea to the Bible and the Book of Mormon”….but its going to far to say, “This verse in Ezekiel is literally about the Book of Mormon.” It might be a subtle difference, but we have to be able to hold both, “here is what the text is actually talking about” and “here is how we’re applying it.” I say all of this – and we’ve gone way over on time this week – because this is how a lot of misunderstanding happens between Latter-day Saints and Evangelicals. Both groups tend to think that our application of a verse is identical to what the verse actually says, and it’s just not. The argument goes back and forth, “this is what it means”…“no, this is what it means”…when a more profitable path is something like: there is a difference between the meaning of a text, and the ways in which it can be reasonably applied, we have very different applications of some verses, let’s get curious about why. Well, enough of that. Please join me next week where we’ll have more fun stuff to talk about. More Come, Follow Me resources here.   Jennifer Roach earned a Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and a Master of Counseling from Argosy University. Before her conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints she was an ordained minister in the Anglican church. Her own experience of sexual abuse from a pastor during her teen years led her to care deeply about issues of abuse in faith communities. The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – Joseph Smith—Matthew 1; Matthew 24–25; Mark 12–13; Luke 21 appeared first on FAIR.

Evangelical Questions: Holy Week by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about Holy Week. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand. Before we get started though I want to remind you about the upcoming FAIR Conference, August 2-4 in Provo at the Experience Event Center. I will be there and would love to say Hi to you. I’ll be speaking one of the days, not sure which. You can register online at https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/conference/august-2023 and there are options for viewing online or in person. Let me tell you about one of the talks that will be happening. You may know who Keith Erekson is, but if you don’t he is the director of historical research for the church. He had a really good book come out a couple of years ago called, “Real vs. Rumor” where he gives really helpful instruction about how to think critically about when you hear a “historical” story. I love history – if you’ve listened to this podcast at all you know that I try to give you the history of why certain theologies or practices developed – but I am by no means trained as a historian. So I adore Keith’s work because he helps normal people like me think better. He really blends expertise in history with a desire to help regular people learn from history in a way that is helpful. I can’t tell you how excited I am to hear his talk. So, come to the FAIR conference and geek out with me. Okay, onward with our work here. Today we’re talking about Palm Sunday and Holy Week. Yes, I know, it’s already past – you’re probably watching this in late May and Palm Sunday was many weeks ago. But I’m brining it up now because 1) It’s contained in our CFM readings this week and 2) It got talked about a lot at General Conference and I’ve heard a number of really interesting conversations and questions come up about it from lifetime Latter-day Saints. So, our text for this week is Matthew 21:8: And a very great multitude spread their garments in the way; others cut down branches from the trees, and strawed them in the way. I think the talks in General Conference did a good job of talking about what Holy Week is and why it’s important. So I’m not going to repeat that information. If somehow you missed those talks go back to the recordings of the April 2023 General Conference and check them out. What I want to do here is talk about what Holy Week is like for Evangelicals, why they’re doing what they’re doing, so that you might have a better conversation with them. And honestly, this is a topic where we Latter-day Saints might have our own imaginations expanded by learning about what they’re doing. I don’t think a re-creation of the typical Evangelical practices of Holy Week should just be copied and used in our church – but Holy Week has been important to believers for 2,000 years and it might be time to figure out how to put some of that into our own context, in a way that fits our church culture, and leads Saints closer to Jesus Christ. Okay, so you know what a Latter-day Saint Holy Week, Palm Sunday, Easter Sunday is normally like. Let me tell you what an Evangelical version of that is like. And with all things Evangelical there is a wide spectrum. But one familiar dynamic you will notice is that more people are interested in coming to church on Easter (and Christmas) so Evangelical churches try to capitalize on this as much as they can. Version 1 – The “lowest church” version (you’ll remember we talked about what “low church” and “high church” are in a previous episode – “low church” here just basically means very little emphasis placed on ritual, ceremony, or formalness) of this that I can think of is the “Helicopter Egg Drop.” And this is exactly what it sounds like. For about $500 a church can hire out a helicopter for the hour, it goes up, drops anywhere from 3,000 to 20,000 plastic eggs filled with candy in a field – and the kids go crazy hunting for them. This is usually part of the Sunday morning worship, not a side-event on Saturday or something, and it’s a big deal for them. It does draw families out. The kids love it, so their parents love it, and the church hopes this will translate into families being interested in getting involved with them. And it frequently works – churches wouldn’t be doing it if it didn’t. And for some churches, this embodies their entire philosophy toward Holy Week and Easter itself – it’s essentially a “put on your best face and try to draw in new families” event. The churches are perfectly aware that dropping eggs out of a helicopter isn’t exactly the essence of how the Savior might want to be recognized on this day. They’re not confused about that, they’re just trying to make a really easy onramp so that the family who comes to church because they want to see a helicopter drop 20,000 eggs (and I’ll be honest – I kind of want to see that too) might be wooed so that eventually their interest in developing a relationship with Jesus grows. They’re playing a long game, and they do a few events like this a year, and it seems worth it. I will say this though, there are churches that use this strategy full-time. Every single Sunday is about impressing people in hopes that they will want to become more involved eventually. I’ll give you an example that is both dazzling and horrifying (even many Evangelicals I know can see both sides of this one.) Years ago I worked as a full-time children’s pastor at a church in California. They were lovely people who had a passion for Jesus and wanted to know how to bring other families into their fold so that they could teach them about Jesus too. So I was working for this church and it had become obvious that the buildings they were used for children’s ministries were getting old and looking run down. Instead of just doing a refresh of carpet and paint, they decided – with very good motives – that they wanted to have buildings that looked closer to a children’s museum than a children’s Sunday School building. So, they sent me on a trip across the country to go visit a church that had done this very thing. My purpose for this trip was to get a tour of the building and come to understand what aspects had been worth the investment, what had not, and what elements our church back in California could be inspired by. They start the tour by showing me the check-in desk for school-age children – this is a common feature for bigger churches – the children are brought to that point, checked into their class, and sometimes the parents are given a vibrating pager (like you get while waiting for a restaurant sometimes) and the kids are off to their classes. But in this church, after the check-in process was complete the worker would go to the wall behind the desk and open up 1 of 4 round hatches. When it was open it revealed a slide. The child would then be invited to slide from the main floor down to the floor where their classroom was. A monitor above the portal showed a video feed from the bottom where the parents could see their child greeted by a worker and taken to class. Then they took me to the infant/toddler area – instead of having some toys and blankets laid out on a floor for the nursery-age children they had constructed a room where 2 of the walls were floor-to-ceiling salt-water aquariums filled with exotic fishes. And it went on and on from there. And I’ll be honest, it was impressive. It was exactly children’s-museum-meets-Sunday-School. If I were an Evangelical parent looking for a place my child would be excited to go to on Sundays – this would be it. But much like the churches that use helicopters to drop thousands of eggs, churches that are doing this have to be crystal clear on why they’re doing it and work hard to get people to the actual goal – becoming disciples of Jesus Christ. And sometimes, this goal seems to take second place to “being impressive.” Because it’s really fun to be impressive. When I was an Evangelical I fell into that trap for a long time. And it’s not an easy one to see your way out of. Version 2 – back to Holy Week – the next version of what Evangelical churches do for Holy Week is a step up in terms of what you might recognize as