The Church That Could Save The World, But Chooses Not To

The Church That Could Save The World

But Chooses Not To

This is the same church that could bring in the millennium but chooses not to. It has the means, or could get the means, but it does not have the will. Just to be clear, I am speaking of the LDS Church.

And why do the central church leaders choose not to change the world when they could do so? It is hard to know their thoughts, but, presumably, it is because it would be inconvenient to the leaders to do so. Obviously, the basic concepts of the gospel are in conflict with much of what is taught and done in the world, so, if the church leaders were more vigorous in their support of gospel principles, they would be in almost constant conflict with the world in some way and on some level. Is that really enough reason for their constant timidity and lack of significant change? Apparently they believe it is.

But their choices are in serious conflict with the actions of almost every other prophet or set of prophets that have ever lived on the Earth. We could begin with the vigorous lives of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, but at every other time in the recorded history of the earth, the lives of the prophets were filled with conflict and activity. Certainly, Moses had a tumultuous time as the head of the church in his era. Even though he lived to be 100 years of age, he had no time for being part of a retirement community.

Perhaps the church today could be called "the church of convenience." We now have vast powers of transportation and communication which were unthinkable in other centuries, but it appears that these vast technological powers have actually been used to allow the church headquarters to accomplish less than it ever has before, rather than more. Perhaps these vast powers are also very useful in promoting Satan's concepts and resisting the church of Christ. Although they offer a way to get out the gospel message more easily and more quickly, they also provide for quicker and stronger negative reactions and more resistance. Perhaps these new powers and possibilities have the church leaders in a state of shock, overwhelmed by their potential negative consequences.

Whatever the answer might be about church leader reasoning, it appears that we can say that unless something very basic and radical changes with the church and its administration, it has already done everything it is ever going to do in this earthly realm. Hundreds of years from now there is little or no measurable change to be expected. Although there is a very minimal level of current incremental growth, the church is actually shrinking relative to the growth of the rest of the world. This makes the whole prophesied gospel project seem like it is effectively over.  The two other church restorations accomplished personally by Christ himself disintegrated after about 200 years, and as we are on the cusp of the 200 year mark ourselves, it appears that we will suffer the same fate.

As a church member, I find this very depressing, and I suspect that many others do too, although I don't know how many would express themselves that way. As the church criticism levels seem to be going up, and the member activity levels seem to be going down, these negative trends could easily be tied to the performance of the church headquarters itself.

We might notice that today the all-in centralized cost of finding and integrating a new long-term member of the church is about $400,000. The all-in centralized cost of a new long-term member at the beginning of the last three restorations of the church, including ours, was zero. The church was growing rapidly in those other three periods, while it is shrinking today, at least relatively if not absolutely. If we can't explain and greatly modify these extreme differences in costs and results, we have to assume that there is no hope for any improvements in the future.

Over the past few years, I have written at least 50 different articles as part of my personal effort to analyze and describe the situation of the church today and what can be done to make it better. None of these articles were actually published, but were simply a means of recording the results of my various research steps. Even at the end of that process I still did not feel like I had a complete grasp of today's situation. However, I believe I have developed a working set of theories about where we are, and how we got here, and what we can do about it, to allow the church to fulfill its prophetic mission. It seems inconceivable at this point that I will ever have the time and the wit to rewrite all of these articles from a different viewpoint or to integrate them into some single descriptive volume.

What I offer then is an introduction to a few of the articles, plus those few articles themselves as they appeared in their original form. It is quite likely that the reader will find them somewhat incomplete and inconsistent and perhaps even contradictory at times. Hopefully, however, the reader will gradually come to understand the main points which I have discovered and wish to pass on. Perhaps there are others who can use this information as a starting point to more completely research and write that desperately needed fully integrated treatise on this major problem of the church and its current and future place in the world.

Perhaps the reader can think of this publication as a book within a book. These first few pages are intended to set the tone and some goals and to be a guide for the serious student of today's church, while the much larger (and still slightly rough) embedded book entitled Restoring the Restoration: Repairing 200 Years of LDS Doctrinal Drift and Reaping the Benefits fills in most of the details.

