Back in late November, I met some LDS missionaries on my way
home from church one evening. It was
already dark, so I didn’t recognize them immediately. They handed me a card advertising some event,
and I tried to hurry away before they could get me to sign up for something,
like sponsoring a child in Africa. But
they introduced themselves too quickly, and as I realized who they were, my
face lit up.
This is a reaction that not everyone might understand, but
the truth is, I had always wanted to meet some Mormon missionaries! Or Jehovah’s Witnesses, or really whoever was
going door to door. I wanted to learn
more about them and what they were doing and talk some theology, even if we
disagreed. This is actually not uncommon
among seminary-educated people, I’ve discovered. I do know a few Mormons, but we’d never
really gotten into the specifics of what we respectively believed, and this
seemed like a great opportunity. We
arranged to meet in a nearby park the next day around lunch. I was excited.
That night my mom told me about her own one experience with
LDS missionaries: they had come to church once with another member of the
congregation who had been meeting with them.
If he went to their church, they would go to his, and they did. The way Mom described it, they sent their
ringers, the most car-salesman-y guys in the ward, who shook everyone’s hands
after worship and tried to convert them over coffee cake.
But that’s not who I met.
Instead I met two young, friendly guys who confessed to being nervous at
talking to a pastor. (Actually, three
now, because one got replaced by another along the line.) They were nice. They offered to help fix the water fountain
at church the day it broke and flooded the hallway. They clearly believe in their mission, enough
to spend whole days outside in 12 degree weather. And yes, they tried to convert me.
We’ve met four times total since November. There are four sessions, if you will, and
they give you a pamphlet and describe an aspect of their theology in each
one. Last week was “The Plan of
Salvation,” for example. Today was “The
Gospel of Jesus Christ.” These meetings
have been an opportunity to learn about the LDS faith, but also to reflect on
evangelism—their version of which is almost completely foreign to me.
One thing I admire about Elders G and F is that they know
their tradition. They can tell you what
they believe. How many mainline
Christians can do that? Sometimes people
talk about your “elevator pitch.” If
someone asked you about your faith on an elevator, what would you say in that
fifteen seconds or so? I don’t have an
elevator pitch. Even with an M. Div.,
even as someone whose job it is to talk about this stuff, I’m not really sure
how I would lay it all out for someone who needed the info quick. But they know their content, and I like that.
I also don’t like it at the same time. Earlier this week I was doing my homework,
reading the Gospel of Jesus Christ pamphlet they had given me in advance. I was doing this a little out of guilt,
because at our first meeting they gave me a Book of Mormon, and then at each
meeting after that they brightly asked if I had been reading it and praying to
receive the truth, and I said no. But I
figured a pamphlet I could handle. It
had a picture of Very White Jesus on the front and referred to God as Heavenly
Father a lot, which I take it is standard LDS nomenclature. But even besides those things, the pamphlet
rubbed me the wrong way.
It wasn’t about content, really. In fact, with some small tweaks, it could
have been written by any evangelical Christian tradition. That was one of my main questions in our
discussion today—what, really, is the difference between the Gospel as you
understand it and the Gospel as I already understand it? What does following Jesus mean in your
tradition that it doesn’t mean in mine?
(Besides the obvious things, like not drinking coffee.) As far as I could tell, the answer was not
that much.
My objection was more about form. As I was reading I realized this: I am inherently
suspicious of any faith that can be summarized in a pamphlet.
That goes for other forms of Christianity, too. Show me a pamphlet with three steps to
salvation, the last one of course consisting of some drawing of a cross forming
a bridge over hell, and I’m pretty much out.
To me, faith is so much more than that.
It’s wrestling with God and struggling with tradition and trying to make
sense of experience in community. It’s
learning and praying and doubting and coming to new understandings. It’s trying out what it means to love Jesus
and finding there’s something you’re drawn to about that and then trying to
figure out from there how all the puzzle pieces fall into place, if they even
do.
That’s the kind of faith we even see in the Bible, with
people who follow and fight and question and lament and fall away and fall
back, and with authors who disagree with each other, each trying to figure out
who God is and what it means to be God’s people. The whole thing is a struggle and a conversation. The day I realized that is the day I fell in
love with the Bible.
And here was that faith I vaguely recognized reduced to some
bold points across six pages with a vocab section in the back.
I got a little preachy about this at our meeting today. I testified a little.
I mean, I get it, you know?
You can’t lead with the complicated and messy stuff. You can’t ring someone’s doorbell and say, “Hey,
there are a lot of different ways of understanding the Atonement, and I’m not
really sure which one I think is right; here’s where I’m at today.” You have to give people something to go
on. The conversation can develop from
there.
I figured there had to be more than this. These missionaries had to present their case,
they had to give the “right” answers to my questions, even if they sometimes
seemed parroted. That was their
job. But surely underneath it all was a
living, dynamic faith that I could recognize and appreciate, even if it was not
the same as my own.
So I asked: “Tell me something you struggle with in your
faith.”
They looked at me like they did not get that question a
lot. After a minute one of them said, “There
isn’t anything, for me.” To be fair, he
grew up in an orphanage in Eastern Europe until being adopted by a Mormon
family from Utah just a few years ago. I
got the impression that being adopted into that family was when life stopped
being hard, and he was ready to accept it all because it had given him
that. Still, he looked like he didn’t
even really appreciate the question.
The other one seemed more sympathetic to the question. “I’m sure there are people who do doubt
sometimes,” he said, “but I can’t think of anything.”
But if it were me, I could think of so many things. And I’m not ashamed of that.
I walked away kind of disappointed. I had really wanted there to be more than
that.
I’m not trying to make sweeping generalizations about
Mormonism here. They are two guys,
young, trained to know the answers. I’m
sure there are Mormons out there with a more nuanced faith (in fact, I’d love
to hear from them.) I’m sure a
conversation with many evangelical Christians would have gone similarly. I’m sure when I was 22 my faith was a little
less nuanced too—in fact, my elevator pitch has probably deteriorated steadily
since then. Not that I was brave enough
to go around and share it with random strangers, even then.
So I’m not trying to generalize. I’m just trying to say I’m reminded how
important it is to me that faith never be wrapped in too neat a package.
But how do you evangelize that?
