President Nelson thrilled many of us with the sweeping changes announced last April.

In that vein, President Nelson has announced that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will move away from the term “Mormon” and “LDS” to describe the Church and adherents of the Church. Apparently this shift was announced to leadership a few weeks ago, and the full import of the shift will be announced in months to come. I expect we will hear more in October conference.

It will be interesting to see where this goes in coming months. Given that people are lazy, I doubt that our new manner of referring to ourselves will be long. Perhaps it will be as simple as referring to ourselves as Christians. In which case, we would come to see ourselves as engaged in Christian ministry.

In the past the Church has attempted to move away from the moniker “Mormon.” There are a couple of factors that suggest this attempt may be more successful:

This is a change that is coming from the prophet directly, couched as revelation. This change is occurring in the midst of other significant terminology changes.

An amusing fall-out, mentioned by someone tongue-in-cheek, is that this makes all former Mormons now “ex-Mormons.” The line that has previously excluded the disaffected has now been drawn around the entire population of those who ever considered themselves Mormon.