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by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC

Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about obedience. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand.

I do love to tell you about things that are going on just in case you don’t know. This coming weekend, Sept 15-16, is a conference in Salt Lake, at the Conference Center and it’s regarding the completion of the Joseph Smith Papers. The conference is free and you can come in person, or watch online. Each session will be focused on a different aspect of the world during the time of Joseph Smith. Which is really cool because you can think about what the social and economic forces are at play behind the scenes of the beginning of the church. So there’s a session on what it was like for women and families during that era, or what race, ethnicity, and politics were like then. There’s a session on how they handled conflict and one on finances. And lots more. If you’re into historical stuff like I am, you will be sure to enjoy it.

Okay, we’re going to talk about the concept of obedience. And our jumping-off verse is 2 Corinthians 2:9 which says:

Another reason I wrote you was to see if you would stand the test and be obedient in everything.

So, Paul is writing to the church in Corinth. What we call 2 Cor is thought to actually be his 4th letter to them, and as you can see in the letter, things are not exactly going well. They’ve gotten themselves into some very precarious situations, and Paul is trying to help them out. But he’s also apparently a bit worried that they’re not going to listen – as evidenced by the fact that this is his 4th letter and things have gotten worse over time. So he starts out the letter with a reminder about obedience. Which leads us to an interesting question….What does the phrase, “you should be obedient in everything” bring up for Evangelicals that’s different than what it brings up for Latter-day Saints? In church we sing, “We love to obey thy command.” And that’s good. I actually really like that song. But Evangelicals get a bit weird around this sentiment and it’s not because they don’t want to obey the commands of God. They do. They interpret them a bit differently than we do, but on the whole, they are interested in obeying God. The problem, which actually is illustrated rather well in this song, is that those “commands” often come through human leaders. That song, “We Thank Thee oh God For a Prophet,” is praise directed toward God for a variety of different blessings, including the blessing of having a Prophet.

We’ve touched on this briefly in the past, but there are some variations on this topic. They’re not as much based on the different denominations or groups, but on where you fall in the authority structure of that group. Here’s an example: The average pew-sitting Evangelical will likely never be in the position to promise obedience to a human leader. They do have membership agreements that they agree to when joining a certain church, and we’ll get to that in a moment. But in general, they are assuaged into obedience based on what the individual or family will get out of that obedience. For example, the church starts some new program they want everyone to participate in. The church leadership will use various marketing techniques to help the people see the need for this thing they’re offering and then willingly participate. That’s mostly what it’s like for the pew-sitting person, no matter what version of Evangelicalism they’re following. But you will see far more variety regarding how leaders in those churches are dealt with.

Latter-day Saints, I think you’ve vaguely familiar with this, but I’ll go over it just to be sure. Church leadership in the Evangelical world is almost all done by paid employees. Those employees fall into 3 categories. First category, ordained pastoral staff. These are people who went to Divinity School and have been through an ordination process. This is a long-term career kind of position. They intend to spend their life serving a group of people by teaching them. When you think of someone who says, “I’m a pastor,” this is what you’re thinking of. Second category, non-ordained pastoral staff. These are folks who maybe are in the process of finishing their pastoral education or those for whom that level of education was simply out of reach. They might have a title like, “youth pastor” or “children’s pastor” I was a children’s pastor for a lot of years at a great church in California. And this is the category I was in. Sometimes people in this category are called “youth director” instead of “youth pastor” depending on the rules of the church, but they function identically. The third category are folks who have been hired because they possess a skill that the church needs in order to run – someone to work on printed materials; someone to keep the grounds; someone to keep the books, etc. Mostly these are people who could be doing the same work somewhere else, but work for a church instead. Our church hires lots and lots of people in these categories – people who make the website and LDS Tools work; people who know how to manage a warehouse, etc. But in theory, these people could take their skills and work for any other employer as well. So, in talking about obedience, Category 2 (non-ordained pastoral staff) and 3 (skilled professionals) are mostly compelled to obedience in their work environment by human resources, or an employee manual, or a board that oversees their work. But the Category 1 people, those who have a formal education and are ordained, might also have a different level of requirement for obedience. In the denomination where I was ordained the ordination service included what is called the Oath of Conformity and the Oath of Canonical Obedience which is a lot of words just to say: You promise to do what the Bishop tells you to do. But my experience is on one end of the spectrum – not every ordained leader is asked to take an oath for conformity and obedience. And in some places, the pastor almost ordains himself and decides to start a church all on his own, and he only answers to himself. So you can see, sometimes obedience is required at higher levels, but that is a tiny, tiny percentage of people. Most Evangelicals won’t even come across any kind of wording like that unless they’re paying attention to the process of how people get ordained. But what Evangelicals have been frequently asked to do is sign a membership agreement. But some interesting exceptions have popped up and there’s history here.