looking like a religious observation. The bare-bones version of this is…1) Palm Sunday. Congregations members are given palm branches when they arrive for the Service that Sunday. At some point during the service one of the leaders will talk the congregation through the meaning of the Palm Sunday story and the congregation will wave the palm branches in the air. (Many parents know how to teach their children to make little items with the palms after they’ve been waved – they can be made into woven crosses or even little dolls while the children sit in church.) This service is often accompanied by upbeat music and singing. In many scenarios that will be the extent of it. Most churches will allow the mood to stay upbeat until the end. A minority of churches will end the service talking about that while Jesus receives a warm welcome on this day, things would turn against him in the days to come. But most of them will let the mood remain festive. The next even of Holy Week for a church like this might be either a “Maundy Thursday” or “Good Friday” service. Maundy Thursday is traditionally a feet-washing service. And in the past perhaps everyone in the congregation would have the opportunity to have their feet washed, these days it is far more likely to be a symbolic event that maybe a handful of people experience on behalf of the rest of the congregation. The idea here is that Jesus washed the disciple’s feet and we are to remember that he humbled himself to be the servant of all. This is generally a service attended by adults and maybe older children, though I’ve never heard of younger children being prohibited. The same is true with Good Friday. This is a somber service where congregants remember the crucifixion. It’s often an emotional service with music, low lights, scripture readings, and not many bells and whistles. Sunday morning – Easter – can either be a ramped-up version of their normal service, or perhaps a Sunrise service. People are more likely to dress up – Evangelicals normally do not dress up for church – but there are lots of exceptions to that too. All of this is sort of a middle-of-the-road kind of approach to Holy Week. Version 3 – this is a church that goes all out. They will do all the things just mentioned plus some additional things. The first difference that you would notice is that the palm branches used on Palm Sunday are collected from the congregation – so no little crosses or dolls are made from them. Seems weird at first, but the reason they do this is that those branches are laid out and dried, then later they are burned. The ashes will become the ashes used in next year’s Ash Wednesday service. Ash Wednesday is the beginning of the season leading up to Easter called Lent. Lent is the 40-day (minus Sundays) period leading up to Easter. The point of Lent is to get your heart ready to celebrate the resurrection. And they will often give up things like sugar to help them stay disciplined and focused during that time. On Ash Wednesday they go to church for a special service where the ashes (made from the Palms) are smeared on their forehead in the shape of a cross. After Palm Sunday they would certainly celebrate Maundy Thursday and Good Friday as well. But they add in a Saturday service that I think you will be fascinated by. It’s called Easter Vigil. It usually takes place on Saturday night. Sometimes this is a simple service, and sometimes it’s a grand production with actors and costumes, lights and music, but here is the point of it…..The service tells this history of humanity beginning in the Garden of Eden. It talks about how and why Adam and Eve left the garden and tells the history of God’s people down to Moses, and then from Moses to Jesus Christ. The point is for them to tell the history of the salvation of God’s people – leading to the resurrection or the doorway to eternity. The highlight of the service is at the end when the congregation is symbolically placed in Heaven celebrating God’s love. I imagine that every adult Latter-day Saint is making connections here to what we’re doing in our temple worship. Some of the same things are going on – we Latter-day Saints have a much more developed theology around what all of that means, and this is a similar practice to what many of you do on a regular basis. So it might be interesting to learn that at least some Evangelicals are doing this once a year – it doesn’t mean the same thing to them that it means to us. But some of the raw materials are there. I don’t where our traditions around Holy Week will go in the future. We had some great talks and inspiration at General Conference this last time, and we’ll see what that might develop into. I think it’s exciting. Join us next time and we will continue on. See you then! More Come, Follow Me resources here.   Jennifer Roach earned a Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and a Master of Counseling from Argosy University. Before her conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints she was an ordained minister in the Anglican church. Her own experience of sexual abuse from a pastor during her teen years led her to care deeply about issues of abuse in faith communities. The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – Matthew 21–23; Mark 11; Luke 19–20; John 12 appeared first on FAIR.

Evangelical Questions: Handling Difficult Texts by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about handling difficult scripture texts. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand. Before we get started though I want to let you know about a very cool event coming up. Every year FAIR hosts the most fantastic 3-day conference that you should think about attending. I will be there, I’d be happy to meet you. I’m speaking on one of the days, though I don’t think the schedule is finalized yet so I don’t know which day. One of the talks I really looking forward to hearing is from Dr. Jenet Erickson. Sister Erickson has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, U.S. News and World Report, Slate Magazine, and more. She’s a social science researcher and digs into all areas that affect family life. She will be bringing her expertise to talk about the new For the Strength of Youth. Even if you’re beyond the stage of life where you have young people in your home, Dr. Erickson is absolutely worth listening to as she applies wisdom from social science to theological concepts. Our scripture this week comes from Matthew 19:9: And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery. We’re not actually going to talk about divorce or adultery in this episode – I’m brave but not that brave. What we’re going to do instead is look at the different ways Evangelicals and Latter-day Saints handle the really difficult texts in the scriptures. And like most topics, this one is easier to understand with some historical background. There has never been a time in history when people of faith have not had to grapple with difficult scriptures. Sometimes there are difficulties come because we don’t understand something about the context or language of a passage, but sometimes they come because the passage is just painful or hard. And all along people have had to figure out what to do with those. One way of handling it was that sometimes the scribes who would hand-copy the manuscripts would change them intentionally to make the verse easier. Let’s talk about the New Testament as our example. There are lots of changes – or what we call “textual variants” – between various NT manuscripts. In an ideal world we would have original copies of what was actually written by the hand of Paul to compare the manuscripts to. But we don’t. There are no originals. There are only copies of copies. The Book of Mormon and the Bible actually have this in common – no originals to compare them to. Just lots of copies – And those copies vary in quality. There is a branch of study called “Textual Criticism” which isn’t about criticizing what the scriptures have to say, despite the misnomer. Textual criticism is the study of figuring out what the most likely original word was in a text. There are about 5,500 hand-written manuscripts of the New Testament that range in date from about 150 years after Christ to the year 1550 AD. At that point, the printing press was established enough that no one was interested in making hand-written copies anymore. Of those 5,500 manuscripts some are very tiny – about the size of a business card – and just contain 1 verse or a part of one verse. Around the year 350 AD we get the first complete Bible manuscript. It’s called the Codex Sinaitcus and you can go see it – it’s on display at the British Library in London. But before the Sinaitcus we have about a hundred or so fragments, and after it we still get lots of small fragments, but as the centuries go on, better care is taken of newly produced manuscripts, and they last longer, so the newer a manuscripts is, the more likely it is that we have more than just a fragment. Every manuscript is numbered, and some are named – like Codex Sinaitcus. They are also categorized into 5 groups. Category 1 manuscripts are considered the best, but not because they’re the most complete, because they’re the oldest. A Category 5 manuscript might be complete, but if it was created in 1500 it has had the opportunity to have a lot of textual variants. And, so what? What do we do with this information in our conversation about how to handle difficult texts? If I was fancy, and I knew how to put graphics into these videos, I would show you a copy of Papyrus 28. Papyrus 28 is about 3×2 (considered medium-sized for its category) and is from John 6, the story of the loaves and fishes. It used