This morning, on my Zion email list where I discuss things Mormon with my closest online friends, a member pointed out that many saints “never had a real testimony to begin with.” He was speaking of those poor souls who accept the nonsense that the Book of Mormon is true only in the sense that it contains many inspired truths, but that it is not historical and that there never was an actual Lehi colony as related in First Nephi.
I responded by writing this:
Absolutely true! But we must not misunderstand the extent of the problem of false doctrine, and the importance of good teaching. Many people who do not have strong testimonies have been retarded in their spiritual growth by false doctrine that they were taught and embraced as non-Mormon Christians before they joined the Church, and by inadequate instruction since they became members of the Savior’s true Church. How many talks in Sacrament Meeting do we hear each Sunday that fail to teach correct doctrine from the scriptures? How many lessons do we hear that wander far afield from the scriptures they are supposed to focus on? Ineffective teaching is a big problem in the Church, especially in the most important meeting that many saints attend as their only gospel instruction: Sacrament Meeting. Many of our apostles have spoken on this problem of poor teaching in General Conference. Some of it has been quite recent.
Consider these words of Elder Jeffrey Holland in a recent General Conference:
When crises come in our lives–and they will–the philosophies of men interlaced with a few scriptures and poems just won’t do. Are we really nurturing our youth and our new members in a way that will sustain them when the stresses of life appear? Or are we giving them a kind of theological Twinkie–spiritually empty calories? President John Taylor once called such teaching “fried froth,” the kind of thing you could eat all day and yet finish feeling totally unsatisfied. –Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, General Conference, April 1998
He made the point, and other prophets have recently made the point in General Conference, that our retention problem with new members is partly and perhaps largely the result of people coming to Church and not being spiritually fed. They are not being taught the scriptures. They are not learning true doctrine at Church. Instead, they are being fed a lot of feel-good stories with bits and pieces of personal “testimony” that consist largely of telling Church stories about “when I was on vacation” or “when I was on my mission” or “when we first moved into the ward” or “when I met Elder So-and-so” or “I knew a woman once who…” and so forth. All of these personal stories are good. We need them to “liken the scriptures unto ourselves.” But they are of little use in building testimonies if we leave out or under emphasize the “scriptures” part of that phrase. Telling Church stories is no better than stories about “what I did on my vacation” unless we teach the underlying scriptures and doctrines that we are supposed to be learning from such stories.
Next time you are at Church, listen carefully. Judge for yourselves how effectively we saints are teaching the underlying doctrine contained in the scriptures. From my experience we are not doing very well. It is far too obvious from those who speak in our meetings that many or perhaps even most of us are not spending much time studying the scriptures daily as our leaders have asked us to do. As a result the teaching is inadequate. And we are partly to blame for the poor testimonies that leave new members and poorly converted born-in-the-Church members exposed and vulnerable to such false ideas as the non-historicity of the Book of Mormon.