With any luck, making this body of information available will start a lot of people down a fruitful path of research and introspection and writing which can then gradually create an entire community body of work on a new kind of "Mormon studies" which are focused on how to get the church back on the right doctrinal and administrative paths to make it be as successful as was the church which Christ himself restored, at least for the first 200 years of that early restoration.

A few items not found in the attached book

A new take on the original apostasy

Much of early church history appears to have been lost, or at least kept out of sight as inconvenient. The widely accepted version of history that deals with the question of how the church after the time of Christ went into apostasy seems to put forth and rely upon claims about the deaths of all the apostles as the reason for the church going astray. However, there is no particularly obvious reason to think that might be the actual story. The first vacancy in the 12 apostles was easily refilled after the death of Judas. A vote and an ordination was all that was required by the remaining apostles, the work of a day or two. Unless all 12 apostles were simultaneously killed on the same day, it seems likely that there were many opportunities to keep the quorum filled over the next 250 years.

However unpleasant and inconvenient it might be today to be able to more closely examine early church history, the apparent extreme likelihood is that the church ceased to teach and live by correct principles simply because the living apostles were intimidated or corrupted or co-opted. How can the Roman Catholic Church, stemming from the events of about 300 AD, even claim to be continuous back to the beginning if there were no apostles to make a credible transfer of authority to popes under the influence of Constantine? The Catholic Church claims that Peter was the first bishop of Rome who then immediately became the first pope of Rome. They would say that his papacy began in A.D. 30. Again according to Christian traditions, Peter was crucified in Rome under Emperor Nero Augustus Caesar between AD 64 and 68 (with Peter's age between 62 and 67). In other words, according to tradition, Peter was an apostle and head of the church for up to 38 years before his death. It has been estimated that the Christian church had reached the 500,000 membership mark by AD 100 (at an implied growth rate of 7.5% for 70 years). (The population of the Roman Empire was somewhere around 4 million to 5 million people by the end of the first century AD)

At that 7.5% growth rate for the 38 years to A.D. 68, the membership size could easily have been 50,000 members. Obviously, the church did grow quickly or it could never have eventually displaced paganism in the Roman nation. It is estimated to have reached a 5 million membership by AD 300. The main point here is that with 50,000 members at the time of Peter's death, there could easily have been as many apostles available as might be needed to continue the church properly. At that point, the death of one man, even a very important man like Peter, should not have destroyed the whole movement, or left it so adrift and leaderless that it could be easily and profitably co-opted 250 years later by religious allies of Constantine. The very fact that it continued to grow at such a rapid pace for its first 270 years seems to indicate that there was continuous leadership, but that that leadership was eventually corrupted and co-opted by Roman politics.

We might note that although the LDS church today claims to have about 15 million members, the actual number of active members is apparently only in the range of about 3 million, based on the number of chapels and other meeting houses needed to provide meeting space for the active membership. And that is after about 200 years of growth. If the Christians in the Roman civilization reached about 5 million by about 300 AD, after 270 years of growth, that obviously makes the two situations quite similar. This argues strongly for the possibility that the process of drift within the Roman church was very much like the apparent process of drift that has happened to our own church, and that the final outcome will be the same.

In summary, blaming the loss of purity of the original church on the death of Peter and other of the original apostles seems like a very poor and incomplete explanation of how the original church grew to a 5 million membership before being corrupted by politics. One might more reasonably expect that the church would have been snuffed out completely by the loss of those earliest leaders, if no more leaders emerged to take their place. But, to repeat, the church continued to rapidly grow to be about 5 million in size before it was drawn off the narrow path, implying the continual availability of active leadership.

Using the kind of logic commonly heard today about the early apostasy should mean that after the death of Joseph Smith the church was hopelessly and irretrievably corrupted simply because of that loss, just as it is argued that the death of Peter meant the hopeless corruption of the original church. But that is not what happened in our time, as evidenced by the string of apostles who followed in the footsteps of Joseph Smith after his death, so perhaps that is not what happened after the time of Peter either.

