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“Somebody Wrote It:” The Book of Mormon’s Missionary Message to a 21st-Century World
Abstract: Nathan Oman’s “Welding Another Link in Wonder’s Chain: The Task of Latter-day Saint Intellectuals in the Church’s Third Century” wisely called for “new language in which to celebrate the Restoration.” That new language can be found in understanding the power of the Book of Mormon, which is the tangible miracle at the heart of the Restoration that defies the critics. My father, Senator Robert F. Bennett, devoted his final years to arguing that the Book of Mormon’s existence is a stumbling block to those who try to dismiss it as an obvious fraud. Those who scoff at the Book of Mormon have yet to come up with a plausible secular account of its existence, and this allows the Book of Mormon to endure as the centerpiece of our missionary efforts. But rather than simply use the Book of Mormon to attempt to answer questions people are no longer asking, we need to create a missionary message that uses this sacred scripture to connect people, directly and personally, to Jesus Christ.
This is a response to Nathan B. Oman’s “Welding Another Link in Wonder’s Chain: The Task of Latter-day Saint Intellectuals in the Church’s Third Century,” published by The Interpreter Foundation on August 9, 2019.1 In that piece, Professor Oman deftly describes the challenges confronting the 21st-century Church in the face of the rising generation’s mass disaffection with organized religion. In order [Page 266]to kickstart a stalled missionary effort, Oman suggests that our efforts ought to be focused on “[f]inding new language in which to celebrate the Restoration.”
Oman stated that the Church’s initial missionary message was centered on the idea of a single true, restored church with all the New Testament authority and spiritual gifts. That message held a resonance for a 19th-century populace that waned considerably after the Church’s exhaustive fight with the federal government over plural marriage, and in the early 20th century for a time, convert baptisms, in Oman’s words, “had slowed to a trickle.”2 It wasn’t until the post-World War II Church began emphasizing the power of sealing keys and their saliency in creating eternal families that growth began to markedly increase, leading to exuberant predictions about the Church’s future. Sociologist Rodney Stark, a non-believer, announced that “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints … will soon achieve a worldwide following comparable to that of Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and the other dominant world faiths,” predicting that by 2080, the Church could see more than 265 million members among its ranks.
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Abstract: Nathan Oman’s “Welding Another Link in Wonder’s Chain: The Task of Latter-day Saint Intellectuals in the Church’s Third Century” wisely called for “new language in which to celebrate the Restoration.” That new language can be found in understanding the power of the Book of Mormon, which is the tangible miracle at the heart of the Restoration that defies the critics. My father, Senator Robert F. Bennett, devoted his final years to arguing that the Book of Mormon’s existence is a stumbling block to those who try to dismiss it as an obvious fraud. Those who scoff at the Book of Mormon have yet to come up with a plausible secular account of its existence, and this allows the Book of Mormon to endure as the centerpiece of our missionary efforts. But rather than simply use the Book of Mormon to attempt to answer questions people are no longer asking, we need to create a missionary message that uses this sacred scripture to connect people, directly and personally, to Jesus Christ.
This is a response to Nathan B. Oman’s “Welding Another Link in Wonder’s Chain: The Task of Latter-day Saint Intellectuals in the Church’s Third Century,” published by The Interpreter Foundation on August 9, 2019.1 In that piece, Professor Oman deftly describes the challenges confronting the 21st-century Church in the face of the rising generation’s mass disaffection with organized religion. In order [Page 266]to kickstart a stalled missionary effort, Oman suggests that our efforts ought to be focused on “[f]inding new language in which to celebrate the Restoration.”
Oman stated that the Church’s initial missionary message was centered on the idea of a single true, restored church with all the New Testament authority and spiritual gifts. That message held a resonance for a 19th-century populace that waned considerably after the Church’s exhaustive fight with the federal government over plural marriage, and in the early 20th century for a time, convert baptisms, in Oman’s words, “had slowed to a trickle.”2 It wasn’t until the post-World War II Church began emphasizing the power of sealing keys and their saliency in creating eternal families that growth began to markedly increase, leading to exuberant predictions about the Church’s future. Sociologist Rodney Stark, a non-believer, announced that “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints … will soon achieve a worldwide following comparable to that of Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and the other dominant world faiths,” predicting that by 2080, the Church could see more than 265 million members among its ranks.