This week, the priesthood lesson is going to be chapter 12 of Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Howard W. Hunter. It is titled “Come Back and Feast at the Table of the Lord,” and its focus is helping the inactive return to activity in the Church. As members, we are to leave the ninety and nine and go into the wilderness in search of the one sheep that is lost.

My many close friends who have left the Church have given me ample opportunity to commune with sheep in the wilderness. This has been supplemented by reading online the thoughts of Mormons of every stripe: traditional Mormons, (so-called) progressive Mormons, ex-Mormons, etc.

I was raised with the typical understanding of inactive members of the Church. They were uncommitted. This meant that they wouldn’t take responsibility to help in the ward. They were lazy and would rather not live by the strict rules of worthiness.

That certainly may describe some, perhaps even many. However, it does not describe my close friends who have left the Church, nor the ex-Mormons who write about their experiences online.

Let me describe a hypothetical person who represents my friends who have left the Church. I’ll call this hypothetical conglomerate Peter. Peter faithfully served a full time mission. Peter attended Brigham Young University, where he actively participated in the student ward. After courtship, Peter married Molly in the temple, graduated, and started his career. At this point, Peter probably seems like an ideal, true believing Mormon. Yet within a few years, he had left the Church.

What surprises me about the Peters that I know personally and whose writings I have read online is that while their departures seem sudden, they aren’t. Peter spent years of wrestling trying to find a way to stay in the Church. The departure was both thoroughly considered and painful.

The underlying logic for all of the Peters I know boils down to the same basic Mad Lib:

I can’t believe that priesthood leader(s) would do a thing like troubling action . God would never call someone who would do a thing like that!

One should not underestimate the stakes of questions of this type. One cannot easily ignore a single question of this type because of all of the other great things that the Church is or does. Once a member loses faith in prophets, they will leave the Church founded and run by prophets.

Let’s consider an example. A person who has left the Church, or perhaps is in a pre-departure faith crisis might say, “I can’t believe that Joseph Smith would do a thing like marrying a fourteen-year-old. God would never call someone who would do a thing like that!”

Now, there are a couple of ways that a faithful member might be inclined to respond to an issue like this. “Oh,” the member might say, “that’s just an anti-Mormon lie. That didn’t happen.”

The thing is, it did happen, and you can now read about it on LDS.org. It’s understandable that most members might not know about such things. For the past few decades the Church has put much more emphasis on uplifting the faith of its members than on teaching the difficult aspects of its history. Boyd K. Packer famously suggested that, “Not everything that is true is useful.”

Unfortunately, the fact that such things are not commonly known by members means that they are sometimes shocked to learn them from sources other than the Church. Many wonder if the Church could have something to hide. Why else would Church curriculum avoid these difficult topics? These troubling implications are often as much a wedge for a struggling member as the difficult topics themselves.

A second common faithful response is bad apologetics. “Joseph Smith was such a great man, that this couldn’t have had the bad implications that you suggest,” an apologist might say. “It must have only been a sealing rather than a fully-realized sexually-consummated marriage.”

Inevitably, these arguments fail to satisfy, despite the best efforts of the apologists, because the premise of the argument is fundamentally wrong: we don’t believe that Joseph Smith or any other man is a prophet because of their superior character. In fact, we learn in Doctrine and Covenants that prophets can err and sin (D&C 1:24-28), we witness Joseph being chastised by the Lord for his transgressions (D&C 3), and we learn of the procedure for excommunicating a prophet (D&C 107:81-84). Perhaps it is because of the imperfections of men that the Lord directs the Church to receive the words of the prophet not only with faith, but with patience (D&C 21:5).

Extending our consideration of prophets beyond the latter-days, we can easily recognize that prophets of the past were not chosen because they had perfect character. The great prophet Moses was kept out of the promised land because he disobeyed. Jonah wanted to run away from his assignment. God said no. Jonah wanted to curse the city he was called to teach. God said no. The Book of Mormon had prophets like Omni, who wrote only three verses of scripture and stated, “I of myself am a wicked man, and I have not kept the statutes and the commandments of the Lord as I ought to have done” (Omni 1:2). And if we extend the list to apostles, we find Judas Iscariot.

God doesn’t call perfect leaders, and we should not expect perfection from our leaders. When we foster the idea that prophets are perfect in our homes and wards, we sew the seeds of apostasy. Members will continue to feel shocked and betrayed when they learn of the imperfections of their leaders until we learn to teach nuanced, realistic expectations of our leaders. Of course we should lead with the milk of God revealing his truth to prophets before we deal with the meaty, thorny issue of prophetic fallibility, but we should address it for the sake of those who are struggling.

Recognizing the human side of a prophet need not diminish our respect for the man nor the office. After all, members often do pretty well at striking that balance with family members and local leaders. We respect them for their accomplishments and their sacrifices, and love them unconditionally despite their faults.

It has been said that the Catholic doctrine is that the Pope is infallible, but no one believes it, while the Mormon doctrine is that the prophet is fallible… and no one believes it. If we can change our attitude as a community, we can help people stay active in the Church.