The main question then seems to be whether the corruption of the apostles happened in one step, possibly including the direct corruption or loss of Peter, as the Catholics seem to be claiming, or if more steps and generations were required. Perhaps there are records which go back that far which actually describe the deterioration process in some detail, but, if so, they have been kept out of sight. If I were an avid conspiracy theorist, I might accuse the LDS church today of having a hand in making sure those records are not available for fear they might demonstrate that the church today is following in the footsteps of its predecessors in seeking to build a worldly political empire using incorrect principles rather than focusing all its efforts on spreading the gospel in its original purity, including using the original administrative methods.

The traditions of the fathers -- an irony

What is so very strange about all my studies on this question of the current state of the church is that even though we are told to read the Book of Mormon every day of our lives, and we receive all these ideological preparations including many warnings, we are nonetheless reenacting the greatest ideological and sociological errors of the Book of Mormon "as we speak," as they say. The great lie in the Book of Mormon, initiated by Laman and Lemuel, and then perpetuated by all of their descendants, was that a great political and religious wrong had been done to Laman and Lemuel, justifying their rebellion and attacks on their "tormentors."  Those lies that were repeated again and again by their descendants for more than a thousand years, were that somehow Nephi had stolen the birthright from his elder brothers, and that the Lamanites had suffered horribly ever since under subjugation, even though the two societies of the Lamanites and the Nephites mostly lived completely separately, and there was no practical possibility of the Nephites continually exploiting the Lamanites.  In fact, the truth was, that the Nephites were often in bondage to the Lamanites, being taxed and exploited when they weren't being exterminated by the Lamanites. It never, or only rarely, happened the other way around, with the Nephites exploiting the Lamanites, but that simple truth never seemed to get in the way of the convenient and self-serving Lamanite political narrative.

All of this bizarre and endless hatred and sociological insanity was perpetuated for more than a thousand years until the "eternal victims", the Lamanites, finally destroyed their "oppressors" through a series of genocidal wars which were finally successful in exterminating the "exploiting" group.  At that point, the only "exploiters" of the "victim group" was that victim group itself, and they continued in a degenerate and even further deteriorating sociological situation ever after, endlessly exploiting and murdering each other as they had the Nephites, presumably continually adjusting the "traditions of the fathers" to justify any cruelties they might decide to carry out.

The ability of a few lies and the sustaining traditions of the fathers to make white into black and black into white, and to maintain that confused "alternate reality" mental state for thousands of years, is truly remarkable.  We apparently imagine today that we are so wise and so advanced and so intelligent that we would never make the kinds of mistakes which the Lamanites and all their allies made in charging the Nephites with grievous ancient lies and errors and then prosecuting their case to the point of exterminating their supposed enemies.  Even though this "traditions of the fathers" process was interrupted for 200 years by the coming of Christ and the enjoyment of the full Gospel for that time period, nonetheless, the ancient traditions of the fathers were somehow resurrected, and the task of the wrong side killing off the right side was finally accomplished.  But then, of course, in good tribal warfare fashion, new "enemies" and "exploiters" were found acting against the "victims," so that the victims felt justified in destroying the "exploiters" and the "enemies."

This is all so ugly and brutal that it seems incomprehensible that humans could descend so low, but this was all made possible over and over again, for thousands of years, because of the traditions of the fathers.  And the traditions of the fathers could come and go in cycles, some of those cycles being no more than a year or two, even though there were longer cycles, overlaying the shorter cycles, which may have lasted up to 600 years.

In our own case, our particular traditions of the fathers only seem to go back a little more than a hundred years to the time when LDS church leaders discovered the benefits of the "new" concept of a paid ministry as they found a way to receive reliable flows of funds from the church members to maintain their own desired lifestyle.

At this point, these and other total inversions of original Gospel principles have been maintained so long and so vigorously and so successfully, that today's church members believe the exact opposite of what the Scriptures teach.  Even in our own case, black has become white, and white has become black, on many important doctoral and practical issues.

