Meeting with Mormons

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?