Mormon – Page 2

What to Expect at a Mormon Church Service

February 25, 2009 by rickety Leave a Comment

A new website began in January 2009, Mormons Made Simple, has a mission to help set the record straight on what Mormons believe. It is not an official LDS Church website. The creators, Laurel and Doug, explain that with all the misinformation about Mormons on the web, they saw the need for plain and simple truth on the matter — YouTube style.

Laurel and Doug’s first foray into video production came during the campaign to pass Proposition 8 in California in 2008. They produced the video Proposition 8 — Made Simple over a weekend using a laptop, a Sharpie marker, and some photo slide-show software. They were pleasantly surprised when the video received over 350K views. That’s when they first began to realize the potential for simple, explanatory videos.

With the website being so new there are only two videos but more are promised. Embedded here is one of them called Attending a Mormon Church Service. It is accurate and helpful. I should point out that sometimes the meetings are in reverse order, in other words, Sacrament Meeting may be held last, as it is in my ward. If you want to see the other video, then go on right on over to Mormons Made Simple.

Mormon Time Magazine Covers

November 24, 2008 by rickety 3 Comments

Occasionally I enjoy browsing through TIME Magazine’s archive. It contains almost every issue of TIME since it began publication on March 3, 1923 and has available a full-text search through more than a quarter million articles. Recently I became curious to see how often The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was the subject of the front cover. I found three such instances.

Heber Jedediah Grant, L.D.S.

Mormon Centenary — April 7, 1930

Excerpts

Last week the thoughts of all the 700,000 Mormons in the world dwelt in Salt Lake City, capital of Mormondom and of Utah, where the centenary of the founding of the Church was to be celebrated, exactly to the day, on April 6, 1930.

Mormon good fortune since the trek to Utah is due in no small measure to a faith which greatly admires and encourages prosperity. Mormons irrigated, planted and built with as much persistence as they prayed. A striking fact is that the Mormons did not dig in the ground for metallic wealth but concentrated on husbandry. They made a desert bloom.

Mormon wealth, though impossible to calculate, is apparent to anyone who studies Salt Lake City commercially. The Church owns The Deseret News, two hotels, two office buildings, the Beneficial Life Insurance Co., and Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution (first U. S. department store, 1868). Through the Utah-Idaho Sugar Co., the Church owns 24,539 acres of farm lands and operates numerous beet sugar factories in Utah, Idaho, Washington, Montana, South Dakota.

Meanwhile, in 1877, [Grant] married Lucy Stringham. Seven years later, on May 26, he espoused Augusta Winters and, on May 27, Emily Wells. The last is the only one of his three wives now alive. In 1882 a startling businessman, aged 25, he was chosen one of the Twelve Apostles. During 1901-03 he lived in Japan as a Mormon missionary, then served two years as head of missionary activity in Europe. Read the full story at TIME archive.

Mormon Leader Smith

A Peculiar People — July 21, 1947

Excerpts

Mormons today do not expect divine intervention in this sinful world before they have exhausted their own final resources. And 100 years after the Mormons’ perilous trek to Utah’s Great Salt Lake, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is far from being exhausted. In its self-made oasis on the Western desert, it is flourishing like a green bay tree.

But what will most awe them will be the spectacular manifestations of Mormon diligence and industry. As commander of temporal as well as spiritual affairs, kindly old President George Smith presides over an enormous going concern. The church, as owner of the big and prosperous Z.C.M.I., Salt Lake City’s first department store, deals in everything from plowshares to perfume. It owns Salt Lake City’s top-rung Hotel Utah and its next-best Temple Square Hotel. It owns one of the city’s daily newspapers, the Deseret News, and its biggest transmitter, radio station KSL.

Mormonism is changing with the rest of the world. But few institutions and few peoples have succeeded as well in stamping out their own destiny and in shaping the times in which they lived. After a hundred years there is milk and honey in the land of the honeybee. There are many great monuments: green, irrigated valleys, temples, cities, and that never-to-be-forgotten reminder of Mormon faith and courage, the faint marks of the old Mormon trail. Read the full story at TIME archive.

Mormons, Inc.

Kingdom Come — August 4, 1997

Excerpts

In Salt Lake City, Utah, on a block known informally as Welfare Square, stands a 15-barreled silo filled with wheat: 19 million lbs., enough to feed a small city for six months. At the foot of the silo stands a man — a bishop with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — trying to explain why the wheat must not be moved, sold or given away.

