You're out!

Excommunication is a funny thing. The Church is supposedly for everyone - as in EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING EVER BORN OR TO BE BORN ON EARTH NEEDS BOTH THE GOSPEL AND THE ORDINANCES FOUND ONLY IN THE LDS CHURCH - and yet there are those times when you just have to take your neighbor aside and say:

"Hey, Jesus loves you and died for you, but you can't be in his church anymore because we say so!"

Everyone's supposed to fit in, but apparently we need to kick some people out anyway. This is kind of the way Jesus wants it.

Let's be practical here. You can't let that new convert dude keep standing up and flipping off the first councilor whenever he takes the stand, can you? And I know there's room for the lady who likes to teach that dinosaur fossils were placed on the earth by the Devil to deceive the hearts of man, but can we honestly sit by and let a Sunday School teacher admit that she thinks green tea is harmless and that the Church should change its policy about tea drinking?

What are the limits of heterodoxy and heteropraxy? What are the Church's limits? Who's out? We can't all be in.

The universal gospel

 
It was not an easy thing to admit, but I eventually came to realize that there are people the Church and the Gospel cannot “help.” Why? Because some people are entirely incapable of understanding, let alone conforming to, the logic and lifestyle of Mormonism. Or maybe they do understand it but it strikes them as absolutely ridiculous.

This doesn't sit well with Mormons because we've been taught that "the Gospel is simple" and logical and that "the Church is for everyone." I can't tell you how many people I met on my mission who just couldn't put everything in place. Mormonism just wouldn't click for them. Then there were those people who I knew could never fully function with a dominantly Mormon world view. Their lives, their thoughts, their concerns, their raisons d'etre won't fit.

Could it be that Mormonism wasn't as universal as I believed? How much did I owe my understanding to decades of training and conditioning? Even then, how much sense did Mormonism make to me?

I was sure I had it all figured out and all the pieces put together. Except for those ever so small, ever so occasional doubts - the one's I knew I had to doubt.