Peter,

Thanks for your post! As a Christian who grew up as a Mormon it is great to hear your observations. It’s a breath of fresh air to read the thoughts of someone who has taken a moment to try and understand the LDS.

I am always a bit cautious about trying to learn things from LDS practice because it is so often rooted in appalling theology, as you have noted when it comes to their giving. It does make me ask the question, how do you learn from those that you seriously disagree with?

Thanks again,
Andrew

P.S. If anyone is interest in evangelism to Mormons check out Mormon Outreach Ministries (http://www.momsydney.org.au).

Andrew,

That question of learning from those who you fundamentally disagree with came up a lot while we were in Utah and Idaho - and I’m afraid I didn’t make too much progress on an answer. I think it is important to think about the motivation for the actions you are observing. Unfortunately in the LDS case, it often stems from legalism and control, rather than grace and love.

“They believe that orthodox Christianity, as we know it, is deficient.” Actually, they are taught that orthodox Christianity is apostate. Which is going quite a bit further than “deficient”.

One of the things I have noticed of late (I have been researching Mormonism so as to point out their ideas in the Twilight books by Mormon author Stephenie Meyer) is that LDS promotions focus heavily on the things that they know make their religion different to other religions, in what (they believe) is a good way. Go to Mormon.org and you will see that they focus heavily on the LDS doctrine of eternal marriage, for example. Obviously they see this as a selling point, and so they spend lots of time talking it up. Other, not so positive aspects or the religion, such as the requirements for temple worthy certificates, or the whole thing with the underwear, don’t get a mention, of if they do it is very brief and made to seem as nice as possible.

I think there are perhaps two things we can learn from this:

(1) yes, we should be tailoring the first part of our evangelistic message to the perceived needs of our listeners.

(2) But the rest of the message must be unvarnished gospel, with no attempt to make the truth more palatable than it really is (to unsaved ears). We need to be like Paul, who wrote “I am not ashamed of the gospel” (Rom 1:16), even though we know the truth that “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing” (1Co1:18) and “the smell of death” (2Co2:15-16). We cannot be ashamed of the message of hope that we have. We must tell it plainly.