What this means in practice is that today's church members are so saturated by our own set of "traditions of the fathers," that long-term mind control technique, that it is nearly impossible for them to understand the truth even when it is presented to them clearly.  They have become so certain that black is white and white is black that they are essentially impervious to the actual truth. We say that we are great seekers of the truth, looking for it wherever it can be found, while, at the same time, carrying with us such great errors of understanding, that, in many cases, we would not recognize the truth if we saw it.

As another level of irony upon irony, we now see among us the "new Lamanite" groups of dissenters who go out of their way to invent new lies of exploitation, and then gradually, through a large amount of propaganda effort, turn them into a new "traditions of the fathers" which can affect millions of people.

Perhaps we can say that we are at the same point the Book of Mormon society had reached after the time of the coming of Christ when the Lamanites "remembered" the "vast wrongs" supposedly done against them nearly a thousand years before, and began to justify killing their ideological competitors, the Nephites.

This all becomes much harder and more confusing because today's "Nephites" have themselves absorbed a large number of perfectly wrong and backwards traditions of the fathers, which, unfortunately, give some real basis to the new "Lamanites" to invent and propagate their new version of the old traditions of the fathers that ended up with all the Nephites being exterminated.

This is a very sad and twisted situation, being repeated for the umpteenth time, and hardly anyone seems to know what is going on right before their eyes.  It is these kinds of considerations, and this kind of blindness all around, that make it seem highly likely that, after 200 years, the church will destroy itself in our own time, just as it managed to destroy itself from within about 200 years after the coming of Christ to the Old World and 200 years after the coming of Christ to the New World.

In the political world these days, there is much said about "global warming" or "climate change," which seems to consist of a hysterical set of pro-taxing pro-government atheistic ideological totalitarians trying to convince everyone else that the normal climate cycles of our earth, which have been going on from the beginning of time, were actually recently caused by man, and somehow threaten all life on the planet, and that only these enlightened few visionaries can save us from a certain end.  Of course, these hysterical groups are atheists who completely discount the fact that God may have something to say about what happens to the earth he created and his children living on it, but if their propaganda is strong enough and persistent enough, perhaps this is a way for the reflexively totalitarian atheist groups to enslave all others through this constant propaganda which they hope will turn into a new traditions of the fathers which will numb the thinking of the masses which then will allow themselves to be exploited, as the atheists are excitedly hoping to accomplish.

These are a few of the examples of the weak and limited thinking skills of most people on the planet, and, apparently, the Mormons are at least as vulnerable to this kind of manipulation as anyone else.

All of these kinds of musings seem to tell me that it is essentially impossible to stop the deterioration of the gospel once it has reached its 200 year mark (evidencing another kind of religious algorithmic inefficiency -- see below), and that the "truth," wherever it may be found, will be so unrecognizable and preemptively rejected that it is simply impossible to stop this slide into ideological oblivion.  Anyone who tries to act against this avalanche of foolishness will simply be pushed aside or even crushed out, and those doing the crushing will see themselves as heroes, just as the Lamanites probably saw themselves as heroes, perhaps as "saving humanity," as they slaughtered the Nephites, or as any other society in the history of the world might have considered themselves heroes as they destroyed any prophets that might have come among them to disturb their settled and comfortable mindset.

However, even though the Mormons may have a few mental health issues related to the "traditions of the fathers" mechanism, they may still be the sanest people that can actually be found.  So as long as there is the slightest chance that this rush into oblivion can be stopped, there remains an impulse to try to stop it.

Algorithmic efficiency

I first began my studies of the state of the church in our time by looking at the algorithmic efficiencies of the extremely large church programs concerning genealogy and family history.  These programs consume at least $2 billion in church member resources each year, with about $0.5 billion in cash and about $1.5 billion in volunteer time.  When I finally discovered and verified that it was perfectly feasible to carry on the same process with at least 100 times more efficiency, that meant that costs could be lowered to 1% of current costs. In some cases 1000 times more efficiency could be achieved, meaning the costs could be reduced to 0.1% of current costs.  I naturally became quite alarmed at this extreme ineffectiveness which leaders are very determined to continue.

