Featuring guest scholars Barbara Jones Brown and Ben Spackman, this part one of a special two-part review of the October 2018 General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints explores two newsworthy topics:
- Reducing the Sunday meeting schedule to 2 hours, with emphasis on “home-centered, Church-supported” learning.
- The first General Women’s Session included in General Conference weekend, replacing the Saturday Priesthood Session.
(Note: Part 2 will cover President Nelson’s talk on the naming guidelines of the Church, and Elder Oaks’ talks touching on political issues around marriage, sexuality, religious freedom, etc.)
Morgan: In October 2018, the General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints left us with some interesting topics for discussion. There was big news for members of the Church, with a shortening of the 3-hour Sunday church schedule to 2 hours, and a focus on learning at home:
President Nelson: This morning we will announce a new balance and connection between gospel instruction in the home and in the Church.
Morgan: It marked another milestone for women in the Church, with the first time the General Women’s Session was included as a part of General Conference weekend:
President Joy Jones: On this historic night, I express my love and appreciation to each of you, my dear sisters.
Morgan: We heard reinforcement of Church positions on many issues pertaining to marriage, sexuality, and religious freedom that have occasionally generated controversy in news and politics…
President Oaks: We are beloved children of a Heavenly Father, who has taught us that maleness and femaleness, marriage between a man and a woman, and the bearing and nurturing of children are all essential to His great plan of happiness.
Morgan: …as well as a doubling down against the use of the term Mormon, with some strong language that grabbed some attention in the news:
President Nelson: To remove the Lord’s name from the Lord’s Church is a major victory for Satan.
Morgan: We’ve brought on some outstanding guest scholars to help us dive into all these topics from General Conference, along with sharing some of their favorite personal moments:
Barbara: I was thrilled to see an immigrant speak so prominently and so well, and share a message of love, and service, and inclusion.
Morgan: All of this, in a special 2-part General Conference review.
Morgan: Welcome to another episode of Mormonism Magnified. Or as maybe we should call it, the podcast soon to be formerly known as Mormonism Magnified, since after a lot of consideration, we’ve decided to rename our podcast. We’ll talk more about later, but for now I will note that we are doing our best to apply the new name guidelines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which discourage the use of terms Mormon and Mormonism when referring to the Church. In the meantime, we are grateful for those who follow President Nelson’s guidance to “be courteous and patient in our efforts to correct these errors” since we still occasionally slip and use the term Mormon when referring to the members of the Church in our discussions. And we should point out, we do feel there are still times where using the term Mormon is appropriate and even best, when referring to the broader religious movement started by Joseph Smith that led to not one but many churches. But we’ll get into that later. For now, thanks for joining us on the first episode of a two-part General Conference review. My name is Morgan McKeown, and I’m here as usual with my co-host Patrick Mason, who is the Chair of Mormon Studies and the Dean of Arts and Humanities at Claremont Graduate University. We’re joined today by two outstanding scholars, first Barbara Jones Brown, who is a historian of the American West and an author with degrees from BYU and the University of Utah.
Barbara: And I recently became Executive Director of the Mormon History Association, which is an independent association dedicated to the scholarly study of the Mormon past.
Patrick: I’m on the board of the Mormon History Association, and we couldn’t be more thrilled with Barbara joining us in this leadership capacity. And I should say that Barbara does really important work as a historian herself. Barbara, do you want to mention the work that you’re doing with Rick Turley, the book that’s about to come out?
Barbara: I was editor of the book “Massacre at Mountain Meadows” published by Oxford Press in 2008, and since then I have been co-authoring volume 2 of the series. We are finishing up, and it’s also forthcoming.
Morgan: Second, we are pleased to be joined by one of the rising stars in Mormon scholarship, Ben Spackman, who is one of the current PHD students in the Mormon Studies program at Claremont Graduate University.
Ben: My area of interest is the history of religion and science, particularly as it relates to the interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis. So I do a lot with religious opposition to evolution, creationism, fundamentalism, as well as conceptions of scripture and revelation that play into those kinds of issues.
