I recently read a post about the current state of the Mormon Church that sounded really frustrated. It was the kind of post that was arguably not written by some angry-about-to-leave-the-church-member, but most likely someone who cared deeply about her religion and wanted to make us think about it in uncomfortable ways. It wasn’t the bad kind of discomfort either. It reminded me more of the impassioned letter that Captain Moroni wrote to Pahoran. It brought to mind Harold B. Lee:

“The true church is intended not only to comfort the afflicted, but to afflict the comfortable” (italics added).

While I do not always agree one hundred percent with the tone, the form, the spirit, or even some of the points the author raises, there is so much more here to carefully and thoughtfully reflect upon that it would be a mistake to simply ignore it, or worse, chalk it up as anti-Mormon rhetoric. If anything, it spiritually challenged me in ways that I appreciated. It left me relishing a remarkable feeling, translated in my mind as these words:

“I need to do better, and I can do better.”

“I need to be the change I wish to see in my church.”

The anonymous author, otherwise known as “Cate,” had a pretty adverse reaction to Elder Holland’s recent conference talk, “The Cost and Blessings of Discipleship.” To be fair, the talk was probably not an easy one for him to deliver. His fervent tone and language, as we have come to expect from Elder Holland, probably didn’t help popularize his message either. He spoke about the inconvenient truths of Christ, a divine messenger from God who told us not to entertain sin, not to believe in soothing platitudes, and to pluck out our eyes if they offend us. In contrast to Christ’s messages of kindness, acceptance, and tolerance, this same affectionate exemplar remarkably declared, “I came not to [bring] peace, but a sword” (Matt 10:34).

How these messages reconcile with other compassionate teachings of Christ remains to be our biggest challenge of knowing how to love each other in the right way, despite our differences. I personally did not have the same experience that Cate had towards Holland’s talk, though I could certainly sympathize with where she was coming from. I could see how Holland’s statements about how some of us desire “comfortable gods…gods who do not demand much,” and who would tell us not to “forsake transgression and any hint of advocacy for it in others” could be interpreted as Holland casting unrighteous judgment upon “families who lobby for civil rights for their gay children, [or] women who struggle with the hierarchal inequality in Church structure.”

I’m not so confident, however, that Holland was trying to suggest this.

Take LGBT issues for example.

The church has already declared it is very much in favor of gay rights, and has even “advocated for legal protection for same-sex couples regarding hospitalization and medical care, fair housing and employment rights, or probate rights, so long as these do not infringe on the integrity of the traditional family or the constitutional rights of churches.” What the church has not done, which its critics have cited as cruel and hostile, is sanction homosexual behavior as divinely permissible. This stance, they say, “neither constitutes nor condones any kind of hostility towards gays and lesbians.”

I must confess.

This is a terribly complex issue that warrants no easy solution. What I do fear is how Elder Holland’s “words [might] catalyze the most judgmental voices in the church, promoting a spirit of division and justifying intolerance.” I personally have to agree with Cate here. I have read some rather insensitive blog posts and even sat through some pretty brash Sunday school lessons concerning this issue. The attitudes and explanations I’ve experienced have been far too comfortably caricatured, superficially glossed, and oversimplified to the point that it has made me realize how many cultural predilections need to change in the church if we truly are to be “at-one” with each other.

Cate makes an astute observation:

“I found a God who was radically more interested in my ability to love my neighbor in spite of his or her fallen state than to draw lines which exclude.”

The liberal passion to love all people, without restraint, without borders, boundaries, or lines—in a word, to love “unconditionally”—is very admirable. Few people can effectively do it. There is a difference between choosing to love people unconditionally, and conditions people place upon themselves to feel our love.

I believe it is in God’s disposition to love each of us unconditionally, though this should not suggest that we are always in a position to feel or even accept his love. The scriptures are replete with conditional expressions: “If (certain conditions exist) then (certain consequences follow)”; “Inasmuch as…(certain conditions exist), … (certain consequences follow)”; “Except … cannot…etc.”

To insinuate that there are no real moral conditions to consider to feel or even accept God’s love suffers from what I would call presenting a “selective Jesus,” meaning, isolating his important characteristics at the neglect of others.

Do not misunderstand me.

I am in no way here trying to morally police, judge or criticize people who carry unfathomable burdens yet who seek to serve God, and who live according to the best of their ability. Those kinds of strivings are nothing short of beautiful, something to be applauded. I am merely pointing out how difficult it is reconcile the loving, compassionate Jesus with the apocalyptic Jesus of Matthew 24, or the angry Jesus who kicks ass at the temple, or the divisive Jesus who brings not peace but a sword.

Such a paradoxical Jesus leads us to ask, “How are we to draw moral boundaries while still welcome profound differences? How do we transcend the “us vs. them” paradigms that typically only fuel our fears and antipathies?”

I think Cate has a pretty good answer:

“I found a God whose love is transformative and whose love, when manifest through me, is a corrective force needing little, if any, accompanying condemnation.”

Cate raises another good point. It is true that we should “define faithfulness to God…in terms of what we stand for,” rather than what “we stand against.” Too much focus on the latter has made us a church bent on “sin management” rather than creating environments that welcome and embrace “people who sin differently.” We as members of the church, myself included, can improve a lot in this area. The challenge, of course, is how to be equally just and merciful, at the same time.

My brother Trevor raises a great question concerning this balance:

“Can we have both [mercy and justice], or must we always err to one side or the other? And if we do err, which side is it better to err on?”

