The LDS Faith is one of simplified faith, for the purposes of promoting faith, not

[Indy Coug]

Originally Posted by Mormon Red Death

My question with this is... people in times past continued to receive revelation and they weren't any better at following the prophets than we are. Is a god dicriminatory? Are we held to a higher standard?

We don't receive revelation now?

[Solon]

Originally Posted by Indy Coug

We don't receive revelation now?

IMO, No.

[Indy Coug]

Originally Posted by Solon

IMO, No.

What would you consider to be revelation? What are we missing now that we had before?

[Tex]

Originally Posted by Solon

And, as I said, LDS leaders used to be the intellectuals. That, to me, is a change . . . a mixed message, if you will.

Not to mention the way some LDS use intellectual arguments when they're convenient, and then discard them for the non-quantifiable "emotion" argument when they're not.

I don't know what to tell you about the former ... the church changes and evolves. I don't know how that amounts to a mixed message.

Originally Posted by Solon

IMO, No.

All revelation is not created equal. Doctrinal revelations are not common any longer ("this generation shall have my word through [Joseph Smith]") but revelations clarifying the doctrine, and indicating the direction to take the work, are common, and dare I say, daily.

[Taq Man]

Originally Posted by Archaea

So one newspaper article makes it true? That's not very thorough. In any given year subject to any given analysis it may or may not be true. It was true for a long time, and then Africa hit, and then it wasn't. To rank it is silly but you're not much of an academic if you're going to rely upon a singl soletary newsarticle.

It is an opinion. It's not like I'm going in to give my disertation on the subject. Really I couldn't care less one way or the other. It was a news article I found interesting. I didn't see anybody else offer evidence to the contrary.

[Taq Man]

Originally Posted by Indy Coug

Maybe once you get enough members regularly attending the temple, then maybe you're finally in a position to be able to properly "dig a little".

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. With that attitude you will never get around to digging.

[pelagius]

Originally Posted by Archaea

So one newspaper article makes it true? That's not very thorough. In any given year subject to any given analysis it may or may not be true. It was true for a long time, and then Africa hit, and then it wasn't. To rank it is silly but you're not much of an academic if you're going to rely upon a singl soletary newsarticle.

Arch, I think Taq Man probably overstated the original case, but I do think there is evidence that "real" church growth is not that high. By real growth I mean growth in active or even self-identifying numbers (The self-identification in South American countries is really low). We had a similar discussion a year ago about this here on the guard (Hyrum took a similar position to Taq Man). The Peggy Fletcher Stack article (from the tribune about a year ago) is useful. She does cite an interesting academic study:

When the Graduate Center of the City University of New York conducted an American Religious Identification Survey in 2001, it discovered that about the same number of people said they had joined the LDS Church as said they had left it. The CUNY survey reported the church's net growth was zero percent. By contrast, the study showed both Jehovah's Witnesses and Seventh-Day Adventists with an increase of 11 percent.

That would imply that net growth is in the US is basically driven by the difference between the US Mormon birth rate and the US Mormon death rate.

On the other hand, I think looking growth in Stakes gives us a good measure of how well the church us growing. Stake growth really has to be fueled by active members. It is not a perfect measure since the definition of stake is not perfectly constant but it will gives us idea of the growth rate of active member:

1991: 1837
2005: 2701

That's an arithmetic average of about 3.1% and a geometric average of about 2.5%. So there has definitely been real growth over the last 15 years. However, I believe if you look at stake growth over the last few years it is closer to the 1-1.5% growth rate. Growth rates are positive, but it doesn't seem to be that high in absolute terms (although I it is probably pretty decent in relative terms).

[Indy Coug]

There's all sorts of reasons why conversion rates may have dropped:

1. Market saturation. Maybe that's not quite the right term. What I mean is that areas that have had missionaries working in them for a long time have already been worked over and so the expected returns will diminish over time.

2. Quotas put in place for higher producing areas. In the late 1980s, Ghana was capped at 300 baptisms per month, with around 60 missionaries. They could have easily surpassed that number by a substantial margin if there were no quotas and if their mission had the normal amount of 150 to 200 missionaries in it. The quotas were designed to help the existing membership to get leadership training without being too overwhelmed with integrating floods of new members.

3. Changes in requirements for baptism. This varies from mission to mission, but in general it's harder to get baptized now than a few decades ago. This is personal observation and I don't necessarily have anything to back that up.

4. Increased proselyting competition. (?) Are there more churches actively recruiting converts now than in the past?

5. Increased secularization of society. (?) Europe is becoming a spiritual wilderness where religious identity is more of a family heritage than actually representing a set of beliefs.


Anyway, just some thoughts off the top of my head.

[Mormon Red Death]

Originally Posted by Indy Coug

We don't receive revelation now?

I guess it depends if you think the inspiration to manage bureacracy means revelation. I have no doubt we have that (examples being mini temples, PEF, Priesthood to all races). BTW I am not saying its not a form of revelation. I just wonder where the "thus saith the lord" has gone? We know the church is in possession of at least one of the seer stones. We sustain our leaders as prophets seers and revelators. Why arent we privy to what is being seen?

[Solon]

As MRD says here, I suppose one could consider the ability to lead a multi-million member organization as proof of 'revelation.' Nevertheless, from a more critical point of view, there is a marked difference - for better or for worse - between LDS "prophecy" and "revelation" of 150 years ago.

For instance,

A Gospel Doctrine Sunday School lesson from the D&C manual emphasizes “Continuing Revelation to Latter-day Prophets.” It outlines a series of developments since the 1950s that demonstrate the Lord’s consistent guidance. All of these developments (correlation, Official Declaration #2, publication of LDS scriptures, and expanded quorums of the 70) seem to me to be geared toward management and administration of a large, world-wide organization and the formulation and enforcement of doctrinal orthodoxy rather than the development and dissemination of additional doctrine.

I recognize that the LDS church’s needs are much different today than they were 100 or 150 years ago. Nevertheless I cannot overlook the lack of continued doctrinal revelation at the church-wide level. Perhaps, as others have asserted, God is speaking and we’re not hearing, or perhaps the faithful LDS are not worthy of or ready for additional instruction. I'm hardly in a position to speculate on this.

Regardless of the reasons, I identify a prolonged drought in the development of Mormon doctrine and theology. Although the church regularly publishes the words and discourses of its leaders, why haven’t any additional “scriptures” been added to the canon since 1918, and only three D&C sections (135, 136, 138 – not including the Official Declarations as scriptures per se) since the death of Joseph Smith in 1844?

http://www.lds.org/portal/site/LDSOr...ontentLocale=0

While there are certainly multiple explanations that avow continued revelation, the most convincing and logical (to me) is a discontinuation of revelation (assuming, of course, that it existed with JS et al. in the first place).