Patrick: It’s been great to have Ben as a member of the graduate program at Claremont Graduate University. He brings a lot of expertise in Hebrew Bible and Biblical studies, as well as what he’s doing on religion and science and modern America.
Morgan: We brought these scholars on to talk about the October 2018 General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And we ended up having so much great content from that, we decided to divide it into two Episodes. So this will be Part 1 of 2, and today we’ll cover the 2-hour, home centered church program, as well as the Women’s General Session. In part 2 we’ll explore some of the political topics brought up in President Oaks talks around marriage and sexuality, as well as President Nelson’s talk about the name of the Church. Let’s dive in.
2 Hour Sunday, Home-Centered Church
Morgan: President Nelson started conference off with a bang, with an announcement that there would be a shorter Sunday meeting schedule, along with a home-study program, or as he described it:
President Nelson: … an integrated curriculum to strengthen families and individuals through a home-centered and Church-supported plan to learn doctrine, strengthen faith, and foster greater personal worship.
Barbara: I was really surprised because there have been rumors about the Church switching to a 2 hour Sunday program for so many years now, I didn’t think it would ever happen. So when those rumors were circulating again this year, I thought, “no, it’s not gonna happen.” So when it did, it was a big surprise.
Morgan: This was the first major change to the meeting schedule since the 1980’s, when the Church went from multiple meetings throughout Sunday and the week to a consolidated 3 hour block.
Barbara: It shows a trend of how Church leaders are making church meetings easier and easier to attend. I study a lot of the primary documents and journals and so forth of 19th century Utah. Church used to be 2 hours every Sunday morning and 2 hours every Sunday afternoon. So four hours of Church every Sunday. And then of course going from there to the consolidated 3 hour block. And now to just 2 hours every Sunday. I think it’s making it easier for Church leaders to participate.
Patrick: And of course we know that lots of people didn’t go to church in the 19th century. I think it’s one of the things that I think surprised modern members of the Church, because we think of these heroic pioneer forebears. But a lot them weren’t attending all of those Sunday services. It was a lot of church back then, and they were doing other things in an agricultural society.
Morgan: Let’s talk about some of the different reactions from Church members to the announcement:
Barbara: I think people are really excited about the opportunity to have more time on Sundays doing this home church as families or as individuals, or with other Church members, and just having a two-hour block
Ben: I actually had mixed feelings. And I’ve talked to some people who feel very negatively about it, to be honest. There are a variety of reasons that kind of depends on the individual circumstance. I know some older single people where their 3-hour church is their primary social contact for the week. I know some young parents of small children who enjoy having that time to talk to other adults about serious things during the week when their kids are being essentially babysat by someone else. And I was really on the fence about whether we will get better church learning by offloading it to home. That’s something I still debate over.
Patrick: I think you raised a good point Ben about people who wonder how this will affect their place within the community. Of course, there are many people for whom they are the only member of the Church in their family. It’s not like they have a nuclear family to study the gospel with on Sundays. Whether they are single, whether they are the only member of the Church in their family, a part-member family, or something like that.
Patrick: The other concern I have, and like Barbara, I’ve heard mostly an enthusiastic response to this from most members of the Church. The one gray cloud, or at least question mark that I have, is whether this will further dilute the sense of the Mormon village. Already people are spread out, if you don’t live in Utah where your ward is your neighborhood, oftentimes the 3-hour Church is the only time that you interact with other members of the Church. Maybe during a midweek activity. And so I wonder what this will do to the sense of identity, and collective identity among members of the Church. It’s one fewer hour for people to associate with each other. To have the kinds of conversations that Ben talked about, but also just to form a sense of community. So, it will be interesting to see how that plays out for Mormon collective identity. And I’ve already been using the word Mormon, and so I’m already in transgression about some of the other things that we’ll be talking about, but old habits die hard.
Morgan: Let’s discuss some more about the key factors that might have led up to this change.