to be housed at a University in Berkeley, but it was sold to a private collector about 10 years ago. There are 2 really interesting things about 28….1) In that small manuscript there are 5 variations or 5 unique differences between it and other similar manuscripts and 2) it looks like someone took an exacto-knife and cut out 1 word very deliberately. The word that is cut out means, “those who were sitting down.” Somewhere in the history of this papyrus someone probably decided they didn’t like that detail, or they thought it didn’t fit, so they just cut it out. And I suppose that’s one way to solve your issues with difficult texts – just cut the passage out. However, it’s not a very efficient or good way to deal with a difficult text. Another example of how the scribes deal with difficult passages is to simplify them. Even though the scribes who copy these manuscripts lived across many centuries there are some patterns that appear in their work. One of those patterns is that scribes tended to add words to the text to explain or clarify what they were copying. They were trying to be helpful to the reader in doing this, but for modern purposes what they were doing is giving us a general rule to follow that says, “The shorter reading is probably closer to the original.” If you have 2 manuscripts, and one has extra explanatory words in it, that is probably the manuscript that has been altered. In a similar way, scribes also tended to try and “harmonize” the texts, sort of smooth them out, or make very difficult sayings less difficult. The rule here becomes, “The harder reading is probably closer to the original.” So here we see a slightly more sophisticated version of editing than just cutting the word out of the page – this is deliberate scribal changes because they thought they were doing the right thing. Modern ways of dealing with difficult passages So, fast-forward from all of that history to today. How are difficult passages handled today by Evangelicals? There’s 2 answers – the scholars and the people in the pews. First, there are many very good Evangelical scholars who are offering their very best to help people know what to do with hard passages. The top of the heap, in my opinion, is Dr. Phyllis Trible. Her landmark book is called, “Texts of Terror” and in it she takes the 4 most disturbing passages from the Old Testament – the stories of Tamar, Hagar, the Daughter of Jephtha, and the unnamed woman whose husband is a priest of Isreal, and commits human sacrifice on her. All of these stories are extremely disturbing. And she goes through them one by one and helps the reader understand what is going on beyond all the violence and sadness that are at first so shocking. Her book is a very good example of showing what a very careful and close reading of the text can do as far as figuring out what in the world is happening. But that’s what scholars are doing, not what people in the pews are doing. And most of the time what people in the pews are doing is…. avoiding the hard passages. In their minds at least, they tend to swap them out for broader 30,000 feet comments that are much easier to listen to. Something like, “Well, I don’t know what Jesus was really saying about divorce here, but I do know he said we’re not supposed to judge, so I’m just going to let God sort ‘em out.” It’s not that Evangelicals don’t have scholars putting out work on these texts, they do, they just prefer more practical answers that let people get on with life. One of the values in the Evangelical church really is an anti-intellectualism which comes across as just trying to get out of the scriptures what they need to live life, and move on. In 1994 an Evangelical scholar, who is also an excellent historian, wrote a book called, “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind”….and it turns out that the scandal is that there isn’t much of one. Things have gotten somewhat better for them since, at least at the academic level. In 2004 Christianity Today said that Noll’s book did more to change the trajectory of Evangelicalism than any other that had been published in that decade. But the anti-intellectualism in the pews remains. Several authors and speakers in the Evangelical world have tried to address this, but none of them seem to get much traction. So, how do Latter-day Saints manage difficult texts? A good test case for this is Doctrine and Covenants 132. That is a difficult chapter that many people need a moment or two when trying to wrap their minds around it. So how do we see people handling it? For many people, a path that makes sense can be seen in what Scripture Central is doing (they used to be called Book of Mormon Central.) They are not shying away from the passage or making any excuses about it, they’re trying to help listeners contextualize it in history. They’ve got 15 videos explaining it from various angles that take top-level scholarship and make it accessible to regular people. Some of those are bite-sized little videos, while others are 90 min long. But what all of them are trying to do is help the listener pull the lens back and understand the entire context of a passage. If you go to the FAIR website – which stands for Faithful Answers Informed Responses – you will see similar work being done, but with a different focus. If you have a specific difficulty or question about a passage, chances are very good that one of the FAIR scholars has already written a lot to address that very question. And not just with scripture passages, but with issues from church history, and current events (they have a new page up on understanding what in the world is going on with the Daybell trial, for example.) And they also have very focused responses like Sarah Allen’s 69-part response to the CES Letter. And how about Latter-day Saints in the pews? This is just my experience, but it is my experience, and I’m going to tell you something hard. One of the things Latter-day Saints do when they come across a difficult passage in the Bible is immediately jump to, “Well, clearly this is not translated correctly.” And…it’s lazy. Not because it can never be true – we all share the belief that the Bible has mistranslations. It’s lazy when it’s the first solution you jump to when you come across a difficult passage. There is no list of, “these are the passages translated incorrectly,” though you know from the beginning of this video that the science of figuring out what the New Testament actually originally said is difficult. A better approach is that if you come across a passage you don’t know what to do with, don’t jump immediately to, “mistranslation.” Go to the FAIR website or the Scripture Central website and do some reading about that passage. Both are working hard to make scholarship accessible. If you want to geek out even more go to the BYU Studies page and look up some of the academic work on that passage. Go to the BYU Scripture Citation Index – you can search up the passage and see every time it has been referenced in a General Conference talk all the way back to 1830. My point is that the tools are there for you to use and if you do some of the work to learn how to study better you can get more out of your scripture study. This kind of work isn’t a replacement of the Spirit – without the Spirit you’re never even going to get off the ground – but without taking in some content from people who know more than you, the Spirit only has so much to work with. On a more positive note, the other way I’ve seen Latter-day Saints manage really difficult passages is with the kind of faithfulness that says: I don’t understand what is happening – Doctrine and Covenants 132 is a great example here – but I’m willing to let it ride for a while and see if I can find a way to think about it that’s helpful. One of the greatest gifts in our church is the idea that ongoing revelation exists – you don’t have to have everything all figured out today. Eternity is long, and your intelligence will have forever to learn and grow. I hope this was helpful to you. This issue of difficult scriptures has been with people of faith for as long as scriptures have existed and I hope out discussion has helped you think about how you handle difficult passages. Join me next time and we’ll take up a new topic. More Come, Follow Me resources here.   Jennifer Roach earned a Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and a Master of Counseling from Argosy University. Before her conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints she was an ordained minister in the Anglican church. Her own experience of sexual abuse from a pastor during her teen years led her to care deeply about issues of abuse in faith communities. The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – Matthew 19–20; Mark 10; Luke 18 appeared first on FAIR.

On this episode, Rene Krywult joins us for a discussion about whether temple ordinances are sacred or secret. René Alexander Krywult, a native of Vienna, Austria, Europe, has been a member of FAIR for over twenty years and has been instrumental in founding the German-speaking FAIR group. He is a software developer and project manager for a European financial institution. He is married to Gabriele Krywult, and they have four children and three grandchildren. Jacob Crapo was born and now resides in Las Vegas, Nevada. He served his mission in Upstate New York and was an ordinance worker in the Las Vegas Temple. One of Jacob’s dreams is to help build a temple. He is an electrician by trade but his real passion is helping others access the powers of heaven. The post Cornerstone: A FAIR Temple Preparation Podcast – Episode 3: Sacred or Secret? with Rene Krywult appeared first on FAIR.