Trevor follows up his questions with a great paraphrase from Lowell Bennion:

“If you’re faced with a situation in which you could reasonably exercise justice over mercy, err on the side of mercy. Given the nature of institutions, however, I don’t know if they can afford that luxury.”

This is exactly right.

It seems that institutions cannot afford the luxury to be universally merciful, that is, to validate all beliefs, practices, and lifestyles as “divinely acceptable,” or even equal for that matter. If everything is sacred then nothing is sacred. Religious institutions, to survive, must be predominantly conservative and correlated, lest they become fractured schisms devoid of a centralized ethos. The central message of the Mormon church can still be one of love and radical compassion, though greater work and articulation still needs to be given to how we ought to circumscribe boundaries between truth and error, sacred and profane paradigms. Such matters need to be handled sensitively, probably not with harsh brush strokes.

“Contrary to cultural mythos, it’s not because we are guilty and hate hard truths. It’s because, as was the case with Job, we’ve lived lives of hard truth and we’ve experienced the complexities of mortality firsthand. We’ve seen beneath the superficial skin of simple dichotomies and have felt the blood of our belief pour from us like water from a sword pierced side.”

Correlation is hard on intellectuals.

I sympathize greatly with those who struggle with this program.

I personally struggle with it.

But I also find it exhilarating—the challenge, that is, to wrestle with it.

I feel the pain and frustration of Cate here and I sympathize:

“I see good people frustrated with being called to repentance by an institution which acts in ways that are sometimes baffling when compared to the word and life of Christ. I see a corporation that has built up a culture through correlated texts and copyright media which prioritizes unthinking conformity over true discipleship.”

In the correlation program, it is difficult for eager, hungry, painfully thoughtful members of the church to thrive because, for us, individual integrity is viewed as something tremendously sacred. It is not something we easily sacrifice to big groups that demand strict obedience, groupthink and conformity. Just as our parents know that our testimonies can never be theirs, so too do anxiously engaged members grow tired of borrowed light and begin to create their own.

“Most of our people, having been fed a steady diet of pre-digested milk, are pathetically nonchalant. Starved for a gospel rich in transformative unity with God, they are uninspired by the lackluster offering of platitudes and proscriptions. They are wandering toward agnosticism, atheism, and other churches, not because they are unable to believe, but because the anemic offerings of their church experience have convinced them that God is not present at our self-congratulatory “historic” meetings or in our proclamations drafted by legal teams, however well they poll.”

This is a bit heavy-handed, I admit. I personally do not agree with the tone here, but I certainly agree that there are plenty of “platitudes and proscriptions” that fall upon deaf ears at church. I look around me and people look bored, tired, and starved for meaning, distracted by phones, games, children and robotic speakers. I agree that people are leaving to create light elsewhere, if only because their church experience did not inspire them to be the change they wished to see in their wards.

Making our own light has its challenges. No one is truly an island; we all borrow from each other and insulate ourselves from perspectives we find uncomfortable. The problem with thinking we’re islands, that we should merely follow our own conscience, independent of organized groups, is that we rarely then experience the needed social pressures that organized groups provide, which in turn allows for people to question our motives, whether we are trying to change God’s will to match our own perspectives, or whether we are trying to align ourselves to the will of God.

Knowing the difference between these two—our will, and divine will—comes to us best, I believe, through individuals wrestling with institutions, sons and daughters wrestling with families.

I’d like to close now with what I believe are the best parts of Cate’s post.

“My God calls me out into the streets. He leaves me restless with the ache to heal and be healed. It is a throbbing, relentless discomfort that compels me to do His bidding. And when I heed His call, lives are changed. They are transformed without the need for formalized discussions or new member checklists. They are changed because the good news is just that good.”

This paragraph deserves a standing ovation.

It sums up everything I have tried to get from my mind buried deep down into my heart. It exposes how useless, how perfunctory our rituals and ordinances are unless they truly take us somewhere, take us to Christ, wherein He then takes us beyond the rote, mechanical aspect of performing these rituals, and transforms our hearts into eternal compassions ready to mourn, serve, create and grow with others. Our services should not be limited either to strictly those in our own congregations, but should “see the faces of those who most need our service,” whomever they may be.

“The gospel doesn’t spread by force—certainly not by forced discussion. It spreads by fascination.”

I know a non-member who is taking the missionary discussions right now. In fact, I sit with this genuine man and participate in these discussions with him. He and I have chatted about what baptism might mean to him, what kind of member he’d want to be, but the missionaries sort of turn him off because of their agenda to push the baptismal card without really considering that what they are asking of him takes time. Sometimes a lifetime. Sometimes never. And we should be ok with that. We should be ok with the fact that our agendas do not convert people—only the Spirit of God converts people, and that Spirit can manifest itself through us by really getting to know people, loving and serving them, laughing and challenging them; not by “formalized discussions or new member checklists.”

And so, I say to you, my fellow friends in the gospel, and to you Cate…

This is your church.

Be the change you wish to see in your church!

Step up, rise up, throw off the fear and boredom that surrounds you; voice your opinion; show forth your good works; magnify your appetite for otherness—even if you’re mocked or rejected. In the words of Elder Holland, you will then “step into a circle of very distinguished women and men who have, as the Book of Mormon prophet Jacob said, “view[ed Christ’s] death, and suffer[ed] his cross and [borne] the shame of the world.”

Just be authentic, be real.

People will then naturally congregate and want to give new meaning to organized religion.