Patrick: They have been experimenting with this throughout the Church, not just in the United States, but globally. You can recognize some of the same pressures that led to the consolidation of the 3-hour block back in the 1980’s. As opposed to meetings all day Sunday, and throughout the week. The pressures of people not living in a Mormon village, of having to drive in, sometimes half an hour or an hour, or sometimes more. You hear these stories of people walking to Church in various places, spending 2-3 hours doing that, and allowing for more time at home. I think they’re very serious about people spending time together as families, and the worship that has to be the primary site of gospel learning. Now there’s an essential role to coming together in communities. It’s commanded in the scriptures to do so. Of course, the Sacrament is an ordinance that is done in community. But they’ve been experimenting with this for a long time, and so they must have felt that they had the data. I expect this was a data-driven decision. That the outcomes that they saw from those that had been experimenting with the 2-hour block, that the benefits outweighed any costs.
Barbara:I wonder too, with so many converts coming into the Church, particularly in Africa and other nations outside the United States, where people are used to attending church maybe one hour a week if they were going to church at all. To make that shift from going either no church every Sunday or just one hour on a weekly basis, to go from that to three hours… I’ve heard that a lot of converts have said that could be a difficult transition for them. So, I wonder if the two hour block has been a compromise that has been successful as Patrick has mentioned.
Patrick: There’s always the question. There’s a lot of research that came out in the ’80’s, 90’s and 2000’s that showed that strict churches that ask a lot of their members are the ones that grow, and successfully recruit converts, and others. But there is also a point where you are asking too much, where you are asking is so counter-cultural or so contrary to people’s expectations or what they’re willing to give that it’s simply too much. I think it’s a good point, Barbara.
Barbara: Another point I wanted to bring up… Ben mentioned earlier that church is a time when parents of young children can go and essentially have their kids babysat. But in reality, until your children are 2, those children are on your lap for three hours. So just remembering my own experience, church is exhausting. Especially if you had a calling, and if you had a young child who was tired who needs to be fed during that period, who’s cranky, who needs a nap, who’s crawling all over you. Until they’re 2 years old, church for three hours was exhausting during those years.
Patrick: Yeah, and trying to teach a Primary lesson to Sunbeams for 50 minutes is a little tough too. So this is going to condense that. I actually think this will be very effective at the Primary level. You’re going to have 20-25 minute lessons. You’ll have 25 minutes of music time. I think that’s going to be a much more efficient use of time that will track better with children’s attention spans.
Ben: It means that no one in theory will have church meetings scheduled through that dangerous afternoon block of 12-2 or 3, which is post lunch, everyone’s trying to nap, children are cranky.
Morgan: And many of those hardship of a 3-hour block were called out by Elder Cook, who was responsible for elaborating on the program after it had been announced by President Nelson:
Elder Cook: the senior leaders of the Church have been aware for many years that for some of our precious members, a three-hour Sunday schedule at church can be difficult. This is particularly true for parents with small children, Primary children, elderly members, new converts, and others.
Morgan: And that’s a good segue to the home-centered aspect of the program change, since as Elder Cook was quick to clarify:
Elder Cook: But there is so much more to this adjustment than just shortening the Sunday meetinghouse schedule.
Ben: I think the rhetoric that came with it was really a surprise… President Nelson and then Elder Cook, I went through and read their talks and counted, and multiple times they said “home-centered, Church-supported.” And it was easy for me to see this as a response of sorts to people who have grown up feeling like the Church is responsible for teaching me about history and scripture. And if I don’t know something, there was a failure of the organization to teach me. And this rhetoric almost seems like it could be responding to that. The emphasis is on the family and the individual at home. And the Church supports. But the emphasis is on you at home. And your family. In your own setting. Repeated multiple times. I think it’s almost a phrase they decided to use, because “home-centered, Church-supported” shows up half a dozen times, 10 times in these two talks. That rhetoric was very interesting to me.
Elder Cook: The new home-centered and Church-supported curriculum needs to influence more powerfully family religious observance and behavior and personal religious observance and behavior.
Morgan: What are some of the other key implications of shifting the responsibility of teaching away from the Sunday meetings?
Patrick: One of the interesting things that I thought came out of this was an encouragement of people to form study groups. This has been somewhat verboten, and in fact, Elder Oaks as an Apostle, about 30 years ago, or maybe 20 years ago, discouraged the independent study groups. I think they saw problems coming out of that. And now people are being actively encouraged to do so.
