My Big Mouth Strikes Again!

Well, I must be a glutton for punishment.

Either that, or I just refuse to let the hateful/mindless majority take over the church my family has been a part of for at least 6 generations. (Or maybe once in awhile I’m still willing to let the spirit work through me.)

We had an EQ lesson the Sunday after April General Conference from the Howard Hunter book, Chapter 7: Continuous Revelation through Living Prophets.

Our teacher is a divorced guy about my age, that has a daughter that is currently on a mission.  He brings up some story about how she has a friend/former mission companion, that has issues with the churches new policy about the children of LGBT parents.  He then try’s to say some crap about this new policy is really not that different from what we’ve always been taught, and most of the class then goes off on an echo-chamber tangent about how good and inspired this new policy is.

I was just about to get up and leave in disgust, but instead, I felt inspired to raise my hand.  I said something to the effect of: I can’t believe that you are all giving some corporate handbook, written by some anonymous lawyer at Kirton▪McConkie the same weight as scripture or actual revelation.  There’s a huge difference between some handbook policy, and the word of the Lord.
The guy sitting across from me just nodded and smiled, and the rest of the quorum (including the instructor) just sat there stupefied.

TBM EQ Pres, thought he’d save the day and made some silly comment about how all of the brethren are inspired and prophets seers and revelators, and we need to just follow them if we don’t want to have bad things happen to us.

And then I did it again, I just interrupted, and said something like: look, the Q12 or 1st Pres can say what they want, and it MAY be inspired, but it doesn’t have to be.  What we do know is that ONLY THE Prophet can receive revelation for the whole church.  And unless THE Prophet is actually speaking for the Lord, it’s not binding on the whole church.  (I could have added and the church accepts it by what is today the worthless formality of  “common consent.”)  So if we have a question about a policy (or anything else being taught), we ought to analyze it by looking to see if it is consistent with the scriptures.  In this case, I think that answers the question, and shows the policy is wrong.  But if that doesn’t do it, then you look to see if it’s consistent with what other Prophets (when they were the president of the Church™), expressly speaking FOR the Lord, have said.  If that still doesn’t answer it (and while I didn’t say it, let’s face it there’s VERY little of that), then is it consistent with the principle of charity.  And if not, then it’s not likely to be the will or the word of the Lord, and the spirit will tell you that.  Then I said something about how the whole purpose of our mortal existence is to make choices, and that we all get to decide what we believe and how we act.  Finally I told them that if they abdicated their agency to church leaders, or anyone else, there will come a day when they will be called to account for it.

My nodding smiling friend across the room, just kept nodding and smiling, and everyone else just kind of shut up, and let the instructor finally move on.  Literally two minutes later he’s having people take turns reading the lesson book and comes to this:

“Only the President of the Church has the right to receive revelations for the entire Church or to give official interpretations of the scriptures or the doctrines of the Church”

Vindicated by the dicta of the correlation committee.

I’m actually not sure how to feel about that. Especially when they support the conclusion by mis-citing D&C 28:2 and substituting “[the President of the Church]” for “my servant Joseph Smith, Jun.”  But the spirit did shut them all up, and maybe a couple of them though about it, at least a little bit.  So I guess there’s that.

The next week I was out of town for work.

I’m sure TBM EQ Pres is planning to “report” me to the stake pres again, if he hasn’t already.
While I still have NO respect for the guy, I suppose I do sort of feel bad for him.

But then again, I’m Dence.

So . . .How Did It Go?

Is what my wife asked me when I got back from my meeting with my stake president on Tuesday 4/5.

I thought it would at least be interesting.

Turned out, not so much.

I basically sat there for about a half hour as my stake president kind of talked around the events I chronicled in my letter to him, and as sincerely as he could said “I/we sure do love you/your family” about 3 dozen times.

He said that (as I expected) my TBM EQ Pres. had “reported” me to him back in December after my EQ lesson.

He said he thought that perhaps I was having marital, financial or job issues, and wanted someone to check to make sure that wasn’t the case. (I call BS on this, as he met with my wife before calling her to the stake RS at the beginning of the year, and never mentioned any such concerns to her) He claimed that “we often find that members are suffering from excessive stress when they disagree with the brethren.” (Well, that or they actually think about what’s being said critically, rather than “trying to find the good” in what’s said, no matter how bad it is.)

