Conference This Weekend

I saw some familiar names from the T&S/BCC crowd in that article.
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Pres Nelson telegraphed what he was going to do early on when he used the phrase “New Testament Church.” What did he mean by that? We’ve been finding out — and there’s more coming. (In the wider Christian community, especially among Evangelicals and Pentecostals, “New Testament Church” has certain connotations/meanings.)

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Elder Cook gave a plain-spoken description of how big a sea-change is occuring when he said “we need to think and do from a new perspective” and “change church culture” about 1:11 into this video where he and Elder Uchtdorf introduce GA 70 Elders Nash and Ringwood to discuss more of the Love-Share-Invite initiative.
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/how-to-share/introducing-love-share-and-invite?lang=eng

which is the 2nd video on the Love-share-invite thing. (First was the recent leadership training video, the one with remote participants.)

Q: How can we reconcile Elder Uchtdorf’s statement that the principles of Love Share Invite have been around since the New Testament, yet Elder Cook said we have to think and do from a new perspectice and have to change church culture?

A: I think his implication is: we’ve been thinking/doing/culturing incorrrectly at the grass-roots level.

“Meanwhile, Latter-day Saint teachings have been continually simplified to become nearly indistinguishable from some evangelical Christian beliefs.” –SLTrib

With patently false assertions such as this being made by this article, I am unable to take it seriously. That isn’t to say that the Church is not or should not change; ours is a “true and living” church. Life is a continual process of change; the Lord knows what the Church needs to be now, just as He knows how to grow it into what it must become.

That claim was particularly bad

Re: Robert’s quote. The words “nearly” and “some” leave loopholes big enough to drive a truck through. It’s “over the top”, yes, but it is “directionally true”, which is a technique from Dale Carnegie.

Almost all the quoted sources in the article seemed off-kilter to me, but that particular quote is more accurate than the surface indicates, and … for reasons other than the source or the casual reader may suppose.

Evangelicals have not always, but probably since the 1960’s have been our closest _theological_ cousins. The rivalry is somewhat competition-driven since we are both convert/missionary oriented. We fish the same pond so to speak, and at times we poach off each other. They have reason to be testy with us.

In Robert’s quote, the exaggeration is more of degree rather than of kind. There is a small nugget of truth in it, and it has been true for a long time. But it is not so easily observed because LDS and Evs/Pents have been talking past each other and misconstruing/misrepresenting each other for the sake of argument.

The last time I visited a friend’s evangelical church, I estimated that the pastor’s talk/lesson was 95% compatible with LDS doctrine. His talk drove home the point, to me, that serious Evangelicals don’t believe in “cheap grace” and that the faith vs works/commandment-keeping is a phony argument — they preach commandment-keeping pretty much like we do.

From the article, I gathered that neither the author nor most (not all) of the sources understood the changes, nor why they are needed. It’s hard to tell from such short snippets, but it seemed that both the author and most of the sources appeared to need better/bigger/more-accurate views of the culture vis-a-vis gospel relationship.

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In the video I linked above, Elder Cook spilled the beans…. the Brethren want us to “think and do differently” and “change church culture.” He was so non-chalant, so calm, that by merely listening, you might not realize the importance of what he said. But write down his 2 or 3 sentences there, and read the text. Or rewind it and listen a couple times. (I will try to post a transcript later on.)

My take: Church culture, at the grass-roots level, has gotten off kilter because, at the grass-roots level, we have been “thinking and doing” incorrectly. I somewhat described it two years ago: https://www.jrganymede.com/2019/07/13/stop-thinking-missionary-work/

The Brethren have been working on these changes since Pres Nelson took the helm. During the early changes, Pres Nelson warned us that changes would continue and accelerate.
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Come to think of it, these culture changes go back to Oct 2002 with “raise the bar”. “Raise the bar” was just the diplomatic way of saying “too many of you parents aren’t raising your sons well enough to be missionaries.” I say this because the “new” mission requirements were the exact same as the old _stated_ requirements, but enforcement of the requirements had been so lax for so long, that people were “living down” to what the _effective_ requirements had morphed into… “meh, just confess and go.”

We live in exciting times.

The biggest problem with church culture I see is we are so busy and filling our lives with so much complexity that we don’t have time for a church culture. The time and complexity issue is endemic to all modern society.

In general, I regret that whenever I hear a complaint about church culture it really just means, “what I don’t like about Utah.”

There are a lot of problems with Salt Lake Provo I15 corridor Mormonism. Mostly it’s the degree to which it’s been able to rapidly assimilate California and New York values into daily living.