Morgan: Here’s another statement from Elder Cook’s talk:
Elder Cook: It would be completely appropriate for young singles, single adults, single parents, part-member families, new members, and others to gather in groups outside the normal Sunday worship services to enjoy gospel sociality and be strengthened by studying together the home-centered, Church-supported resource.
Patrick: So there’s a bit of a reversal there, which I think could be very positive. But I’ve heard some people wonder if they’re going to be left out of those invitations. If essentially that will lead to the “cool kids” inviting each other over to their houses, and again leaving out some people who are kind of on the margins in wards already. Most of this will have to do with the execution of it.
Ben: There have been some good LDS examples as well of different implementations of this kind of thing. I’ve participated in a regular scripture study group run by a BYU professor on Friday nights in Provo that we take 3 hours, and we focus on a couple of verses, and it’s been fantastic. But again, the implementation is tricky, because how do you open it up to everyone and not be cliquish. But if you get too many people there who are not familiar with what you’re trying to do, it can kind of fall apart. So implementation will be everything, and there’s so many good ways to go forward with this, and so many ways to fail. The informality is kind of a blessing and a curse.
Barbara: One thing that my husband and I have talked about since this change was made, now we’ve got more time on Sundays, who can we start inviting over to our house to get together on Sundays. Now that we’ve got more time, thinking of people who are either the only members of the Church in their families or that are single members of the Church. And so I think there’s a possibility… it depends on how it’s executed… but there is a possibility that it could create stronger social networking if people take advantage of that opportunity and reach out to all members of their ward to include them. I think there’s a lot more potential for social interaction at home over dinner and doing some home study together, rather than sprawled out in a Sunday school class in a Relief Society room.
Patrick: I think you’re absolutely right, and this has been the discovery of Evangelical mega-churches over the past couple of decades, which is one of the major changes in the way that Protestantism and Evangelicalism is practiced. They have these enormous churches where literally thousands of people come for the main worship services. But they’re realizing that’s not fulfilling all the needs, you can’t create community with thousands of people in an auditorium or even hundreds or dozens of people in a Sunday school class. The great innovation there has been the small group, these small Bible studies groups. So even if you go to a huge mega-church, you can choose to participate in a small group Bible study that meets on a Sunday night or a Wednesday night or whatever. And these are 8-10 people who come together and form community, and study together. They’re seeing it as a kind of a “both and” approach. I don’t know whether Church leaders looked to that as a possible model, or if they’re aware of it. But certainly, this has been the sort of thing that’s been successful in Evangelicalism over the past couple of decades.
Morgan: What are some of the logistical implications for expansion of the Church?
Ben: You can now compress more wards into a particular building, and have more flexibility in the scheduling because you don’t have a 3 hour block to work with, but a 2 hour block.
Barbara: Looking at it from a logistical standpoint, does this mean that it saves money for the Church, because you don’t have to build as many church buildings in places where there is a large population of Latter-day Saints? I recently lived in an area that was just growing exponentially in Utah, and the Church could not keep up with building fast enough. We were just always crowded in buildings with several wards. You couldn’t even walk down the hallways between meetings because there were so many people. And so I wonder if financially this saves the Church and logistically helps out ease things as well in populations where there are large populations of Latter-day Saints.
Ben: I would think so.
Morgan: That is interesting, I’d love to see someone calculate mathematically how much extra capacity for membership growth this gives the Church without having to construct any more buildings. It may not have been the primary reason for the change, but certainly is a benefit. Are there any other key implications of this announcement to either reactivation or retention of members of the Church that we haven’t mentioned yet?
Patrick: But I think one of the questions will be, are there people out there who aren’t going to church right now, who will say, “Oh, I’ll give it 2 hours. I wasn’t willing to go if it was 3 hours, but I’ll go if it was 2.” Will this lead to any significant reactivation? I’m a little skeptical, and I wouldn’t name that as a major reason to do it. I’ve heard some people speculate that will be the case, but I’m not sure that will be true.
