ClobberBlog | Mormonism, Evangelical Christianity

Shortly after I agreed to start the LDS missionary discussions, some Jehovah’s Witnesses came to my door wanting to teach me their lessons. Sure, why not, I said, I figured if I could handle the Mormons I could handle the JWs. So on Thursdays I would come home from high school and meet with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, then I would go to the Pratt residence and meet with the LDS missionaries. I’m not going to talk about the Jehovah’s Witnesses here, or ever probably. I just bring it up to point out that all these competing new religious ideas soon had me feeling spiritually exhausted. And also, I was very, very stupid for thinking I was old enough and mature enough to go head-to-head with all that.

I started the missionary discussions in November of 1998, when I was still 16 and the church was still having its missionaries memorize rather rigid lesson plans.¹ For whatever reason, Brother Pratt felt like I needed to hear the fourth discussion first, so we started with a lesson about the plan of salvation and eternal progression.² Our discussions were never typical; they took a lot longer than six weeks, even though I was never formally taught the sixth discussion, and entire discussions were often centered around trying to answer objections I had raised. I recall that they spent one discussion trying to cover why women do not have the priesthood, turning over every cliché in the book from “men have priesthood, women have motherhood” to that abhorrent joke about women holding the priesthood every night when they hug their husbands. That was the pattern of our discussions.

Let’s just cut to the reasons why the missionary discussions weren’t such a great experience for me, and there’s a lot of blame to go around. Here’s a summary of the reasons:

1) Wrong approach and motives (from both parties)
2) The famed Mormon-evangelical terminology confusion
3) Failure on the part of the missionaries to understand and appropriately respond to evangelical Protestant doctrine
4) LDS culture v. Evangelical culture, and failure on the part of Brother Pratt and the missionaries to appreciate and assimilate those habits from my evangelical background that had nothing to do with doctrine
5) Constant badgering to read the Book of Mormon and pray about it in addition to mindless testimony-bearing repeated ad nauseam
6) My increasing interest in evangelical counter-cult arguments and materials

I’ll go over all of those points and experiences in-depth for my next post.

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¹This changed in 2004, when the LDS church switched from the rigid Uniform System for Teaching the Gospel to the more freestyle Preach My Gospel.

² I own a copy of the Uniform System for Teaching the Gospel, but could not locate it prior to writing this article. I may clean up the article a bit once I find it.