What is your status now with the Church?
I remain an active, temple recommend-holding member of the LDS Church. My wife and I currently teach in the primary and really, really enjoy it.
I love both the church and its members deeply — and sincerely hope to see the Church strengthen and prosper in the coming years.
That said I consider myself a heterodox, (largely) orthoprax, universalistic Mormon (“Open Mormon” for short). What this means to me is:
- Orthoprax: I generally take the commandments of the church pretty seriously in my own life. I’ve still never tried alcohol or tobacco, for example. I attend church weekly, fulfill my callings, contribute financially to the church, have family prayer and scripture study, etc.
- Heterodox: My beliefs in LDS doctrine and theology are different than the average member (I am guessing). For example, I don’t believe it very likely that either polygamy or the black priesthood ban were commandments from God. I view them more likely as mistakes. These would be just 2 examples of many.
- Universalistic: I don’t presume to judge the status of other churches and/or belief systems, relative to my own. I’m always thrilled to find faith, hope and charity wherever it may be found: within our church, within other churches, or outside of religion altogether. I no longer seek to rank my church and/or beliefs relative to the churches and beliefs of others. While I feel most comfortable with our doctrine and theology from a religious perspective, I feel like I have no clue what “the truth” is with respect to doctrine and theology. I tend to feel like each religion does its best to figure that out….each has their share of good and bad doctrines….and I feel like it’s God’s job to sort all that out in the end. As the good book says, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”
I really enjoyed your podcasts, and in the end I found them to help me strengthen my faith. I have come to a similar conclusion as you did, I find a lot of strength and peace in our faith. I believe strongly in what we do and how we live. I relate to you view in no longer seeking to rank our faith against others, I think that is a more harmonious and healthy out look.
Thanks for sharing your journey with us.
John
Wow. It’s been ages since I visited the site. I was almost sure it wasn’t coming back.
Corey,
I’m also surprised (and happy!) to see the site back.
In my opinion, it seems much more tolerant than anti-mormon sites and at the same time John’s Mormon Stories give us the opportunity to embrace whichever “version” of truth will work most for happiness in our lives.
I’m glad you brought the site back John!
I am a recent convert (1 year) who spent 9 years investigating the Church. A significant obstacle to the progression of my testimony was my perception that being heterodox and universalistic was not possible within the LDS faith. While I now understand heterodox and universalistic members will always struggle with themselves within the church, regardless of their degree of orthopraxy, I now realize the power of a personal testimony to overcome these crises.
I appreciate your work in proving that faith in the doctrines of the LDS Church does not necessitate homogeneity.
This is interesting…do you live in Utah? As someone who lives on the East coast where there aren’t very many members, I have a hard time understanding what this is all about. “The Church” is a wonderful institution that I attend three hours on Sunday. What “the Church” is really all about to me because I’m so outside the Mormon culture, is bringing each member to Christ through saving ordinances and in our day to day lives being blessed with all the knowledge we have to come closer to God through prayer, scripture study, and serving others and to thank the heavens for our gift of the Holy Ghost and the priesthood.
Now, I’m SO one to appreciate everyone’s faith and know that it brings them closer to God, but there’s a HUGE difference between our church and the rest of the churches beginning with our meat compared to everyone else’s milk. I just have a problem when people try to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the level of what everyone else has, saying they all have their good things. We can each KNOW the truth because we have a personal relationship with God who steers each of us to the truth.
What matters most is our individual testimonies of the Savior Jesus Christ and his atoning power, not the cultural crap that is on this website. Of course you can believe polygamy and barring blacks from the priesthood is a mistake, but that doesn’t make the church any less what it is (and I wonder if they were mistakes too, but so what? It doesn’t make my relationship with the Savior any less real? That’s what matters.) I just feel like this website doesn’t bring people to Christ and that’s too bad. And I think people need to get out of Church culture and see what life is really like and how blessed we are to have the knowledge and power that we have and its ability to bring others to Christ and peace, and get to doing that for others, not just through missionary work but service and friendship.
In conclusion, I think this website is sad, especially done by someone who professes to go to church but not really believe in it more than anything else. I think if you wanted to do some good in the world, there are better ways. Just figure I’d leave my two bits.
John,
You could not have expressed my own views better. It is actually strange. Thanks for the hard work. The podcast really is something that my wife and I look forward too…
Susie, I’d be interested to know if you feel the same way after listening to a few of the Mormon Stories podcasts. I assume you haven’t listened to any because you don’t really seem to understand what Mormon Stories is all about. Give it a listen, particularly episode #118 (linked below), which explains a lot about John’s personal beliefs and motivations. If, after listening to the podcast, you still feel that this is a sad website that turns people away from Christ, at least it will be an informed opinion.
http://mormonstories.org/?p=826
This is a WONDERFUL website for those of us who have struggled with our faith in the Mormon Church. John provides a very important service for people who have a hard time fitting in with Mormon culture. John has provided so many helpful resources and perspectives that I would never have encountered on my own. I’m still working my way through the podcasts, but I find new ideas in each of them as well as new ways of verbalizing my own thoughts and feelings. For my husband and myself, this website is tremendously helpful. We absolutely love it.
This is a fantastic website. I am 18-years-old and have struggled with my Mormon faith since I was 13. With shaken faith, it’s hard to find many informed or sympathetic local church members. I contemplated leaving the church following seminary graduation, but now I look forward to serving a mission. However, that will be tough, acknowledging issues like the black priesthood ban and polygamy. I am attempting to become an expert on Mormon history/doctrine and have compiled great research in reading the Book of Mormon and Rough Stone Rolling. I am reading other stuff like Huebner vs. Hitler, From Man to God, and of course the Bible in the meantime. This situation will be even more interesting as I move on to college, potentially BYU.
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I have heard you question the word “truth” on a podcast and in this post. The word can be interpreted in different ways. According to scripture, the “truth” is a knowledge of the way things were, the way things are and the way they will become. Also, Christ has called himself the truth. When people say the church is true, according to scripture definition. It means the church is eternal, or past present and future and it is of Christ.