Ben: It may not be the 2-hour church itself that will reactivate anyone, but depending on what happens at the local level, it may be that the scripture group that someone organizes might be attractive to someone who is less active. They’d be willing to come to this other thing, and socialize and learn that way. I know of one case where there’s just a group being talked about, and there’s a couple that’s inactive and has been for years said, “You know, we’d be interested in that.” And so it might be kind of a bridge, so to speak. It will be a way to maintain some kind of church connection, some kind of scriptural or spiritual connection for people who can’t quite take that step to be back in a chapel on Sunday morning.
Barbara: I’m not sure that it will lead to any increased activation or not, but I do know it would make it easier for those who are active who have young children. I’m thinking of that 11-2 block where my husband and I would just have to take turns who went to church that Sunday because that was right in the middle of nap time, and so we would just every other Sunday go to church. Whereas if it’s just a 2-hour block, if that makes it easier for people with younger children to be able to stay for 2 hours. And I also wonder if it just might help younger people, I’m thinking of our teenagers who were overjoyed, have better feelings or enjoy going to church more if it isn’t so long, and they’re not getting hungry in the middle of it and so forth. If it just increases their desire to attend church.
Patrick: I heard some teenagers were disappointed that it didn’t start the week after General Conference. They showed up and it was still 3 hours, and they felt gypped.
General Women’s Session in Conference Weekend
Morgan: October 2018 marked the first time that a General Women’s Session was included as part of General Conference weekend. We should point out that it’s certainly not the first general women’s meeting of the Church. Relief Society and general women’s meetings have been held for decades, usually just before General Conference, either once or twice a year. Then from 1993-2013, the Church held alternating Young Women and Relief Society meetings before General Conference. It’s perhaps debatable whether all those earlier meetings were technically a part of General Conference, but many would say that the first time that a women’s session was officially part of General Conference occurred in April 2014. In that session, they stopped the alternating meetings between Young Women and Relief Society, and held a General Women’s Session where all females over 8 years old were invited to attend. And when President Uchtdorf conducted that 2014 meeting, he officially acknowledged that it represented the opening of General Conference:
“My beloved sisters, my dear friends and blessed disciples of Jesus Christ, I am honored to have this opportunity to be with you as we open another general conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”
Now in October 2018, there’s been another meaningful change in the Women’s Session, where it became part of the General Conference Weekend, and actually replaces one of the two biannual Priesthood Meetings on Saturday evenings of Conference.
Barbara: This is something that I think a lot of women were excited about, and happy about, that the Women’s Session became part of the General Session, that it feels like it places us on more of an equal footing with the priesthood session. However, I also had concerns. I thought, be careful what you ask for. Because the General Women’s Session, whereas before it was mostly all women speaking with one member of the First Presidency speaking, this time it was all three members of the First Presidency speaking. So, half men, and half women now speaking at the General Session for Women. So, I’m sure a lot of women, maybe a majority of Latter-day Saint women would like having the entire First Presidency speak. While I enjoyed all of their talks, I was kind of struck by the fact that even at the General Women’s session now, half of the speakers are men. So did we kind of lose something there? And also, many women and men noted that instead of having two women speak in the Saturday and Sunday regular sessions, there was just one woman speaker. So that was cut in half, from two to one. And so, was that because we went to having this General Women’s Session on Saturday night? Did that mean therefore that we lost half of the women speakers in the General Session? So I see some definite pluses with this change, but I also kind of felt a couple losses, to be honest.
Patrick: Some people might do the arithmetic to say, “no, you doubled the number of female speakers because you went from 2 to 4, right?” But the point is that since 3 of the 4 were speaking in the Women’s Session, it means that most men weren’t tuning in to hear that. And so it is a reduction of half of the women speaking in the General Sessions for everybody in the Church.