Evangelical Questions: Heavenly Mother by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about Heavenly Mother. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand. Before we get started though I want to let you know about a very cool event coming up. Every year FAIR hosts the most fantastic 3-day party. When I say “party” what I mean is getting to listen to and interact with some of the smartest people in our church. They give a talk on what they’ve been working on – and frequently the FAIR conference is the first place their ideas are presented in public. That’s my kind of party. And maybe it’s yours too. This year the FAIR conference is on August 2-4 (Wed – Friday) at the Experience Event Center in Provo, Utah. You can buy tickets to attend in person, or online by going to https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/conference/august-2023. I will be there all 3 days and would so happy to meet you. I am presenting a talk on one of those days, I don’t know which on yet, but will let you know once the schedule is finalized. 2 of the talks I am very much looking forward to are…1) Michaelbrent Collings is an American horror novelist and he’ll be talking about, “Horror: the Genre of Goodness, Godliness, and Hope.” Horror is not my genre at all, but I am completely intrigued by what he will say. 2) Dr. Janiece Johnson – her specialty is religious history – will be speaking on the Mountain Meadows Massacre. I’ll try to highlight the talks every couple of weeks here – if you enjoy sitting around listening to me, you probably will enjoy sitting around listening to my friends too. Okay, back to our scriptures… Our scripture this week comes from Luke 13:34: O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee; how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not! Evangelical Views So here we have God compared to a mother hen. The traditional Evangelical conversation around this verse goes something like this….Yes, God is compared to a female chicken, a hen, but this verse does not require us to believe God is female any more than it requires us to believe God is a Cosmic Chicken. Fair enough. No one is asserting that God is a giant chicken. And for a long time, this was the boundary on thinking about God and gender. God is male, and images in the scripture that refer to God as female such as a hen, a woman looking for her lost coin, a woman in labor, a nursing mother, a mother bear, and a mother eagle….these were just poetic images and not to be taken too seriously. But the boundary has certainly changed in even the last 10 years. It used to be that if you wanted to talk about any kind of feminine identity for God you were being scandalous. Only the most liberal of the Evangelicals would be talking about this. But last year Eerdmans published 2 books on the topic. If you are not familiar with the Evangelical publishing world Eerdman’s is willing to push the boundaries, and that’s been true for a long time. They’re not Zondervan or Lifeway which are going to take a very traditional Evangelical line, and to my knowledge have not, and would not, publish something about a feminine identity for God. But Eerdman’s isn’t ignored by Evangelicals either. So it’s a big step forward that this is being talked about. The traditional Evangelical view is not all that interesting to talk about. God is male. End of story. So I’m not going to spend much time there, but what I do want to talk to you about is the direction the Evangelical world is headed on this topic – even if all of them aren’t there yet. And that direction takes 2 flavors. In order to get at what those flavors are I’m going to summarize 2 different books – and the reception they’ve received. By the end of this section, you should have a good idea of where the line on this topic has moved to. After that, we’ll compare the Latter-day Saint view. The first one is, “Women and the Gender of God” by Dr. Amy Peeler. She is a professor at Wheaton College, which they like to say is the, “Harvard of the Evangelical world.” It’s probably closer to the, “BYU of the Evangelical world.” That probably gives you the right feel for it. Peeler’s PhD is from Princeton and she’s very well-liked in the Evangelical world. The biggest point her book is trying to make is that while Jesus Christ was male, he was born of a woman. His flesh does not exist without her flesh. She’s modernizing an argument first made by Augustine when he said, “(Jesus) was born of a woman; don’t despair, men; Christ was happy to be a man. Don’t despair, women; Christ was happy to be born of a woman.” And her book has been very well received by Evangelicals. But as Latter-day Saints you might sort of tilt your head at that and think it’s awful long path to just connect 2 points. Why not just say we have a Heavenly Mother? Evangelicals can’t get there. You can see their longing to – Peeler is brilliant and she works hard in this book to help people make connections to the idea that God is not solely male. But it’s an incredible amount of effort to get to a far less radical point than Latter-day Saints make about Heavenly Mother. But Peeler’s book demonstrates the idea that the boundary on this topic has in fact moved, even if it hasn’t moved all that much. In contrast, there is another book that shows pushing the line too far will still get you a slap on the hand in the Evangelical world. The book, “God Is” by Mallory Wyckoff is fascinating, but ultimately most Evangelicals appear to reject where she goes. To be fair, Wyckoff does not have the same kind of educational background as Peeler does. So the work is automatically going to be quite different, and that’s okay. I dont think that’s what gets her rejected. Here’s what she does in the book…She takes the idea that God is not merely male and expands on it using a kind of panentheism that says: because God resides in us, we are God. So if God resides in a woman, then God is a woman. And that line is just too far for Evangelicals. When you read some of the Evangelical criticisms of her book you see the logic of G.K. Chesterson (one of the patron saints of the Evangelical world) – he once said, while talking about this idea, that if a man leans too heavily on the idea that God is part of him – and not also something quite separate from him – then he ends up worshiping not God, but self. You can see from these 2 examples that Evangelicals are very much grappling with ideas about God and gender….but you can also see that they’re in a muddle it’s hard to find a way out of. I’ll point out one other Evangelical take on this issue. If you watched the “Certain Women” episode a couple weeks ago you heard me talk about what women in leadership or ordained ministry is like for Evangelicals. And an interesting little piece of theology pops up here for the Evangleicals who ordain women. In the past, the Evangelical positon on ordained women could be summed up in something CS Lewis said, which is something like: a woman can not be ordained because it would confuse people into thinking that she represents God, and God is not female. And one of the modern-day reasons why some Evangelicals ordain women is so that their members in their congregation can experience what it is like to see the feminine side of divinity. They can’t make the jump to, “there must be a Heavenly Mother,” but they can say something like: All humans are created in God’s image, therefore God must contian within himself both feminine and masculine. So when a woman is ordained so that the congregation can experience a feminine divine through her, they’re trying to get to the idea of a Heavenly Mother, without ever having to get there. Interestingly enough, in oru Latter-day Saint church we do not ordain women, and looking through this lens, it makes sense why we do not need to. The take-away here is that your Evangelical friends and family might be more interested in this topic than you think. If you want to know my first take on hearing about Heavenly Mother, I’ve told you my first experience a few weeks ago back in that “Certain Women” episode. And you might find that interesting. Latter-day Saint view So, this is tricky territory. Let’s just acknowledge that. My sense is that 30 years ago that very few people were talking openly about this doctrine, and for understandable reasons. And things have shifted for us too over the years. There is a resource that if you don’t know about, you should. The BYU Scripture Index – it’s an online site scriptures.byu.edu where you can search general conference talks all the way back to 1830, you can also search “Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith” as well as the “Journal of Discourses” (which can be a tricky reference to wade through – you have to know what you’re looking at in order to not take things wildly out of context) but it’s there and you can search it as well. And you can search for how often certain words or phrases have been used. Pro tip: you might have to do a little research on the historic phrasing of certain words. For example, if you search for “Heavenly Mother” you will only find references going back to the 1970’s, but that’s because before that she was much more likely to be referred to as, “Mother in Heaven.” This doesn’t signal some big theological change as much as it demonstrates how the English language changes over time. So, anyway, if you use the BYU Index to research Heavenly Mother you find several talks from the last 20 years, a couple in the 1980s and 90s, a couple in the 1970’s, 1 in the 1940’s, and 1 in 1885. But there have been more things said outside of Conference and the best round-up of those to my knowledge was presented at the BYU Studies symposium in 2011 called, “A Mother There” by David Paulsen and Martin Pulido. It’s a long paper, 28 pages, but it does a great job of tracing the teachings throughout history. We also see Heavenly Mother referenced in the Family Proclamation. And, most notably, Elder Renlund’s talk a couple years ago titled, “Your Divine Nature and Eternal Destiny.” And, we have our own tension of what can – and can not – be said about her. In the Evangelical world that tension is mostly around, “what is true?” and ours certainly has that element to it but also adds in a layer of, “Even if it is true can it be said?” That layer of carefulness is hard for Evnagleicals to understand as they don’t really have an equivalent dynamic. They don’t have a category called, “sacred things that should be kept private.” Latter-day Saints clearly have that category and the only quibble comes in trying to decide everything that should be in that category. I do want to take minute to talk about the Catholic perspective here. It’s not my area of research or specialty – for that I would refer you to frequent FAIR speaker Robert Boylan. But there is an interesting thing happening in Catholic theology that Latter-day Saints will find interesting. You are probably at least vaguely familiar with the idea that Mary the Mother of Jesus has a special place in their theology. Exactly what her position is has changed over the centuries, but her importance has never gone away. Non-Catholics sometimes day that Catholics, “pray to Mary” and while that is sometimes true, it’s probably more accurate to say that they are speaking to Mary and asking her to pray on their behalf. Mary is also sometimes called The Queen of Heaven, or The Mother of God in their theology. The reason I point this out to you is that it revelas the same issue the Evangelicals are trying to grapple with: They long for a feminine divine, but can’t quite work it out theologically how to get there. Well, we are out of time. We’ll probably pick this topic up another time or two before the year is out. I hope you enjoyed this. Come back next time and we’ll take up another topic. More Come, Follow Me resources here.   Jennifer Roach earned a Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and a Master of Counseling from Argosy University. Before her conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints she was an ordained minister in the Anglican church. Her own experience of sexual abuse from a pastor during her teen years led her to care deeply about issues of abuse in faith communities. The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – Luke 12–17; John 11 appeared first on FAIR.

