Mormon Land

A look at LDS Church growth and what the membership stats really reveal | Episode 319

At every spring General Conference, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints offers a glimpse of its growth by reporting worldwide membership statistics, including the number of converts and children added to the faith’s rolls the previous year.
A more reliable barometer for tracking church expansion, however, can be found in the congregations created (or subtracted). So when the governing First Presidency recently announced new requirements for establishing wards and stakes, or clusters of congregations, insiders and outsiders naturally wondered what impact the changes would have.
For instance, stakes in most of the world previously needed 1,900 members; now they need 2,000, or 5% more. While stakes in the U.S. and Canada also need 2,000, that’s 33% fewer than the previous 3,000. On its face, this appeared to make it easier to form new stakes in much of North America and, in essence, inflate the church’s congregational count.
But experts say that may not be the case. In fact, Matt Martinich, an independent researcher who tracks church movements for the websites cumorah.com and ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com, argues the overall rules could result in fewer stakes and wards coming on line.
On this week’s show, Martinich discusses the recent changes and other trends in church membership, including a newly released study showing self-identifying Latter-day Saints make up 42% of Utah’s adult population.

The LDS army that made its mark in history without firing a shot against a foe | Episode 318

This is a war story unlike any other.
It’s about a fighting force of nearly 500 men who were drafted, in a very real sense, not by the president of their nation but by the prophet of their faith.
Though they were prepared to die for a country they were fleeing, they labored to live for the families they were supporting. Though they were armed and marched through hundreds of miles of hostile territory, they never fired a single shot against their enemy. Though they never tasted death from combat, they endured casualties from foes just as dangerous and deadly: thirst, fatigue, hunger and sickness. Though they never recorded a military victory, they achieved a triumph perhaps far greater.
So why is the Mormon Battalion — a ragtag band of hundreds of reluctant riflemen, along with dozens of women and children, most of whom trekked nearly 2,000 miles from Iowa to Southern California — remembered not only in the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints but also in the annals of the American experiment?
Discussing those questions and more and is Brent Top, retired professor of church history and doctrine at church-owned Brigham Young University and now president of the Mormon Battalion Historic Site.

Remembering a Latter-day Saint humanitarian who truly lived his religion | Episode 317

Lowell Bennion was among Mormonism’s greatest humanitarians, while also being one of its most prominent thinkers and teachers. Indeed, he was among the few non-general authorities or officers ever to speak in General Conferences of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
As the first director of the church’s Institute of Religion at the University of Utah, Bennion spoke powerfully and courageously against the church’s former priesthood/temple ban on Black members — which may have cost and encouraged students to see science and religion as complementary rather than contradictory paths to truth.
But he did more than teach or preach. Bennion, who died in 1996, created the Community Services Council in Salt Lake City to aid poor and marginalized populations. Eventually, a center for service was created in his name at the U., integrating outreach to the disadvantaged into the curriculum. Of the service he rendered, he once said, “I used to teach religion; now I practice it.”
Yet Bennion’s life and work remain largely unknown to today’s Latter-day Saints.
On this week’s show, George Handley, professor of interdisciplinary humanities at Brigham Young University and author of “Lowell L. Bennion: A Mormon Educator,” discusses the life and legacy of the legendary scholar, considered by many to be one of the founders of Mormon studies.

What to expect from Patrick Kearon, not your typical LDS apostle | Episode 316

Newly named Latter-day Saint apostle Patrick Kearon brings an unusual biography to second highest leadership council of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
A British convert, he joined the faith at age 26. Kearon has lived and worked in the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia and the United States. He does not have a university degree, but, having been trained in communication, his speeches are earnest, eloquent and evocative.
He is the second European in the current Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and the third born outside the United States.
What will the 62-year-old Brit’s background, passions and personality bring to the apostleship and how might he influence the global faith?
On this week’s show, Patrick Mason, Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University, addresses those question and more.

Booting women’s leaders off the stand was ‘hurtful’ and ‘heartbreaking’ | Episode 315

For more than a decade, women’s Relief Society leaders were invited to sit on the stand facing the pews during Sunday services among some Latter-day Saint congregations in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was an uncontroversial tradition until October, when an area president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ordered an end to the practice.
The move felt arbitrary to many members and was made without consulting any of the women affected, all of whom were devout believers. After a Salt Lake Tribune story about the edict, many women in the region and across the country are writing letters to church headquarters in Salt Lake City, explaining why the tradition had been good for women in a church governed by men as a sign of inclusion and gender equity.
On this week’s show, we discuss this issue with two women who have felt the impact personally: Amy Jensen, who has served as a Young Women leader in Lafayette, Calif., and Laurel McNeil, a current Relief Society president in Sunnyvale, Calif. One solution, they suggest, to bring uniformity to Latter-day Saint services: Invite women’s leaders to sit on the stand in congregations across the globe.

