Frances Lee Menlove - On Institutional and Individual Honesty

It is impossible for the Church to face the great problems and threats of our age without individual members being free to express to themselves and to others what they think and believe. With the almost unlimited possibility for new scientific discoveries, new sociological and anthropological insights, new ways of explaining human behavior, modern man cannot escape perplexity. "What the Church needs today, as always, are not adulators to extol the status quo, but men whose humility and obedience are no less than their passion for truth; men who brave every misunderstanding and attack as they bear witness; men who, in a word, love the Church more than ease and the unruffled course of their personal destiny." The members of the Church are responsible for the Church.

 -Frances Lee Menlove, "The Challenge of Honesty" Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought (1966), pg.53

J. Bonner Ritchie - Security Religion vs. Growth Religion

Security religion provides refuge.  It builds an ecclesiastical wall which protects from the onslaught of questions and doubts and decisions.  Growth religion, on the other hand, forces its adherents to grow, to accept responsibility, to assume the burden of proof, to move beyond extrinsic constraints.  Growth religion provides not a wall but stepping stones to climb for the purposes of understanding, analyzing, serving, and making choices. We all seek the safe harbor at times.  We need to be protected, to rest so we can go back for the battle.  Security needn't be an inhibiting force; it can and should be positive.  Whether it is or not depends more on how the member responds to the system than how the system makes demands of the member.

J. Bonner Ritchie, "The Institutional Church and the Individual",

The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs.  If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time.  God became Man for no other purpose.  It is even doubtful...whether the whole universe was created for any other purpose.

-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

What we call the virtues are precisely those attributes of character that best suit us to live harmoniously, even joyfully, in society.  Kindness only exists when there is someone to whom we show kindness.  Patience is only manifest when another calls it forth. So it is with mercy, generosity, and self-control.  What we may have thought was our private pathway to salvation, was intended all along as a collaborative enterprise, though we often miss the point.  The confusion is understandable, since our current generation's preference for "spirituality" over "religion" is often a sleight of hand that confuses true discipleship with self-absorption.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 112-113

My religious tenets operate at two distinct levels: that of literal truth and that of metaphorical truth.  I believe that God, Christ, and the Church are literally "true," yet I do not have direct access to these things in the ordinary sense of the term.  Rather, I experience them intuitively, spiritually, "through a glass darkly."  I know, however, that they are true metaphorically, for they function sucessfully in my everyday life.  This combination of believing ad knowing (both of which are relative terms) amounts to a trust that I call my faith.  I readily acknowledge that my faith is a faith; it is not a perfect knowledge.  Indeed, I am content that it is so.  The informed trust that comes with faith can, if it is genuine and well placed, produce a strength and a goodness that could not grow from literal, absolute knowledge.  An earthly example is the power and peace that is a byproduct of a friendship or marriage based on love and trust (faith) rather than on a constant, empiricle, and absolute knowledge that theoretically would verify that the friend or spouse is being "true."  Although there are in fact such things as unworthy friends or disloyal spouces, it is nevertheless impossible to build a healthy friendship or marriage without a deep and lively faith.
-Philip L. Barlow, "The Uniquely True Church" (pg 257) A Thoughtful Faith

I do not believe the crucial issue is finally, "Will I be sitting in the correct pew when the archangel sounds his trump?"  Rather, I believe God sent me to earth to respond freely, with faith, to the conditions of a sometimes dark and difficult world.  My choices here can either promote ("save") or inhibit ("damn") my progress and well-being.  I believe my highest response to these conditions is to learn something about myself, to learn to love blindly, to serve my fellow beings, to acquire a kind of wisdom that is apparently best communicated through human experience.  I feel as though I am invited by a spirit above me to follow what light I am given, to live productively and authentically, with honor and vigor.

-Philip L. Barlow, "The Uniquely True Church" (pg 256) A Thoughtful Faith

I have known people who have rejected the Church because they have overestimated its nature and purpose, and have grown disappointed when the Church did not satisfy the functions that they have privately imposed on it.  Is it possible to overestimate the Church if it truly derives from God?  In my judgement, yes.  Some have misunderstood the Church as an end to be served for its own sake, which is in essence a kind of idolatry.  The Church exists, instead as an instrument through which together we may serve God and His children.  I have heard others express their disappointment by making the unremarkable ovservation that, "I don't get anything out of it anymore."  Though it is certain that most Latter-day Saints could strive more earnestly to reach for the profundities that are accessible through the gospel, it seems to me that such comments as "I don't get anything out of it anymore" in part reflect a loss of vision on the part of the speaker.  When Church members assemble, the idea is at least as much to give as to "get," to contribute as to be spoon fed.