Evangelical Questions: Is It True? How do you know? by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about truth – and how you learn it. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand. Our scripture this week comes from John 7:15-17. Jesus has gone up to the temple to teach and we get this: The Jews there were amazed and asked, “How did this man get such learning without having been taught?” Jesus answered, “My teaching is not my own. It comes from the one who sent me. Anyone who chooses to do the will of God will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own.” (NIV) So, the question is: Do we approach gospel learning differently? Both groups, Latter-day Saints and Evangelicals are highly interested in gospel learning. And yet, we do seem to go about it in very different ways. We’re going to start with the question on a really practical level – what do the 2 groups do when they’re trying to engage in gospel learning, and then we’re going to look at the experiential level that Jesus is talking about in this section of scripture. Scripture Reading First, let me make an outsider’s observation. I’m new enough to being a Latter-day Saint that I can still see some things as an outsider. Both groups, Evangelicals and Latter-day Saints fret a lot on this topic. We both worry that people sitting in the pews don’t know their scriptures well enough, that the youth are uninterested in gospel learning, that things were better in a previous generation where more people were interested in studying. Lifeway Research, the research arm of the Southern Baptists frequently puts out studies showing the state of how frequently their people engage with scripture, and much hand-wringing ensues. Pew Research, which is not denominationally based, also regularly puts out studies on how much scripture study various groups do. My observation is that people in both groups – Evangelicals and Latter-day Saints – fear that their people are not doing this enough and that others are doing it better. I don’t have a study to cite here, but my sense is that many comments get made in Latter-day Saint Sunday School about how we need to do better studying scripture. There might even be worries that Evangelicals do this much more frequently than Latter-day Saints do. And it might surprise you to know that Evangelicals look at Latter-day Saints and think we’re doing better. So what does the research say? In a 2017 study, Lifeway Research noted that 49% of Evangelicals read a little bit of scripture every day. That’s pretty good and it clearly shows that they’re interested in gospel learning. The same study – done in 2017, so prior to the introduction of Come Follow Me – says that 77% of Latter-day Saints read a little bit of scripture every day. Now, this is survey research, so we’re taking people’s word for it that this is actually what they’re doing – and it’s true that there could be some inflation here. But it’s also safe to assume that if there is inflation on the Latter-day Saint responses there is also inflation on the Evangelical responses. This isn’t a “we win” conversation (in other words, you don’t get to use this information to be a jerk and lord it over your Evangelical friends) but it does show one view into how we both approach gospel learning. But it is just one view, so here are some others. What Kind of Information Another way to look at this question is to consider what kind of information the 2 groups are taking in – in other words, what forms the basis of their gospel learning? If you’re a Latter-day Saint the main things are probably: talks in Sacrament Meeting; Lessons in Sunday School/EQ/RS or youth classes; Seminary and Institute classes; General Conference talks, family or private scripture reading, Come Follow Me reading and the various podcasts about them, resources like FAIR, books on gospel topics, and maybe a few other things. And Evangelicals have a fairly similar list. They listen to sermons in church; they have Sunday School and classes for youth; they don’t really have an equivalent to Seminary and Institute in the same way we do – what they call seminary is an academic graduate school program that most “normal” people don’t ever attend. I was a weirdo and went to Evangelical seminary and got a Masters in Divinity, but most Evangelicals don’t access that kind of learning. While they don’t have something to compare to General Conference talks like we do (where the words said are coming from the centralized authority of the church) they do have a wide range of various conferences they attend. And they have books, podcasts, and organizations that try to supplement and increase people’s learning. Lectionary reading vs. spontaneous reading And while both groups do a lot of gospel learning through scripture reading, the recent Come Follow Me change adds an interesting contrast. I’ve only been a Latter-day Saint since the invention of CFM, but my understanding is that prior to that the Sunday School curriculum followed roughly the same pattern (a year for OT, a year for NT, a year for BoM, and a year for PoGP) but that family or individual reading was based on need or preference of the individual family or individual who is reading. And this is roughly the system Evangelicals live in. Their churches set the topics/scriptures for their classes and groups, but they decide for themselves what to engage in for private scripture reading. Some churches do a corporate push toward something like, “We’re all going to read through the Psalms this summer.” But those are special initiatives and not the regular pattern. Interestingly enough, the invention of Come Follow Me actually places Latter-day Saints in alignment with most of the rest of the Christian world outside of Evangelicals. You might not realize this but CFM is a Lectionary. What’s a lectionary? A lectionary is a set list of which scriptures are to be read during which weeks. The most commonly used one around the world is called The Revised Common Lectionary and is used by millions of Christians around the world. It runs on a 3-year cycle, compared to our CFM which runs on a 4-year cycle. CFM is also different because it includes some commentary, ideas for discussion, ideas for family and the like, but in essence, it’s a lectionary. Most Evangelicals would turn their noses up a bit at the idea of following a lectionary because they are fiercely independent and want to decide for themselves even down to the question of, “Which scripture should I read today?” There are pros and cons to that attitude, but that would be a significant difference in how we approach gospel learning. Preaching scripture Another way that both groups engage in learning the gospel is through listening to talks or sermons. And Evangelicals and Latter-day Saints are roughly in the same category here. The biggest difference is that Evangelicals usually have 1 person, or perhaps a small team of people, who are delivering sermons week after week. While Latter-day Saints spread that responsibility around to everyone. And Latter-day Saints you already know the kinds of content you hear in Sacrament meeting talks, so let’s look at what Evangelicals are preaching about. In 2019 the Pew Research Center analyzed 50,000 sermons that were posted online from over 6,000 churches (Evangelical, Catholic, Mainline, and Historically Black). They compiled the data to look for trends. The average length for an Evangelical sermon was 39 minutes, which is roughly comparable to the total number of minutes that Latter-day Saints spend in Sacrament Meeting listening to talks. We’re probably under that by a bit, but not much. The researchers wondered what the distinctive things each group was talking about, and found that the unique things (this doesn’t mean the most common things – this means the things they’re talking about that others are not) Evangelicals talked about were 1) Eternal Hell 2) Losing salvation 3) Trespassing or sin. It’s a bleak list and we might be tempted to look only at the bleakness of it but on the upside, it does show that Evangelicals are thinking hard about these topics. Evangelical speakers also made far more references to other books in the Bible. They might be preaching a passage from Luke but will take care to show how that passage relates to or references other places in the Bible. Latter-day Saints have their own version of this – we just tend to make connections to modern-day talks more than other sections of scripture. Another trend was that the bigger the Evangelical church, the less likely they were to mention anything at all about the Old Testament. We might have some underlying feelings in common here when it comes to knowing how to talk about the Old Testament. There are a lot of other practical level ways to think about this question, but I want to switch over to thinking about how gospel learning happens on the experiential level. Service and Life Similar to Latter-day Saints, Evangelicals talk a lot about learning gospel principles through serving others, serving their families, and serving