A membership agreement is traditionally exactly what it sounds like: an individual signs something to say they agree with the doctrine of a particular church, that document probably says something about the expectation that they participate in the life of the church and that they obey the scriptures. There would probably be something about what might happen if a person becomes apostate. Eventually – think 1960s – 1980s – those begun to be seen as too legalistic, too controlling. Churches mostly moved away from specifics into something that just sort of signs the person up for membership without there being any requirements – or even more likely, they did away with membership all together.

Around the year 2000, many Evangelical churches started to think about church membership differently. There was a huge resurgence of Calvinist or Reformed churches during that era. The vibe of these churches was very slick, urban, young. In the past on this show I’ve told you the history of Mars Hill Church in Seattle – which at one point was the largest church in America – before it blew up in spectacular fashion. But MH is the epitome of this time in Evangelical history. These are the folks who wanted to say – with good motives, I think – but it’s going to sound really weird to your Latter-day Saint ears….they wanted to say that God hates humans and thinks we’re disgusting worms, but the faithful response to this is to kind of take it like a man. Any softening of that was seen as weak faith. These Reformed churches revitalized the practice of church membership – and then they took it to ridiculous lengths.

Instead of being a simple statement between a church and a member about their beliefs, it started to morph into a legal document or contract. What had happened was churches that were trying to practice some form of church discipline – that is keeping members accountable for their behavior – were getting sued by the people they were trying to discipline for defamation of character. Let me read you a quote from an attorney familiar with the story,

When a church begins the process of exercising formal, biblical discipline, it will often receive a letter from the member’s attorney threatening to sue the church for defamation, invasion of privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Many church leaders who would not back down have found themselves forced into court, subjected to days of humiliating cross-examina­tion, and shocked to see juries penalize their churches with six-figure damages awards. This trend was triggered by the Guinn case in 1984, which resulted in a $400,000 judgment against a church and its leaders, and has continued to grow for twenty-five years.

So Evangelical churches have, more and more, reframed the idea of church membership. On one side they’ve completely given up the idea and said, “we just want you to come and learn and be with us – but we make no demands of obedience on you.” OR, they’ve gone the other direction and morphed their membership agreement into a legal contract, sometimes even requiring members to sign a non-disclosure agreement regarding all church issues. I’d don’t have a study to point to that says this, but my own estimate is that probably 60% of churches have very low-key membership, or none at all. There are no expectations placed on people who attend. They’re treated like customers that the staff needs to keep happy. In your town if you have some slick megachurch that goes by the name,”The Rock Church” or “The Well” or “Elevation Church” this is very likely the model they’re using – church members are customers and customer service is the highest priority. And probably 40% that are trying some kind of membership agreement, which may or may not include phrasing about obedience. The ones that do contain words about obedience are probably leaning toward the legal contract side of things.

There are rare churches that have done extra sneaky things. Mars Hill in Seattle, for example, drafted their membership agreement so that in all reality, the church only had 3 members. Despite having 40,000 (or something) attending on Sundays, those people were not members. The membership contract they signed said they are members in name only, and have no right to anything – the 3 members of the church (the senior pastor and his top 2 board members) are the ultimate authority and the ones who must be obeyed above all else, and the only ones who will decide what happens, and attendees have no ability to influence that at all ever. There are other similar things. So, frankly, Evangelicals are not stupid people – they hear about stories like this and get suspicious that membership is a trick, and revert back to their hyper-independence of wanting a relationship to just be between them and God where no one else has the right to say anything about obedience.

So, all that to say, the word “obedience” is really loaded for Evangelicals. It’s either become a dirty word and been eliminated except in the most basic sense of obeying scripture – or it’s been hyped up into the realm of contracts and law. It’s probably going to take another 20 years, probably more, before they can find a sensible stance on it again.