The woman who runs the church’s most visible publisher and retailer: Deseret Book | Episode 314

Deseret Book has been the church-owned commercial publisher for more than a century, producing landmark theological volumes such as James E. Talmage’s “Jesus the Christ” and LeGrand Richards’ “A Marvelous Work and a Wonder.”
It is a sought-after brand for Latter-day Saint leaders, scholars and writers, and remains the go-to retail outlet for rank-and-file members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Through the decades, the focus of D.B., as it has come to be known, has expanded to include not only books by and about Latter-day Saint prophets and apostles but also a range of novels and art.
The woman overseeing all that is Laurel Day, who rose through the ranks to become D.B.’s president.
On this week’s show, she talks about her vision for the global company; the new openness in detailing the church’s unvarnished history; the increasing visibility of women; the part she plays in deciding what is published and what is put on — and sometimes pulled off — the shelves; and Deseret Book’s role in building the worldwide faith.

Apostle vacancy spurs questions about men who run the church — for life | Episode 313

With senior apostle M. Russell Ballard’s death, church President Russell Nelson’s back injury and apostle Jeffrey Holland’s recent illnesses, the focus has fallen once again on the top men who lead the 17 million-member Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Years, even decades, of policy, practice and precedent have established how the hierarchy is ordered — a governing First Presidency, usually made up of the faith’s president and two counselors, at the pinnacle, followed by the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the Presidency of the Seventy and general authority Seventies.
But with all the members of the First Presidency in their 90s and increasingly aged apostles, questions are reemerging about a gerontocracy among these men, who must serve for life and are charged with guiding a global religion. Is emeritus status for these leaders an option? Should it be?
And what about the general women’s leaders? Does their service, capped at five years, prevent them from having more influence in the church?
Historian Matthew Bowman, Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University, addresses these questions and more on this week’s podcast.

Steve Young lays out a new game plan for life: the law of love | Episode 312

Hall of Fame quarterback Steve Young, the former BYU star who earned multiple MVP awards and Super Bowl rings with the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers, ranks among the most famous members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Recently, though, Young has turned from tactics for victory on the football field to strategies for winning at life — namely by living his religion, following Christ, helping to heal others, and, ultimately, loving all people, no matter whether they are in their personal journeys, as God loves them.
Yes, he does draw on his gridiron experiences in his book “The Law of Love,” but he also reveals much about his own shyness, anxiety and insecurity.
On this week’s show, Young discuss a more expansive, more exultant and more exalting kind of love.

We aren’t perfect. Life isn’t perfect. The church isn’t perfect. Why that’s OK. | Episode 311

No one likes pain or poverty, bigotry or war, frustration or failure, disease or doubt, joblessness or homelessness or loneliness.
That includes this week’s “Mormon Land” guest, Melissa Inouye.
The Latter-day Saint scholar has endured more than her share of heartache. She inexplicably lost her hair at a young age and then, at 37, the marathon-running mother of four, was diagnosed with colon cancer, an affliction she has been suffering from and through ever since.
But as Inouye reminds herself and Latter-day Saints in her new book, “Sacred Struggle: Seeking Christ on the Path of Most Resistance,” a carefree, trouble-free world is not what humanity signed up for.
An easy earthly existence, under Mormon theology, was Satan’s plan, not God’s. Divine design, Inouye writes, calls instead for agency, personal growth, compassion and caring for others, and “living a life full of life” — the good and the bad, the ups and the downs, the hopes and the hopelessness — as God’s children learn to be more like their Heavenly Parents by following and finding Jesus.
On this week’s show, Inouye discusses this “sacred struggle” — including how she approaches the sometimes-problematic past found in the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, her hopes for women in the faith’s still-present patriarchy, and how she and other members find joy in imperfect lives, imperfect bodies, imperfect families, imperfect communities, an imperfect church and an imperfect world.

Can Latter-day Saints become as good at peacemaking as they are at proselytizing? | Episode 310

Amid today’s polarized political scene, many Americans throw up their hands and say, like Patrick Henry, “‘peace, peace,’ but there is no peace. The war is actually begun.”
To some, the partisan divide seems deeper than ever — with no way to bridge it. Even religions sometimes seem to battle with other faiths, as well as those within a faith.
Eboo Patel, founder and president of Interfaith America and author of “We Need to Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy,” has done a lot of thinking about how to overcome divisions. He is also an “impact scholar” at the University of Utah and will visit the Salt Lake City campus a few times each year during his two-year appointment.
Retired federal Judge Thomas Griffith, a Latter-day Saint convert, also bemoans the toxic divides that poison public debate and rip apart the fabric of U.S. society. Recently, the American Bar Association appointed Griffith a member of a newly created Task Force for American Democracy, whose aim is to push back against authoritarian tendencies in the country.
On this week’s show, Patel and Griffith — both hopeful if not optimistic — discuss how to bring peace to our trouble times and how members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have a vital role to play in that quest, especially if they can become as accomplished at bridge building as they are at evangelizing.