God in a general sense. This seems to be a major way both groups are living out Jesus’, “Anyone who chooses to do the will of God will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own.” Both groups also have a good understanding of the fact that the principles of Jesus have to make sense in real life, not just as philosophies. Latter-day Saints don’t love philosophical types of thinking much for our own reasons, and Evangelicals don’t love it because it’s not practical. They are very pragmatic and not usually inclined to care about something that works in theory, but can’t be tested in life. If you’re looking for points of connection, this is a big one where we end up at the same spot. To make the next part of my point I need to compare Evangelicals to Catholics for a moment. If you think of the typical Catholic service (even if you’ve only seen it on tv) you probably picture priests in robes, the congregation doing a lot of standing, sitting, responding, and lots of ritual, liturgy, and lots of symbolism. This kind of worship is called “high church” and it’s main characteristic is that the service is trying to teach the people something through ritual, beauty, repetition, and experience. Evangelicals generally hate this stuff. It’s too theoretical and not practical enough. It’s not at all what you might expect to see in their services. An Evangelical service would be called “low church” for this reason. It’s not an insult (as if “high” means high value) it’s just a way of describing how much ritual or symbolism is used. Here’s where it gets kind of interesting. In this sense, a Latter-day Saint Sacrament Meeting is very similar to an Evangelical meeting. Things are pretty plain-spoken, there isn’t anything mysterious happening, very little ritual. I suppose the passing of Sacrament or communion trays is as close as we come, but outside of that everything is pretty grounded and there is not a lot of learning through experience going on. Latter-day Saint Sacrament Meetings, like Evangelical worship services, would easily be called “low church.” Latter-day Saints also have access to all the beauty, mystery, ritual and symbolism that is offered in a high church service – we just access it in the Temple. Our temple worship is highly symbolic, full of ritual, very liturgical, full of meaningful words being repeated or used over and over, full of beauty, and very interested in teaching by experience. In this sense, we sort of have the best of both worlds – the down-to-earth practicality of a low-church service, with the experiential learning of high-church in our temple worship. It’s really a compelling combination and most other churches do not have access to both worlds – high and low church. Temple worship is nothing if not experiential. The other bit of being experiential that comes out is in our theology around why Adam and Eve had to leave the Garden. In Evangelical theology it’s only a punishment. In our theology part of the reason why they have to leave is to go learn from their own experience. The Old Testament tells us many times, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” and we put some emphasis on the fact that Adam and Eve had to learn what it was like to be separate from God (kicked out of the garden) so that they would know what to do to be close to him (stay true to the covenants they had made.) The fear of the Lord here is “not liking what it feels like to be out of God’s presence” so the beginning of wisdom is, “so we learn to do the things that keep us in his presence.” Well, this was a lot – I hope you enjoyed seeing some of the similarities and differences here, and that maybe you picked up a way or two to have these conversations with your Evangelical loved ones. Join us next time and we’ll pick up another topic. More Come, Follow Me resources here.   Jennifer Roach earned a Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and a Master of Counseling from Argosy University. Before her conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints she was an ordained minister in the Anglican church. Her own experience of sexual abuse from a pastor during her teen years led her to care deeply about issues of abuse in faith communities. The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – John 7–10 appeared first on FAIR.

Evangelical Questions: Church Discipline by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about Church Discipline. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand. Our scripture this week comes from Matthew 18:6: But who so shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned. I love Jesus’ powerful word here for people who harm others, especially the vulnerable, especially children. But today we’re going to broaden the scope just a bit and consider all the ways in which church discipline might be necessary. Specifically, I want to look at how this is handled in our church compared to how it gets handled in Evangelical circles. And I will say from the start that I know our Latter-day Saint church has not always gotten this right. And if you’re listening and you are involved in a situation where discipline didn’t happen in a way that you had hoped for, I want you to know that I see you and I know very well that this does not always go down perfectly, and I’m not going to pretend like it does. And at the same time, I want to talk about how the imperfect system we have is different than what Evangelicals do, and why it is that way. So, if you’ve heard my name before watching any of these videos it is probably because I’ve talked a lot about sexual abuse cases in our church and Evangelical churches. And if you’ve watched the video on my conversion story you know that part of my lived experience is abuse in an Evangelical church and the aftermath of how they dealt with it. I’m aware that I’ve had a very particular experience, in a very particular time and place, and that influences how I think about these things. I think it’s okay to tell you my bias going in. We’ll start with what church discipline looks like for Evangelicals. The answer, as with all things Evangelical is: It depends. If you remember back a few episodes we talked about how “Evangelical” is not a denomination. There is no central authority. There is no membership for churches. If a church wishes to be seen as Evangelical they may call themselves such – there is no one to police that term. It’s different in our church – if a new church wanted to call themselves The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in exactly the same way as we do, there would be pushback on that. But anyone can open a church in your town and call it something like Journey Church or Crosspoint or some such thing. So it’s almost impossible to fully answer the question of how Evangelicals handle church discipline as there are hundreds of different answers to that question. But we’ll look at some trends. As you know, Evangelicals are Protestants and at the beginning of the protestant Reformation church discipline was considered part of the mark of the true church. The Catholic church at the time had gone off the rails, and the church leaders offered no discipline or correction. So the Reformers, named three “marks by which the true church is known”: the preaching of the pure doctrine of the gospel, the pure administration of the sacraments, and the exercise of church discipline to correct faults.” But it’s been a long time since that has been true. Christianity Today, which is The news magazine for Evangelicals says, “Today, church discipline is feared as the mark of a false church, bringing to mind images of witch trials, scarlet letters, public humiliations, and damning ex-communications.” Lifeway Research is the research arm of the Southern Baptist Church and while not all Southern Baptists would consider themselves Evangelicals, many would and Lifeway is a good place to look for research. In 2018 they surveyed 1,000 Evangelical pastors across the US and found that almost 60% of them said that their church has never disciplined anyone for any reason. So, how do Evangelicals practice church discipline? Mostly they don’t. I don’t think this is them being lazy or not caring about standards, it’s them playing out their value that each individual hears from God alone and they are each their own prophet. We’ve talked in past episodes about how they really value an attitude of, “You can’t tell me what to do” or “I’m independent and don’t need rules or authority,” and this is one way you can see that attitude play out. However, sometimes we do see them practice church discipline. The 40% who said that they do have some version of church discipline have not used it in the past 3 years. And there is a slight difference here between big churches and small churches. The smaller Evangelical churches, which grow fewer every year, are far more likely to have at least some version of discipline available to them. The larger churches and they are increasing every year, make it pretty easy for people to hide. If there are 5,000 people who