Let’s briefly contrast this with what we believe in our church. We came to this Earth, in part, to prove our willingness to obey a Father that we can no longer see. It’s Abraham 3:25 “And we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them.” We covenant to obey the Law of Obedience, but it’s not blind obedience. At one point in my investigation of the church I had a true fear that having a Prophet actually meant that some guy I never knew could tell me what to do, and I’d have no choice but to do it. But the Law of Obedience is not God legally forcing us to comply with his dominance, it is him inviting us to come unto him. And then we get to make any choice we want – all those choices have consequences. There are no consequence-free choices in any aspect of life. But our obedience is not compelled – it is seen as a voluntary act of faith. We see – at least on our best days – that obedience is something that leads to happiness. Evangelicals have had a rough go on this topic and that word is going to bring up a lot of division (some of which we haven’t even covered here) and it’s not a word most of them would associate with “happiness.” I highly recommend to you the Youtube channel called Temple Light where my friend Jasmine talks through all things Temple in a direct way. Her episode called, “The Law of Obedience” would be a great video to watch after this one (and she’s more efficient than I am and can make her point in 10 min where it takes me 25) But that video will help you to think about why obedience has been played out in our church the way it has.

Next week we’re talking about the 3 levels of Heaven and why Evangelicals think we’re crazy to think such a thing, and how they think about it instead. See you then.

More Come, Follow Me resources here.

Jennifer Roach earned a Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and a Master of Counseling from Argosy University. Before her conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints she was an ordained minister in the Anglican church. Her own experience of sexual abuse from a pastor during her teen years led her to care deeply about issues of abuse in faith communities.

The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – 2 Corinthians 1–7 appeared first on FAIR.

by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC

Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about scripture, what is it, how we read it, and more. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand.

All right, I think this is the last week I will be telling you this – you have 1 week left to purchase tickets for the FAIR Conference, August 2-4 in Provo, Utah. Or you can register online to get free streaming access. I haven’t even told you about half the people who will be presenting. But I will tell you about one more that is near and dear to my heart. Avraham Shannon will be speaking about the Book of Moses. If you listened to my conversation story a bunch of episodes ago you might remember that the very first Latter-day Saint scripture I read was the Book of Moses. I can easily tell you today that I had no real idea what I was reading at the time and mostly read it out of curiosity, not submission to the commandment to read scripture. But I was hooked right about from the beginning. Dr. Shannon is a professor at BYU in the religious studies department and he will be presenting some of his research to us. It should be really great. My talk will be on Friday afternoon. I will be doing 2 things….1) Presenting my own original research on rates of abuse. One of the vexing questions in the area of church abuse is: What practices actually have better outcomes for kids? So one way of answering that question is to take an organization where many different churches are involved and take a retrospective look at which churches the abusers are coming from. You might think you know the answer, but I promise you that you will be surprised on several items. The other part of my talk is 2) addressing some of the most frequently asked questions about abuse in a church context like, “Why don’t we require universal background checks?” It will be a fascinating time together.

Okay, so today we’re going to talk about scripture as a concept. We get our jumping off verse from is Acts 17:11:

Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.

So what we have here are Jewish people living in Berea which is in modern-day Greece. Paul and his group have come up from Jerusalem into modern-day Turkey and then up into this part of modern-day Greece. It sits just south of modern-day Serbia and right next to Albania. (Geography is important – you can’t understand history without understanding geography. And you can’t understand theology without understanding history.) And when Paul arrives they go to the synagogue to teach the people there. He finds that the Bereans were eager to listen and willing to actually investigate what he was teaching. It’s an interesting point because these were Jews still – so when the verse says they “examined the scriptures to see if what Paul said was true,” what they were examining was not the New Testament, it didn’t exist yet, and even if it had those were not their scriptures. What they were examining was the Old Testament – probably the first 5 books called the Pentateuch. And probably studying the major Prophets as well (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel) as well as the minor Prophets (the 12 small books at the back of the Old Testament.) So, Paul is teaching them something new – about Jesus Christ – and they were able to look in the Old Testament and verify that what he was saying was true.

Now, you know that the Old Testament does not talk much about Jesus Christ directly. And Latter-day Saints will sort of frequently roll their eyes and wonder why we can’t just get back to the good stuff where Jesus is mentioned on just about every page. But these Jews in Berea were able to understand what Paul was saying enough to interpret the Old Testament in a new way. This is the task of all the early Jewish converts of course – they must take the scriptures they love, the Old Testament, and use it to verify that the teachings of the New Testament are true. Most people today – even people who have impressive academic credentials – are unable to see the correspondence between the Old and New testaments. But here, these Jews are doing it. And in doing so, they open themselves up to accepting new scriptures – the ones that were being written during that era and would become the New Testament.

Latter-day Saints would see this as a model or precedent for how people in a standard Christian church today have to look at what’s in the Book of Mormon and compare it to what’s in the New Testament. But right here in the Book of Acts we have this beautiful example of the Berean Jews doing this – and being called noble for doing so.

