Leaked Mormon LDS email

TL;DR: UK church leaders are organising forums to tackle significant numbers of members leaving the faith. Watford Stake President urges an end to black/white thinking, and an end to excommunicating the dissaffected or doubters for 'apostasy'.

EMAIL:

Dear Bishops,

Please send us by return a list of candidates from your wards who might benefit from this forum. We would like to receive in the next two weeks.

With love,

Stake Presidency

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Watford Stake Faith Forum

(September start date)

In September, we will be convening our stake's first Faith Forum. Because of the numbers of struggling saints (often 18-35 year olds) who are now burdened with doubts around perceived inconsistencies in our history and discourse, fuelled by unparalleled access to information on the Internet, we have decided to launch a rescue boat.

Rather than judge or label these good people, we feel great love for them and a growing desire to chart a course together for the mainlands of faith. We are a broad church and the opportunity to express faith in our individual way is a great strength to our identity.

These fine people don't need to be excommunicated for apostasy (!) - they just need help to navigate the conflict between their liberal society and their conservative church, their educated minds and the new convert-ready curriculums, and the black and white teachings of their childhood with the new found shades of grey sourced from a more unfiltered Internet.

Speaking to some of you, these issues are becoming more and more common - often infiltrating the priests and laurels, and also recently returned missionaries.

Our intention is to bring together these individuals and create a private forum where people can ask their questions, and together we can seek answers.

Our aims are as follows:

- Make it clear that our destination is obedience to the commandments, where people choose faith. The forum/ course is a temporary pit stop to bolster self reliance and spiritual truth seeking. It is not a belly button fluff picking exercise or designed to set up endless loops of negativity and church bashing. The idea isn't to do endless spin cycles but to catalyse faith and boost immunity.

- Help people take personal responsibility for learning - to graduate from the children's table or one-dimensional, over-simplistic faith models, and move toward an appreciation for complexity, ambiguity, and the responsibility for choosing faith.

- Build the truth processing engine inside of each class participant, able to cope with new information and findings - without their testimonies shattering like glass.

- Look at faithful explanations for events and statements and teach members to consider the source of their research findings and intent of the so-called Bloggernacle.

- Help understand the universal and yet global aims of the church in ordinance work - and that all programmes and policies lead individuals, families and nations to those ordinances. The work is of course going to change emphasis, shift gears, speak to the world - across each culture. As cultures learn to assimilate and adopt the gospel, there will inevitably be aspects of our lives that anthropologists can study and comment on. Try not to get too bent out of shape!

The first lesson will be about sharing concerns and building the curriculum for the following 6 weeks.