Barbara: Exactly. And where there already are so few women’s voices, to go from 2 to 1 is a concern. And I did hear a lot of women express that concern. So, it will be interesting to see if that’s the pattern that continues from now on, or was that just this conference? And next April, when it will be the Priesthood session that falls on the Saturday night of General Conference, will there be again two women speaking on Saturday and Sunday regular meetings, or maybe even more? It will be interesting to see what happens. One thing that was interesting, we had a Stake meeting of Young Women and Relief Society to watch that together. And I was listening to comments of some of the women around me, and some of them were saying, “Isn’t that neat that they let women conduct the session.” Which I was kind of struck by. I said, “This has always been the women’s meeting, and women have always conducted this session.” But some women were surprised to hear that, which kind of surprised me. I don’t know if that was because that was the first time that had been part of a General Conference regular session.
Patrick: I just think this is all part of a changing and developing Church around gender issues and women’s voices within the Church. I think we can point to a lot of things within the last few years in which women’s voices have been given a more prominent role at the local and general level. And I think virtually everybody, women and men alike, would see that as a positive thing. But the process isn’t complete, right? The development and the transition aren’t complete. And the Church is still trying to figure out how do we include more women’s voices in these various settings, whether it be a ward council or a General Conference session. And you simply continue to run into the fact that at the end of the day, the senior presiding leaders at any level of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are going to be men. It’s going to be a First Presidency and Quorum of the 12 Apostles, so they’re going to be 15 men that we need to hear from in General Conference at least as is traditionally done, some of them multiple times. In a ward council, it’s still the Bishop who presides. So even with expanded roles and opportunities for women, I think some people are still looking at a glass ceiling, that still seems to be in place in terms of how far we can go in terms of equalizing men’s and women’s voices within the Church.
Ben: As long as our theology channels authority primarily through priesthood, and priesthood remains strictly gendered, there is going to be reason from within that view to have far more men than women speak in General Conference, strictly because truth comes through authority and authority is priesthood, and priesthood is male. So why do we have women speakers? When you lay it out that way, it’s deeply problematic. But that’s the way it currently is.
Patrick: We’ll see if there’s development on this front. Certainly, President Oaks in some of recent teachings has spoken about the way that women exercise priesthood within the Church, shy of ordination.
Morgan: Here’s a quick clip from Elder Oaks in 2014 on that topic:
President Oaks: We are not accustomed to speaking of women having the authority of the priesthood in their Church callings, but what other authority can it be? When a woman—young or old—is set apart to preach the gospel as a full-time missionary, she is given priesthood authority to perform a priesthood function. The same is true when a woman is set apart to function as an officer or teacher in a Church organization under the direction of one who holds the keys of the priesthood.
Patrick: I’m trying to be patient and wait to see what the long narrative is here, and what developments look like over many years, rather than just kind of 6 months at a time, and to see how that plays out.
Ben: And I think, beyond Elder Oaks’ talk, which is probably familiar to a lot of people, Jonathan Stapley’s recent book out of Oxford will also play some subtle inroads, because he shows just how much our conception of priesthood has changed since the 1830’s, in various ways.
Patrick: And all of the work coming out of the Church History Department, elevating women’s voices, the volume At the Pulpit, the publication of the Nauvoo Relief Society minutes… there are so many more ways in which we are encountering women’s voices, both in the contemporary Church and also historically. And so, it remains to be seen how that actually gets translated into action at both the local and general level.
Barbara: I wanted to add something on the women’s issue. Just doing some background checking before this conversation today, I was struck by how recently it was that women were even allowed to speak at all in General Conference. The first time a woman spoke in a General Session of General Conference was not until 1984, which really surprised me, because I was a teenager at the time. I was young, I wasn’t really thinking about these kinds of issues, but that was just in my lifetime that the first woman spoke. And then the next woman did not speak in General Conference until 4 years later, until 1988.
Ben: Wow!
Morgan: Here’s a couple quick clips from Sister Elaine Cannon, from that first conference talk given by a woman in 1984:
Sister Cannon: It is a great thrill for me to stand at this pulpit in this Tabernacle where I have come to conference all the years of my life… I am thrilled to have this part today…. Brothers and sisters, there are good and gifted people in this church…. In each place that we have traveled in these years of service, I have repeatedly marveled at the able women leaders and the strong priesthood leaders who have been raised up in the far places where the Church is established.
