The Gospel According to Jeffrey

This past Sunday was my first time attending an entire elders quorum meeting in weeks. Between taking photos for the upcoming issue of the Elders Journal , helping a friend in the Family History Center ® , subbing in Primary and Nursery, and our annual stake Priesthood meeting (which requires each ward in our building to have only Sacrament Meeting), it had been seven weeks since I last attended an entire meeting with my quorum. What’s most amazing is how much I missed it, and how little I realized how much I missed it. My hearing isn’t the best, so I always sit in the front row to keep the gym’s (sorry, Cultural Hall’s) less-than-ideal acoustics from drowning out the instructor. The front row was unusually full, this week, and it was great to be back where I belong, in the company of my brethren. Furthermore, we’ve been blessed with a really great quorum—unlike most wards and quorums, I can’t think of a single person that can regularly be counted on, to bring up some ridiculous pet ...

It has always interested me—and not necessarily in a good way—that so many critics of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints complain that the Church is a “brainwashing cult” or whatever. The irony of this becomes particularly apparent when one realizes that many of the most outspoken critics have done no firsthand (or even secondhand) research whatsoever, they just attended some “Mormonism” class that their own church put on and assume everything said in that class—like everything their preacher has ever said—is the Gospel truth. Now, don’t get me wrong; I fully recognize that there are some misinformed members of the Church of Jesus Christ that fall into this same category: that of assuming that everything a leader says, regardless of what it is, is scripture on the same level as the canonical works. This is obviously not the case, as several Church leaders—even Apostles—have been officially rebuked for certain *ahem* inaccurate statements made along the way. I have person...