Presentations Examine Global Reach of Church
Contributed By By R. Scott Lloyd, Church News staff writer
Terryl Givens gives the keynote address at the Church History Symposium on the BYU campus March 6. The two-day symposium was cosponsored by the Church History Department.
Article Highlights
- Different cultures, languages, etiquette, interactions, emotions, and expressions all shape what it means to each of us to be Saints, but the thing that is always constant is God’s truth and power.
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How The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is adjusting to meet the needs of an international membership was the theme this year of the annual Church History Symposium jointly organized by Brigham Young University and the Church History Department.
The two-day symposium, titled “The Worldwide Church: The Global Reach of Mormonism,” began Thursday, March 6, on the BYU campus in Provo with a full day of scholarly presentations and an evening keynote speech by Terryl Givens, professor of literature and religion at the University of Richmond in Virginia and a prolific and popular author on intellectual topics about Mormonism.
It continued Friday morning, March 7, at the Conference Center Theater in Salt Lake City with a keynote address by President Dieter F. Uchtdorf, Second Counselor in the First Presidency, and several other sessions during the day.
In his speech March 6, Brother Givens said the Church faces the same challenge that confronted Christian leaders after the death of Christ: “How do you export and disseminate the gospel in all of its purity and goodness to myriad peoples, nationalities, ethnic groups, and societies without the cultural trappings and accretions it has acquired?”
Brother Givens commented: “Our ideas of what it means to be Saints, to worship God, to live the life of discipleship are shaped by myriad factors conscious and unconscious. Forms of address, rhetorical habits, music, instrumentation, the language of prayer, modes of engaging the sacred, etiquette, and interaction and how we express love—these and a million other constituents of the religious life are not eternal verities or immutable truths but shifting modes of pursuing and living truth.”
Obstacles to spreading the LDS faith “freed from cultural baggage” are rooted in Mormonism’s history, Brother Givens said, explaining that its sacred roots, including the Book of Mormon, were part of the physical landscape for early Church members.
Moreover, he said, prominent themes in the Book of Mormon—wars fought in the name of liberty, a land of refuge for the religiously oppressed, the democratization of revelation, hostility to priestcraft—all resonate with what Americans have claimed as part of their national identity.
However, Brother Givens noted, “the Book of Mormon is in large measure the story of the unending transmission of the gospel into new contexts, new settings, and new conditions. It is a chronicle of the volatility and fragility of lands of refuge. It is a testament to the portability and ceaseless transmutations of Zion, with the only constant being the eternally present promise of spiritual blessedness and direct access to God’s power and truth.”
That, Brother Givens said, seems to be a warning against the tendency to associate Zion “with a particular place or nationality or historical moment. There is no holy land, only a holy people.”
Brother Givens said revelations given to Joseph Smith, including section 10 of the Doctrine and Covenants, hint that the institutional Church is not the “exhaustive repository of the chosen or the blessed or the eventually saved.”
“The idea of a spiritual church that exists alongside to encompass and eventually transcend the institutional Church is persistently reaffirmed.”
He said the Church “holds the keys of salvation for the living and the dead. At the same time, God loves and considers to be His people all those who honor Him and will have Him to be their God.
“The implications for how Latter-day Saints engage the rest of the world are there for the faithful to plumb. My task today has been to try and reconstruct from Joseph Smith’s own revelatory pronouncements what I take to be his way of balancing his certainty of the divine foundations and mission of the restored Church with both the humility of language and self-conception and generosity of vision appropriate to its destiny.”
