Every Member is a Missionary

Mormon President David O.McKay stated this quote above as part of his pitch while prophet of the LDS church.
"Writing in the American Journal of Sociology, (May 1980), Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge traced how LDS literature instructs church members in how to use personal friendships and other contacts with Gentiles to proselytize as hove missionaries. The authors outline how leaders teach the Mormon rank and file-including new converts in foreign countries-to use their everyday encounters with Gentile neighbors to encourage conversions.
This plan starts with simple neighborliness, doing such favors as babysitting, running errands, lending tools. With each gesture, Saints are taught to reveal a new bit of the Mormon lifestyle and faith. When a Gentile praises a Mormon girl's performance as a babysitter, her parents reply that the church's tight family bonds make members good with children. A loaned tool comes with a brief sermon about being self-sufficient and prepared for any eventuality. Appreciation for running an errand is met with an explanation that Mormons stick together and see to one another's needs in good times and bad.
Gradually the talk moves toward doctrinal matters such as how the gospels in most Christian churches are mere fragments of a truth shattered by early church schisms and now have been restored by Joseph Smith. Stark and Bainbridge in their study, "Networks of Faith: Interpersonal Binds to Cults and Sects," observed as well that the instructions urge Mormons to shy away from discussing religion directly but rather to ease their targets toward such consideration by incrementally exposing them to LDS beliefs and practices.
It amounts to nothing more than making friends with the neighbors by doing truly friendly things and then eventually offering the new friends a chance to visit their church. The Stark and Bainbridge study compared LDS church figures form a single year (1976-77) in a state of Washington and found that even though door-to-door missionaries were winning only one convert for every thousand families they approached, the home mission method was working in a startling 50 percent of the cases.
Ordinary Mormons operate under an informal quota requiring that they bring one person per year into the church through the home missionary work. The key here isn't that every Mormon brings in a new believer each year, but that families work for many years, hipping away at their Gentile neighbors until eventually they win them over. It may take years of insinuating church ideas into a relationship based largely on talks about what to feed the children and how to fight crabgrass, but finally the targeted Gentiles come over, If it takes six years to convert a Gentile family of six, then the proselytizing Mormon family has met its quota, and the growth continues."
(In Mormon Circles, James Coates, 1991, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., p147-148)

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About Me

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Michigan, United States
I spent a lot of time deciding if I should write this blog or not. I'm not a great writer and I'm not going to pretend to be. I need to share what I have learned and I might not make some people happy with what I am saying. This blog is a way for me to release the thoughts and feelings that come with knowing I grew up in the wrong religion. A healing process if you will.

How To Read This Blog

Please start with the month of February 2007 and read backwards. This is the most effective way to understand, in order, why I say what I do.

Handmaidens Creed

1.I believe in God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit as one God without beginning or end.
2.I believe the Bible to be the Holy Inspired word of God with full truth and righteousness. No other writing is.
3.I believe that the work of the Lord comes first. Before any temporal thing or person.
4.I believe that grace is a gift and Christ gives that gift freely to all who believe.
5.I believe that the beauty of a woman is contained inside of her and not by what she looks like on the outside.
6.I believe that marriage is sacred and represents the Godhead on earth; two are one just as three are one.
7.I believe that love is more powerful than any other power. Remember, God is love.
8.I believe that tithing is not a part of God's new covenant, free will offerings are. And that doesn't mean just money.
9.I believe that the Aaronic, Levitical, and Melchizedek priesthoods are abolished and Christs Holy Priesthood whom Christ is the "Great High Priest" is eternal.
10.I believe that every believer is a priest in the "Priesthood of Believers".
11.I believe that when two are one, nobody is to separate the one.
12.I believe that Christ is the only way to heaven.
13.I believe that our bodies are temples, not man made buildings.
14.I believe that liars make fools out of others and the liar hates the fool.
15.I believe that all believers are in authority to preach the gospel.
16.I believe that the word 'organization' to describe Christs body is evil and has no place with God.
17.I believe the Americas are not the land of Zion and Christ will return to His origonal land-Israel in the Middle East.
18.I believe that God has set out correct ways of worshiping Him, not man.
19.I believe in holding to the truths of the Bible and not mans understanding of it.
20.I believe that the world is full of evil and Satan can easily gain control over the minds of those who do not profess Christ of the Bible to be their only Messiah.
21.I believe that Saints are those who know the real Savior, Jesus Christ, of whom the Bible speaks of; not the jesus of a cult.