The church’s material triumphs rival even its evangelical advances. With unusual cooperation from the Latter-day Saints hierarchy, TIME has been able to quantify the church’s extraordinary financial vibrancy. Its current assets total a minimum of $30 billion.

The top beef ranch in the world is not the King Ranch in Texas. It is the Deseret Cattle & Citrus Ranch outside Orlando, Fla. It covers 312,000 acres; its value as real estate alone is estimated at $858 million. It is owned entirely by the Mormons. The largest producer of nuts in America, AgReserves, Inc., in Salt Lake City, is Mormon-owned. So are the Bonneville International Corp., the country’s 14th largest radio chain, and the Beneficial Life Insurance Co., with assets of $1.6 billion.

The Mormons are stewards of a different stripe. Their charitable spending and temple building are prodigious. But where other churches spend most of what they receive in a given year, the Latter-day Saints employ vast amounts of money in investments that TIME estimates to be at least $6 billion strong.

“Our whole objective,” says Hinckley, “is to make bad men good and good men better, to improve people, to give them an understanding of their godly inheritance and of what they may become.” And he intends to do it globally. In what will undoubtedly become the hallmark of his presidency, he is in the process of a grand expansion, the organizational follow-up to the massive missionary work the church has long engaged in overseas. Read the full story at TIME archive.

Other Mormon Time Magazine Covers

Senator Reed Smoot 1929

Ezra Taft Benson 1953, 1956

Senator Arthur Watkins 1954

George Romney 1959, 1962

Mitt Romney 2007, 2011, 2012

Glenn Beck 2009

Update

Unfortunately, since I wrote this post in 2008, Time has erected a pay wall. To read the entire article, you must be a U.S. TIME subscriber.

My Faith continued

July 11, 2008 by rickety 4 Comments

Yesterday I posted the first part of My Faith. Here is the conclusion:

“Which Church Is Right?“ quoted Bible verses and was methodical and logical in its presentation. It was the first time that I’d thought of a church that way, though I didn’t have any real feeling about it. The prophet’s testimony was different. A paragraph that stood out was:

It caused me serious reflection then, and often has since, how very strange it was that an obscure boy, of a little over fourteen years of age, and one, too, who was doomed to the necessity of obtaining a scanty maintenance by his daily labor, should be thought a character of sufficient importance to attract the attention of the great ones of the most popular sects of the day, and in a manner to create in them a spirit of the most bitter persecution and reviling. But strange or not, so it was, and it was often the cause of great sorrow to myself. (Joseph Smith—History 23)

I thought it strange too, and identified with Joseph.

Another paragraph:

During the space of time which intervened between the time I had the vision and the year eighteen hundred and twenty-three—having been forbidden to join any of the religious sects of the day, and being of very tender years, and persecuted by those who ought to have been my friends and to have treated me kindly, and if they supposed me to be deluded to have endeavored in a proper and affectionate manner to have reclaimed me—I was left to all kinds of temptations; and, mingling with all kinds of society, I frequently fell into many foolish errors, and displayed the weakness of youth, and the foibles of human nature; which, I am sorry to say, led me into divers temptations, offensive in the sight of God. In making this confession, no one need suppose me guilty of any great or malignant sins. A disposition to commit such was never in my nature. But I was guilty of levity, and sometimes associated with jovial company, etc., not consistent with that character which ought to be maintained by one who was called of God as I had been. But this will not seem very strange to any one who recollects my youth, and is acquainted with my native cheery temperament. (Joseph Smith—History 28)

I was impressed that Joseph would admit to “foolish errors”. To me, someone telling a lie would not say this so openly.

I now know that being impressed by these two paragraphs was the Spirit acting upon me. After over thirty years the deep convincing that I felt is still with me.

I wrote to the Bishop of the Macclesfield Ward and asked him about the Church and that I wanted to know more. He replied to my letter, inviting me to travel to Macclesfield and meet with the missionaries. I did so, and recall one memory from our first meeting. I was being taught the first discussion and my mind wandered. When I was a child my mother used to say in a kindly way that “I was off wool gathering” when I didn’t pay attention. The missionaries asked me a question about what was being taught and from then on I was attentive. After the first discussion the missionaries told me that there were missionaries in Crewe and that I would be taught by them.

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