But things get tricky if you talk about this model this way with Evangelicals. I want to explain why and what their thinking is behind that. Let me use an illustration to talk about it.

My grandparents and great-grandparents were cattle ranchers in California. They had a couple thousand acres and managed herds there. And if you’ve got a big property like that there are a couple ways to do it. You can either make sure you’ve got really, really good fences around every single square inch of the place so that the cows can’t escape. Or, you can let the cows help you out a bit – meaning that if you make sure the cows have access to the resources they want (like a water or food source) they are going to naturally make sure they are able to find their way back to you – you don’t have to force them within the fence, you can kind of let them go where they want, knowing they’re going to come back because they need the water, or whatever. So it’s 2 different philosophies to get a cow to stay where you want it to stay – cage it in, or let it police itself in its own best interest – it can roam all it wants, but it’s going to come back to get what it needs. And our 2 different approaches to scripture are kind of like that.

Evangelicals, all Protestants and Catholics too, have taken the cage-it-in approach. They put some very high fences what is and is not scripture. Now, these fences have moved over time – some books of scripture are in and then later they’re out – but there is always a high fence up. The question they’re trying to answer is something like: How can we make sure we’re protecting the small amount that we’ve been given?

Latter-day Saints take an entirely different approach. Instead of asking how to protect the amount we’ve been given, we ask something like: How can we make sure we’re able to receive anything God has for us? And this is applied to the question of what is – and what is not – scripture.

One of the very best ways to talk about this is to compare what both groups do when an individual wants a direct message from God. And, as always, there is a wide variety of ways Evangelicals deal with this. Most of them, the vast majority of them, would say that God speaks through the Holy Spirit to individuals today and that those words can be trusted in as far as they are understood correctly. But the problem comes if you want to write those words down and treat them like actual messages from God. This can be done sometimes in perhaps the most private of private settings, but very few of them would go around and act like something God told them is on the same level of trustworthiness as scripture. Those would be treated with 2 radically different levels of trustworthiness.

Compare that to how Latter-day Saints think about Patriarchal Blessings. Every Latter-day Saint is entitled to receive a Patriarchal Blessing that is personalized for them, and which they can consider their own personal scripture. These blessings are transcribed and recorded with the church. Latter-day Saints don’t treat these blessings as fortune-telling or step-by-step dictates on exactly what to do, but we do treat them sacredly and as scripture. We consult them throughout our lives and do our best to see them as God being aware of us and our circumstances. They are considered as trustworthy as other scriptures. They have to be understood correctly, and sometimes that takes a bit – but that’s true of any other scripture too.

You can see the 2 different approaches to scripture. Evangelicals have the very best of intentions here. Their sort of locking down what can be considered scripture is their way of making the boundaries very clear about what is out and what is in. They’re not doing this to be controlling or to limit what the people have access to in terms of hearing from God, they’re doing it with the intent of treating scripture with the sacred respect it deserves. Sometimes we Latter-day Saints look at that and wonder: Why wouldn’t they want EVERYTHING God has for them? But that’s not how they think of it. I think they deserve the benefit of the doubt here that their motives for limiting things is good. Latter-day Saints just see it differently – we’re not trying to fence in exactly what God has said with fences that limit what he is able to say. Or at least limit the trustworthiness of things God tells individuals.

And sometimes Latter-day Saints feel frustrated, or perhaps confused, by Evangelicals’ lack of willingness to consider a message God might have for them. And Evangelicals feel frustrated or confused by Latter-day Saint’s willingness to ascribe the word “scripture” to the Book of Mormon (most of them won’t even know what a Patriarchal Blessing is and their heads might explode if they did.) But they look at the Book of Mormon and see that it’s on the outside of the fence they’ve already set up, so it’s hard for them to let it in. I get that. But the reality is that the Bible and the Book of Mormon very much go together. As a complete outsider to the church when I first read the Book of Mormon I saw that very quickly. It can be an interesting conversation to have with someone who is used to scripture being very tightly defined.

Well, that is what I have for you today. Next week we’re on our last week of the Book of Acts and then on to Romans which will be super fun. Go and register for FAIR. I will see you next week.

More Come, Follow Me resources here.

Jennifer Roach earned a Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and a Master of Counseling from Argosy University. Before her conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints she was an ordained minister in the Anglican church. Her own experience of sexual abuse from a pastor during her teen years led her to care deeply about issues of abuse in faith communities.

The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – Acts 16–21 appeared first on FAIR.