Steven E. Snow On Church Essays
Summary: "Woven into the story, the history will be some of the issues that sometimes rise associated with church history and our doctrine. We try to cover those with some essays which are linked to lds.org under Gospel Topics. The Brethren two years ago gave us twelve questions to answer. They included 'Race and the Priesthood', 'Polygamy', 'The translation of the Book of Mormon', on and on. Nine of those have now been answered and three questions remain to be answered and we are still working on those. We should conclude our work by the end of this year. If you haven't had a chance to look at those essays, we'd encourage you to do so and share them with your friends. We are in the process of letting leaders, stake presidents and bishops know about them so they can be a resource in the event that some of their members are having questions or challenges about those issues. 'Book of Abraham' essay was just released in July, that's the most recent of the nine essays that have been published on-line. I think it'd be helpful to know how we chose to roll those out. It was a soft roll out. There wasn't an announcement saying 'You can go to this website to learn everything weird about the Mormon church you ever wanted to learn.' (Loud Laughter from the audience) But yet we had a lot of people struggling with some of these issues. We were loosing young people particularly. And we felt we owed a safe place for people to go to get these answered. So they were deliberately kind of placed in an existing database, so they wouldn't..You know, 90% of the church probably couldn't care less, they don't worry about such things. But we do have some folks who are on-line and we felt like they needed a safe place to go to get answers if they had questions. So I don't think you are gonna see a well publicized campaign to tell you to go to these sites. But we just, you know, the people that are interested seem to kind of pass the word amongst themselves. And the only other thing is that leaders now will have access to them. And I think the long- probably the greatest long-term benefit will be: These are answers that have been vetted by the, reviewed by the Quorum of the Twelve and the First Presidency and they have signed off on these answers. And now curriculum and seminaries and institute can safely weave these essays into a future curriculum to in a sense 'inoculate' is a word I use quite a bit for the rising generation. So, they can learn a little bit about these things without being totally shocked when they hear them for the first time. Does that make sense? ('yeah' from someone in the audience) Yeah, OK. So, don't expect a big campaign. I think there's been a lot of interest within maybe a small percentage of church members but my view is most of the church really is not troubled, members are not troubled by these."