attend your church on a Sunday morning it’s pretty easy to remain a stranger for a long time – and the folks who do that would have no one noticing anything in their life that might require discipline even if a process was in place. And here is where we see a big difference – in a Latter-day Saint church anyone can ask for a meeting with the Bishop, and even if youd don’t have specific need to ask for one, you are invited at least once a year for a tithing meeting, and every couple of years for a recommend meeting. It just doesn’t work that way in the larger Evangelical churches, which most of them are. Once a church gets over about 500 members on a Sunday access to pastoral leadership starts to diminish. Around the 500 member level members are frequently no longer even allowed to request a meeting with their pastor, though he probably knows the names of many of the families and could recognize many people on sight. But once a church is over 1,000 people that is no longer true for obvious reasons. Some Evangelicals attend a church for a decade and never even meet the pastor. There is an article from a group called The Gospel Coalition written about a decade ago (so they used the term Mormon) that compared Evangelicals and Latter-day Saints that says, “But compared to the Mormon experience, evangelical churches are a carnival ride of short services, low accountability, and rare church discipline. If you’re a faithful Mormon, you’re not living a 95 percent secular life like so many evangelicals.” So we’re starting to see how some of these differences play out. Back to the Evangelical churches who do practice some form of church discipline. Some of them like the Evangelical Free Church actually do have a formal process for discipline, but it only applies to the clergy. Others have an informal process where a church leader will use a kind of persuasion/exclusion approach where they will try to persuade a person that what they’ve done is wrong (for example, an unmarried couple living together) but if that person disagrees or isn’t moved by the persuasion the only thing that happens is a “light exclusion” where they are now allowed to do any teaching in the church – meaning maybe they will be asked to step down from teaching the 6th grade Sunday School for example. Cautionary Tale There is a really well-documented example of how all of this plays out and you can hear it in a podcast put out by the Evangelical magazine, Christianity Today. It’s called “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill.” It’s 10 or so episodes long and it’s essentially a cautionary tale of how church discipline goes wrong. The podcast features a church called Mars Hill that was at one time the hottest thing in Seattle. My family and I were members of that church in the early days. My son, who is now a full-grown adult, was a toddler in the nursery when we were there. And Mars Hill was the place to be. It was the fastest-growing church in America and primarily made up of young Seattle hipsters in the early 2000’s. But what happened was the pastor who founded the church really went off the rails in a number of ways that require too much detail to go into here, but suffice it to say that the board of the church came to a decision that the pastor needed to be put under discipline for some of his actions. The church was drawing 15,000 people a week in multiple locations, in 4 states. And when the board wanted to discipline the pastor he initially agreed to submit to it, and then backed out. He decided he would rather quit his role as a pastor than be disciplined by the church. He resigned and moved his family to Arizona 8 years ago. And to this day, the Christian community in Seattle is impacted by this man’s refusal to face accountability for his actions. But, in the Evangelical world, all you have to do is move to a new church or a new city and you get a fresh start. So this pastor moved to Arizona where he formed a new church and is predicted to essentially repeat the process since apparently, he didn’t learn from the last time. In a Latter-day Saint congregation, this could never happen. If a bishop or stake president went off the rails he can’t just move to a new city and become bishop again. At least not based on policy. Have the policies of the church been poorly enforced at times? Of course. But having some policies around stopping someone who refuses accountability is better than having no policies at all because the end result is there is never an expectation that behavior gets addressed. What this case illustrates is that Evangelicals have decentralized leadership and that Latter-day Saints have centralized leadership. If you don’t like your Evangelical leader or pastor, you just change churches. If a leader is trying to hold you accountable for your behavior, and you don’t like it, you change churches. That is harder to do in the Latter-day Saint world. Example I will tell you this next story with a little bit of trepidation. It involves people I care about, so I will disguise some of the details. You’ve probably never heard someone say before, “I have a testimony of church discipline councils”, so here ya go… I had to take the Evangelical church where I grew up to court to hold them accountable for some things. I didn’t want to and tried for a very long time to find another way. But when the church refused to police itself, I employed the help of the secular courts to enforce some consequences for them. I’m glad I did it, and I’m glad it’s over. It was very hard on me. The church said things in court papers like, “Any damage Jennifer took on due to this is her own fault.” I had to fight them, tooth and nail, to take accountability for their actions. Contrast this to the experience of a friend. He was abused by a family member who is a long-time member of our church. My friend hadn’t spoken about this to anyone, but in his 30’s he decided to speak to his family about what had happened and found out that he was not the only victim. The cousins of that family banded together, believed the victims, and wanted to help make things right. The legal statute of limitations had long run out so they had no criminal or legal options, which was heartbreaking and frustrating to them. Their next move was to go to the bishop of the abuser. Within a very short amount of time, the man’s stake held a disciplinary council and he was disfellowshiped. If he would ever like to rejoin the church he would need approval from the First Presidency. When I contrast that experience against my own – where the Evangelical church couldn’t admit what had happened and certainly wasn’t going to disfellowship anyone over it – I understood why church discipline matters in a way I never had before. The church’s actions took the feelings and experiences of the victims into consideration. I relayed the events to a friend who told me about an experience where the details are very different, but the experience of the victim was also prioritized. I know it doesn’t always happen this way in our church. I’ve heard many of your stories in recent years and I acknowledge them and how painful they are. But it does give me great comfort to know that our church at least strives to get this right, and frequently does. I will never meet the men who sat on the disciplinary council of my friend’s abuser. They live in a different state and I don’t even know their names, but their actions of discipline against an abuser knit something back together in my heart, even though it wasn’t my case. I hope this conversation helps you see and understand some of the differences. Join us next week as we take up a new topic. More Come, Follow Me resources here.   Jennifer Roach earned a Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and a Master of Counseling from Argosy University. Before her conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints she was an ordained minister in the Anglican church. Her own experience of sexual abuse from a pastor during her teen years led her to care deeply about issues of abuse in faith communities. The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – Matthew 18; Luke 10 appeared first on FAIR.

Have you ever felt that the gospel is a bunch of things to check off a list? Have you ever wondered what’s up with this “covenant path” that Church leaders talk so much about? If so, join us for this episode with BJ Spurlock as we explore covenants, ordinances, and how God teaches us through symbolism. BJ Spurlock is a Sunday School teacher in Kentucky, blogs at thingsastheyreallyare.com, and has also written for FAIR and Public Square Magazine.   Jacob Crapo was born and now resides in Las Vegas, Nevada. He served his mission in Upstate New York and was an ordinance worker in the Las Vegas Temple. One of Jacob’s dreams is to help build a temple. He is an electrician by trade but his real passion is helping others access the powers of heaven. The post Cornerstone: A FAIR Temple Preparation Podcast – Episode 2: Covenants and Ordinances with BJ Spurlock appeared first on FAIR.

