Heavenly fatherliness #22 - Challenges

According to popular wisdom, a good father challenges his children, meaning he gives them some liberty to face setbacks, conflicts, and tasks to resolve on their own.

Chalk one up for God being a good father! Mormons totally believe God gives us our free agency so we can prove that we choose his plan and often gives us trials so we can learn about ourselves and gain wisdom through our experiences. God did it! He scored one for being a Good Father!

Actually, God's not so good at this, in my opinion. In fact, it seems he's cut us loose entirely and left everything up to his children to resolve. We have no evidence at all that God has done, is doing, or will do anything for the benefit of his children. All he ever "gives" are setbacks, conflicts, and tasks to resolve.

Worst of all, if you somehow mismanage these setbacks, conflicts, and tasks he'll blame you for it. I can hear him now, "You really should have just trusted in Me more. You didn't have enough faith. You were obviously too proud, too weak, too stupid, too mired in sin to pull yourself out of it. I'm really unimpressed. Lucky for you I'm so forgiving!"

*These attributes represent the popular thoughts of Ask Men’s Jullian Marcus, examiner.com’s Tanya Tringali, and Open Talk Magazine’s Glenn Silvestre as per their respective articles on what makes a good father. 

Missionaries and "the elect"

Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints love to pray for the missionaries and "those who are ready to receive the Gospel", the idea being that you can essentially pray people into the Church. Missionaries are the hope and dream of all members' Church growth fantasies so they tend to be the object of many o' prayer. It's not just families and friends who pray for the missionaries [to find people ready to convert], or the missionaries' ward members (the fact is most wards won't even mention their missionaries by name in prayers once they're out of sight), but all members are essentially "praying the missionaries" all the damn time. That's a lot of praying. If that weren't enough, the temple prayer circles always mention the missionaries because heaven knows how powerful those prayers are!

Mormons do better than praying only for people they know serving missions or "the missionaries" in general, they pray for the potential members as well. The missionaries and maybe the missionaries' parents pray for their current contacts as well as the un-contacted "elect", meaning those individuals who have been "prepared" for the message and "ready to receive" it. "Please bless them that their hearts might be softened!" Yes, please do. Behind this type of praying is the idea that God and his angels are out and about setting up people's lives so that when they run into the missionaries the Gospel message will make sense to them and they'll want to sign a life contract with the Church pretty much right away. You know, like that family who lost a child in a car accident will totally jump on the whole eternal family thing right away, whereas a couple that hasn't even had kids is going to take more time to come around.

So why does all this praying for successful missionaries and read-made Mormon converts make my list of doubts? Well because you would think with all those faithful prayers coming from so many directions for one united purpose (the glory of God's Kingdom on Earth) you might actually see missionaries who miraculously run into elect child of God after elect child of God all the time, but it just doesn't work like that. Missionaries convert the vulnerable and desperate, who more often than not disappear into inactivity. There was no line up of souls hungry and eager to feast upon the Word.

It makes one doubts the efficacy of prayer, the competency of God, the truthfulness of the work, and the future of the Church. However I knew that doubts had no place in the heart and mind of a true servant of God, so I just kept on praying for investigators and praying for the elect. My actions had to speak louder than my words. What else was there to do?

Church growth

While on my mission I had access to at least a couple of decades worth of Ensigns in each of my apartments which was great because I couldn't have been more interested in catching up on the words of the prophets. General Conference editions (May and November issues) were by far the best for kids like me who wanted to feast on the words of the Lord's anointed. The GC issues were also of deep interest to my missionary self for the fact that they contained statistics on total Church membership and convert baptisms.

There was nothing I wanted more than to revel in the growth of the Church and the power of God to bring people to it through His missionaries (like me!), so one day I started going through and comparing the stats. Unfortunately they were less than impressive. Sure the general Church membership numbers had consistently gone up, but the conversion baptism numbers were fairly sporadic and generally in decline since the early 1990s.

(from the blog linked above)

What was going on? The rock carved from the mountain had some serious rolling forth to do! There were more missionaries than ever, but conversions were always hanging around 300 thousand per year. At this rate the Church wasn't going anywhere anytime soon. Could it be possible that there's no real divine impetus behind the Church?

Now wait a second there, young missionary! Don't you doubt the Work! It's rolling forth at the Lord's pace. Your mission needs a more Utah-like presence of Mormons and you are there to make it happen!

Miracles - "modern-day miracles"

 
I couldn't help but cringe every time a "modern-day miracle" was announced. Over one-hundred operating temples throughout the world! A million members in Mexico! The inactivity rate hitting 75%! Hooray! The Work is true, the Work is true!

Modern-day miracles not only sucked in comparison to scriptural and early saint miracles because they were the were boring (no dead raised? no seas parted? fire from the sky to burn an offering? no blind healed? no angels from beyond the Veil? damn.), they were disturbing because they were all so corporate-feeling and un-Christ-like. Modern-day miracles are all about the Church's growth though hidden under the guise of "making blessing available".

Think of all the modern-day miracles Apple has had over the past years. I'm starting to think Apple is probably an even truer church than Jesus Christ's.