Barbara: The first woman did not give a prayer in General Conference until 2013! Just five years ago. So you look at how this is really, relatively speaking, a recent phenomenon at all that women were even participating in General Conference as speakers and as prayers. So, women’s voices, as Patrick mentioned, there are all kinds of ways in which Latter-day Saint women are becoming more involved in having a voice. And it will be interesting to see how that continues to evolve in the future. But it has been a very slow, very recent process.
Ben: At least on the local level, there’s a lot of things that can be done to increase female visibility. Neylan McBain’s book, “Women at Church” really brings this out, and it’s really fantastic.
Personal Highlights
Morgan: So that’s going to bring us to the end of this episodes’ scholarly discussion of General Conference, which is part 1 of our 2-part General Conference review. In part 2 which will be release in a few days, we’ll dive into some of the political issues around marriage, gender, and sexuality touched on by Elder Oaks, and we’ll discuss President Nelson’s reiteration of the naming guidelines for the Church. We’ll also use that time to reveal our new podcast name and the rationale. But to close out each of our General Conference episodes, we thought it would be a nice idea to ask our scholars to respond at a personal level to what they liked most about Conference. This episode Patrick and Barbara will share their personal highlights, and next episode Ben and I will share ours.
Patrick: I always watch General Conference with both hats on. As a scholar, I’m always interested in observing contemporary movements within the Church, and trends. So, I’ve always got my scholar hat on. But I do also watch it as an active and practicing and believing member of the Church. And there were a number of things that I thought were a lot of great, gospel teaching through General Conference, and that’s most of what we get. Sometimes we focus on the very particular things, that the kinds of things that scholars are interested in, or major policy changes or something like that, but I have to say, I was struck by a number of talks: I thought Elder Holland’s talk, Elder Gay’s talk were terrific gospel teaching. And then also, I was very impressed by one of the two newest Apostles, Elder Soares, and his talk about the ways that within the Church we can integrate different kinds of diversity, and bringing in people from lots of different backgrounds, and appreciating what they bring into the Church, and his metaphor of the river from Brazil.
Elder Soares: In a similar way that the Solimões and Negro Rivers flow together to make the great Amazon River, the children of God come together in the restored Church of Jesus Christ from different social backgrounds, traditions, and cultures, forming this wonderful community of Saints in Christ. Eventually, as we encourage, support, and love each other, we combine to form a mighty force for good in the world.
Patrick: I can only imagine how excited Brazilian members were to hear that, to hear those images and to hear that taught from a member of the Quorum of the Twelve from their own country. But I thought it was very powerful teaching for the rest of us around the world. So, there were a number of things that I thought were edifying and uplifting, and gave us a greater sense to be a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in its best and noblest aspirations in 2018.
Barbara: I was thrilled to see the General Women’s Session become part of General Conference. I also very much appreciated the nod that President Oaks gave to female leaders when he called them Sister Presidents, and referred to them as President, the leaders of the auxiliaries.
Elder Oaks: We have heard inspiring messages from the Sister Presidents…
Barbara: I appreciated that nod. I loved hearing Christina Franco speak at the General Women’s meeting, particularly because she is an immigrant to the United States, and with the current anti-immigrant feelings through the United States, I was thrilled to see an immigrant speak so prominently and so well, and share a message of love, and service, and inclusion.
Sister Franco: Unfortunately, however, we live in a selfish world where people constantly ask, “What’s in it for me?” instead of asking, “Whom can I help today?” or “How can I better serve the Lord in my calling?” or “Am I giving my all to the Lord?”…What will matter is that we came with a desire to serve… And it will certainly matter that we do all that we do with the special ingredient of service coupled with love and sacrifice.
Morgan: And that’s a great way to conclude this episode. Thank you to our scholars for joining us, and thank you for tuning in. We’ll release part 2 of our General Conference review in just a few days, so make sure you subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, or however you’re listening. As a reminder, this podcast is independently produced, and is not an official publication of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. If you want to support us, please give us a 5-star rating and share us with your friends. And we’ll be with you again soon on our next episode.