Consequently, he says he assigned his counselor to “just check on” me and make sure I was doing OK.  But with the holidays, and February Stake Conference, the counselor just never got around to it.  So it was after Stake Conference when he followed up with his counselor, when the counselor “remembered” and then made the appointment.  Of course, it had been so long since the original assignment was given that the counselor had sort of forgotten the purpose of the meeting.

On reflection, this strikes me as one of the poorest excuses I’ve ever heard.  You believe that you are responsible for me, and suspect that I’m having SERIOUS marital, financial or job issues, but wait over 4 months before you actually do anything substantive about it? I know this man is NOT that poor of a “leader.”  I don’t want to think he’s lying.  But he’s clearly not making a full disclosure.

He then said some stuff about nuance, and how he sees the world, and the gospel, in very nuanced terms.  However, he knew TBM EQ pres definitely does not.  To him everything is black or white.  He then told me that in our old ward, when he was my bishop, and TBM EQ pres was his clerk, that he got madder at him than he’s ever been at anyone.  He didn’t say what the issue was, but he did say that he felt he HAD to bring his counselor in to his office with him when he talked to TBM EQ pres (and apparently set him straight).

He also made a point of saying that EQ secretary is a calling by the EQ pres and bishop, rather than the Stake, so if something changes with my calling, it’s not his doing.  And that I’ve been on “the short list” of  Dry  High Councilmen to call. (I warned him not to do it.)

Then out of the blue he says: “well, lets get down to it, do you sustain the prophet and quorum of the 12 as prophets seers and revelators?”

Since we’d JUST been discussing nuance, I told him yes, and that seemed to do it for him.  No questions to dig deeper into what that actually means, or how I could make such a claim at the same time publicly state that Neil Andersen was dead wrong.  Instead he talked about how he’d never been a fan of Tommy Monson, and wasn’t sure he’d be able to sustain him as a profit prophet, but when the time came, he was, and now does.  He said that he likes “the guys that just tell it like it is” (which I took to mean the “hard liners,” which is pretty much everybody in the Q15 except maybe Robert Hales and Dieter Uchtdorf.) I told him I had the same concern with Tommy Monson (though I’m sure for very different reasons) but that once it happened I’d had a change of heart too.

Then it was another 5 min of well, we sure do love you and your family, and I was on my way home, thinking why didn’t he just reply to my email to say there was nothing to worry about. Instead he dragged it out for almost another full month.  For what?

Maybe I’m Dence.

Some news is . . . .well . . some news & Scripture apps recommendations

So the stake secretary or clerk that I don’t know called this week, and ask if I could meet with my stake president on Tuesday 4/5.  This should be interesting.  I will, of course, post the outcome.

On another note, I'd sent a Facebook message to Mr. Alan Rock Waterman, asking him to take a look at my blog, and let me know what he thought.  (As I continue to be impressed with most of what he does.)  I'm not sure if he actually read anything, or not, but he did message me back that I'd been added to his blog roll.  I've noticed that I've actually had some traffic (though still no comments) since then.

I know I've been poor at making regular posts here. (in part for lack of response, and in larger part for lack of my own effort) I can't promise that will change too much.

However, I do make occasional notes as I study the scriptures.  I may begin posting these notes as entries in the future.  

On that note, for the last year or two I've been using the Android "Gospel Library" app almost exclusively for scripture study.  I can mark (both highlight, and underline) in a number of colors (for different ideas), link different verses (personal cross references) and most importantly, make notes/journal entries of things I'm impressed to write as I study.

I've recently had a concern that in the event something should happen to my "membership" (ala Rock Waterman, John Dehlin, etc.) I'd likely lose access to the app, and with it all my notes, and scripture markings.  I've been looking for a way to export my "personal work product" off of servers belonging to “The Church™” so I can put them elsewhere, but to date the best I've found is this: https://tech.lds.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=20810 ; which purportedly gives me the ability to download my "notebook" in .DOCX, .RTF or XML formats.  However, with 16K highlights, when I attempt to do it, it just hangs.

So would anyone care to reply with a suggestion for a new/different scripture app (android) that allows me to make (and ideally import from my existing Android "Gospel Library" app) the same kind of notebook/journal entries, and hopefully my scripture markings too?

Perhaps I'm asking too much.

But then again, I'm Dence.