Evangelical Questions: “What Apostasy?” by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about the Apostasy. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand. Our scripture this week comes from Matthew 16:18: And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. On the one hand, what a fantastic, reassuring scripture. And on the other hand, you can immediately see how there is a lot of debate about what this actually means. And I’ll be honest, Latter-day Saint friends, some of the ways we talk about the apostasy are adding to the confusion and I think as we go along you’ll be able to see what I’m talking about. So, first off, I will tell you, when I was an Evangelical the apostasy and the accompanying restoration were the hardest concepts for me to understand. This is the spot in our conversation where it is easiest to see the phenomenon that if you ask a fish to describe water he can’t do it – he has no idea what it means to be without water, so he really has no idea what to compare water to. I took missionary lessons for 9 months and we talked about the apostasy many times, but it was hard for the missionaries to get much past, “the apostasy happened and that’s why we need a restoration.” And even when pressed they could only cite a couple of points in Church History where things were especially bad, usually having to do with the pre-Reformation Catholic Church. But from the Protestant point of view, the pre-Reformation Catholic Church is a blip in a 2,000+ year landscape where God has always been active on the Earth. Honestly, during those lessons, my thought to myself was, “Well, these are young kids who are high school graduates and haven’t studied much history so they are simply unaware of the vastness of Christian history.” But once I started to understand what they were actually saying – and it took me an embarrassingly long time for that to actually click – I started to see that this was a case where Latter-day Saints are using the same language to mean something slightly different. For me, at the end of the day, the nuances of how our church is using that language are better. It’s theologically fuller and more hopeful than the Protestant/Evangelical meanings. And I will also say that this is probably one place in which my formal theological education probably made it harder for me than it would for the average person simply because I was able to see all of the knowledge the missionaries couldn’t and had a hard time reconciling what they were saying with the truth of Christian history. So today I want to talk about the terms we use when talking about the apostasy and help you see how Evangelicals hear them so that maybe you can help someone else short-cut through the difficulties I had. We’ve talked in many episodes of this series about how Evangelicals and Latter-day Saints use the same words differently sometimes and that fuels the confusion between us. You might not be aware but there is a niche dictionary called the Baker’s Evangelical Dictionary of Theology which gives us a definition that Evangelicals would agree on. Baker is the publisher and it’s a nice, thick 1,000-page dictionary. So we’re going to draw on that a bit. First, let’s start with the word “apostasy.” Evangelicals don’t use this word a lot, but it’s probably in their vocabulary and according to Baker’s it would mean, “Defection from the faith, an act of unpardonable rebellion against God and his truth. The sin of apostasy results in the abandonment of Christian doctrine and conduct.” And this gets used in two ways. First, and probably most common, is that apostasy is something an individual person does after making a covenant or decision to follow Christ. “He went off the rails into apostasy.” Basically, a person who used to believe the right things, but no longer does. Second – and you’ll see that this is where the confusion comes in – this word can be applied to large groups of people. They see widespread apostasy as an eschatological sign – meaning a sign of the end times signaling the second return of Christ is near. So if the whole world goes into apostasy, the return of Christ is near. Here is how they get there. Just like us, Evangelicals can read the Old Testament and see that constant pride-cycle. The Israelites follow God for a while, then they start to prosper and fall away from God, then God allows bad things to happen to them and they get back in line. They see this as a prototype of what will happen before the second coming of Christ. They base this on 2 Thes 2:3 “Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day (the return of Jesus Christ) will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction.” In that verse, they hear that an apostasy absolutely will happen, but only in the future, and only right before Christ comes again. So when we say, “the apostasy happened” it just doesn’t compute for them because if an apostasy happened, surely Christ would have come again. Another term that causes some confusion here is “priesthood.” Now there is a lot to say about priesthood, and we’ve got several episodes coming up on that. When talking about the apostasy Latter-day Saints would say, this comes straight from the Church’s website, “(After Jesus Christ ascended back to Heaven)…The Apostles were killed, and priesthood authority—including the keys to direct and receive revelation for the Church—was taken from the earth. Because the Church was no longer led by priesthood authority, error crept into Church teachings.” That word “priesthood” throws them here because they define it very differently than we do. Again, according to the Baker dictionary priesthood is defined in 4 ways. The priests we see in the Old and New Testaments; the priesthood of all believers; the post-resurrection ordained priesthood which is modernized into, “being a pastor”; the priesthood of Jesus. So when they hear us say, “the priesthood was lost from the face of the Earth” it doesn’t make sense because 1) Clearly that statement can’t be talking about the priests of the Old and New Testaments. 2) It can’t be talking about the priesthood of all believers because believers in Christ have existed on the Earth since his resurrection, which has never gone away. They’re not wrong about that. 3) It can’t mean that pastors don’t exist because clearly, they do. 4) And it can’t mean that Jesus is no longer our great high Priest. So even though they have 4 definitions of “priesthood” available to them, they can’t work out what we’re talking about when we say that the priesthood authority was taken from the Earth. For Latter-day Saints, there are two additional meanings of priesthood that Evangelicals don’t easily see. Those are 1) Priesthood is the power and authority of God. It has always existed and will continue to exist without end. 2) In mortality, priesthood is the power and authority that God gives to man to act in all things necessary for the salvation of God’s children. Both of those are straight from the church’s website. It’s the power of God, given to humans in certain circumstances to do stuff. Evangelicals get really nervous right here – and this might sound funny to your Latter-day Saint ears – but they hear that as a very Catholic concept. They have no conceptualization of the idea that certain actions like baptism would need to be done in certain ways, by certain people, according to God’s law. That is not a concept for them. Instead, they would say something like: We take the principle of baptism and contextualize it into our specific culture and there are no absolute rules about how that must be done. It’s sort of a “pragmatism wins” approach to theology. Evangelicals are very pragmatic, for better or for worse. The idea that a person might need to wait to be baptized because baptism requires someone who bears the priesthood is nonsense to them. They would have a kind of “hero cowboy” approach of: Well, I would jump right in and baptize that person who cares about your rules. There’s a prototype here much earlier in American religion than the Evangelicals. You’ve certainly heard of the Methodist Church. They invented this attitude. Back in the 1700’s, pre-Revolutionary war, the Church of England whose members are called Anglicans was very well established in the colonies, but because all the senior leadership was still headquartered in England things moved very slowly for the Anglicans in America. When the Revolutionary War ended in 1783 the Anglican leaders in America were ready to start spreading out further and reach people who were living outside of the cities. Westward expansion wasn’t really in full swing yet, but it was starting and the Anglican leaders wanted to develop churches in outlying places. Their leaders in England made it hard for them – feelings were still pretty sensitive as the war had only been over for a few months. So 2 Anglican brothers, John and Charles Wesley become very frustrated and want pragmatic solutions for how the American churches could self-govern and make decisions about where and how to Evangelize. The Anglican leadership in England said no, so the Wesley brothers started the Methodist church primarily so that they could figure out how to reach people who lived outside of the established cities at that point. They needed and wanted practical solutions. It was sort of a, “Well, I don’t actually need your permission Leaders in England. Goodbye.” And Evangelicals inherited that attitude from them. It’s: you can’t tell me what to do; I don’t need your authority; I can innovate solutions without you getting in the way. It’s very, very American in that sense. And it is a high value for them to solve problems without bureaucracy. So when we say something like, “ordinances require proper authority” they hear “I want to put bureaucracy in your way.” One final definition I want to touch on is kind of more of a cultural issue than a literal definition issue. From the same article on the church website talking about the apostasy we get, “Because the Church was no longer led by priesthood authority, error crept into Church teachings. Good people and much truth remained, but the gospel as established by Jesus Christ was lost. This period is called the Great Apostasy.” Now, how that sometimes gets taught by members in our church is something closer to, “Absolutely everything from God was removed from the Earth and no evidence of his presence could be found.” And this is maybe were we could be a little more careful with how we say things because that’s actually pretty insulting to the many people who have loved Christ and been faithful to God in the best way they could ever since Christ’s resurrection. In every era of history, we can find that people who love God are alive and well. It’s going to cause some real confusion for Evangelicals if you try to suggest that is not true. And it’s quite needless to suggest that every bit of God’s presence was removed – because that’s not even what our church is teaching, as evidenced by the quote I just read. But still, culturally, some members of the church are still saying it that way. I hope you enjoyed this conversation about the apostasy and hopefully, you understand a bit more about why this gets muddled between Evangelicals and Latter-day Saints, and maybe some ideas about how to talk more clearly about these ideas because this is one area where our church really does have a lot of goodness to offer. Join us next time and we’ll take up another topic. I hope to see you then. More Come, Follow Me resources here.   Jennifer Roach earned a Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and a Master of Counseling from Argosy University. Before her conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints she was an ordained minister in the Anglican church. Her own experience of sexual abuse from a pastor during her teen years led her to care deeply about issues of abuse in faith communities.   The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – Matthew 15–17; Mark 7–9 appeared first on FAIR.