-Philip L. Barlow, "The Uniquely True Church" (pg 252) A Thoughtful Faith

None of this, of course, is a threat to the unique role and stature of The Church of Jesus Christ.  It simply reinforces the obvious notion that God loves all people and influences them through many channels.  I have come to see that as a Latter-day Saint I can allow the term "chosen people" to have no room for an elitest tinge.  The deepest meaning of this difficult term is revealed for me in the image of the Christ who washed the feet of His deciples.  Perhpas we are a people chosen to serve people.

-Philip L. Barlow, "The Uniquely True Church" (pg 250) A Thoughtful Faith

Given my faith in Christ, I nevertheless could live more or less authentically with or without an organized church.  This, I think, is self-evident.  Joseph Smith's own family for long periods chose to remain nondenominational Christians.  Yet I have come to believe that for most of the people most of th time (perhaps all of the people most of the time) it is better to belong than not to belong to an organized (Christian) church.

I recognize that this is a large assertion, for the institutionalization of anything brings with it certain potential liabilities, because of the very nature of institutions.  In any organized chruch, for example, (just as in any secular organization) there may develop unseemly pressures to conform to a misconceived "orthodoxy."  There may develop an unspoken etiquette, implying that one may rarely talk in public about what he actually feels or thinks, but only about what he ought to feel or think--therby straining "authenticity."  as in any organization, unecessary and unhelpfull restrictions of autonomy may accrue.  Ther may be complacency or exasperating bureaucratic entanglements.  Morover, formal, institutionalized religion may sometimes function as an ironic, distracting buffer between God and His worshippers; the focus may unconciously shift from "servicng god and man" to "doing things correctly."  One will inevitably witness occasional instances of pettiness, unfairness, distateful personalities--"people problems."  Since such difficulties will exist in any large organization that involves human beings, one may therefore be tempted at times to live one's religion apart from other persons, int he peace of solitude.

The profound error in this course of action is demonstrated by the Savior's example.  Jesus did not choose to remain above and apart from human beings.  Instead, He condescended to our condition in order to heal, teach, and serve us.  Indeed, it was precisely in the midst of our imperfections that He found opportunity to accomplish His redeeming work.

With modest effort, after all, one can largely avoid letting a church become a buffer between oneself and God.  And with a little stregnth of character one need only believe what he or she believes.  Moreover, some of the "problems" of religious organizations are themselves ultimately a part of the answer to my central question--"How do I live with meaning and authenticity?"  Indeed, "people problems," not sanitized isolation, are precisely what genuine disciples of Jesus are invited to engage.  Anyone (including a robot) and unthinkingly conform, and anone (including a dog) can rebel and withdraw. The more difficult and worthy accomplishment lies in the Way of Jesus--in meek, but courageous service, in constructive interaction with God's children.

In extended isolation from the worshipping community one is especially susceptible to conceit, to forgetting how much one may learn from other human beings, whatever their station.  Apart from the congregation, one has radically fewer opportunities to serve.  One's ability to love becomes abstract, remote from the life-giving power constricted, academic, emasculated.  In this isolation one is in danger of losing a sharp awareness of collective sin, of group power, and of the resources of community ritual.  It is clear that love, service, and the acquisition of knowledge are better worked out in regular contact with a community to which one feels responsible than in comfortable, unadulterated solitude.

-Philip L. Barlow, "The Uniquely True Church" (pg 247-249) A Thoughtful Faith

My confession is to acknowledge my awareness of the many linguistic, historical, and theological difficulties that arise as one attempts to analyze such documents as the Book of Abraham and the Book of Mormon, and also as one tries to take account of the Mormon (or any faith's) past.  Both my professional study and my continuing attempts to conform my private life to the requirements of the scriptures have led me to this awareness.  I have reconciled many of these difficulties, not reconciled others, and have suspended judgment on certain of them.  Most are explicable if one approaches them not from the perpective that the church is essentially divine, marred only by the weakness of human administrators, but rather that the Church on earth consists entirely of human beings (with all their limitations) who are trying to respond to the divine with which they have been touched.  The distinction is crucial, for the second conception is an inversion of the first.

-Philip L. Barlow, "The Uniquely True Church" (pg 239) A Thoughtful Faith

The history of the church is very complex, very mingled. I want you to know how aware I am of that fact. These days there are so many people who think loyalty to religion is benighted, if it is not worse than benighted. I am aware of that, and I know the charges that can be brought against the churches are powerful. And I know, too, that my own experience of the church has been, in many senses, sheltered and parochial. In every sense, unless it really is a universal and transcendent life, unless the bread is the bread and the cup is the cup everywhere, in all circumstances, and it is a time with the Lord in Gethsemane that comes for everyone, as I deeply believe...It all means more than I can tell you, so you must not judge what I know by what I find words for....I hope you will put yourself in the way of the gift.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 114)