The procedures and algorithms used in those genealogy and family history projects are so ineffective that it becomes completely impossible to ever finish the genealogy even for the United States, let alone for the world.  To illustrate, using current methods it would cost more than $900 trillion just to finish the United States.  That is such a large number that it might as well be infinity.  This makes the costs of each new unique name submitted to the temples something in the range of $2000, when a cost of $2 should be closer to the average cost.

Moving on to look at the missionary program, it appears that we are currently spending about $400,000 in church resources for each new long-term convert. That seems like an absurd amount and serves to indicate how self-centered and inward looking we have become.  A family of five new converts would thus represent the church members spending $2 million in total.  This should be enough for a family to buy a new home and have the parents retire for the rest of their lives.  Obviously, with this kind of extreme inefficiency, there's no chance at all for the church to have significant growth.

I think most people assume that governments and charitable organizations are not typically known for their efficiencies, but the track record of the LDS Church in the areas of genealogy work and missionary work is so bad as to be almost incomprehensible. 

Another even more fundamental algorithmic inefficiency is demonstrated by the fact that the church now, even with all its modern technology, including information storage and processing technology, has no mechanism to maintain its own purity beyond the 200 year mark, just as the last two versions of the church started by Christ himself also contained no mechanism to maintain their purity beyond the 200 year mark. Apparently, the natural human tendency to become victims of the long-term mind control phenomenon known as "the traditions of the fathers" is a basic human characteristic which is inevitably and always successfully exploited by Satan's minions. Only an extraordinarily vigorous process, never seen before among men, could hold the church to the straight and narrow path for centuries on end.

Age of leaders vs. wickedness of world

There could be some advantage to having men long past retirement age managing the church because of their breadth of experience and long memories. But, at the same time, they are also likely to be extremely restrained and cautious. It is hard to imagine a 90-year-old man who is also an ideological and sociological firebrand, something like Joseph Smith at age 25, willing and able to put forth the level of effort and commitment it would take to actually change the world for the better. Most men of that advanced age are weak and timid and just want the peace and quiet of typical retirement. They are not inclined to take on giant worldwide problems at that stage of their life.

So we truly do have a geriatric viewpoint concerning the mission of the church on all levels. Just as most of these men have finished their life's work and are happy to have enough savings to see them through retirement, possibly with their new church calling being a nice supplement to their pension, they similarly seem to think that the church has already done its life's work by merely establishing itself, and all it needs at this point is to have a quiet retirement which only requires a few steady and unexcitable caretakers to make sure that it doesn't completely disappear.

All these leaders need to do now is to keep the younger and more aggressive church members calmed down to keep them from somehow generating ideological or practical conflicts with the world which might complicate the lives of the church leaders and destroy their serenity. Maintaining that calming effect now becomes job number one. It seems that the concept of changing the world fell into the church memory hole about 100 years ago, as the focus turned to merging with the world and being fully accepted by it and avoiding any conflict with it on any level.

Perhaps the first 70 years of extreme and nearly unabated conflict with the world left many of the remaining leaders burned out and anxious to end that phase of the church's history. However, the pendulum has obviously swung far too much the other way now, with the church embracing almost every ideological and practical aspect of the world, only managing to delay by a few years its members' acceptance of nearly every bad aspect of worldly culture that comes along. At this point, overcoming that well-established and well-entrenched inertia would both require and cause a great stir indeed. It is hard to even imagine where such a vigorous positive influence could come from that would not be quickly squelched by a very comfortable central headquarters.

To justify the leaders lack of vigorous action and their lack of world-changing success, it appears that the world is blamed for being too wicked to heed the gospel message, with that message weakly presented or simply made available, and the members are blamed for being too lazy and stingy to overcome all opposition, all the while that the central headquarters is absorbing and "managing" perhaps $12 billion in resources each year, which implies the ability to compete head-on with such successful opinion makers as Hollywood and the mainstream media. This impulse to blame others and to fail to accept these large responsibilities is not consistent with the historical gospel as it appears in the Scriptures. Many of the prophets of old accepted impossible odds and yet were often successful. The prophet Jonah is one good example. Christ himself, a single man in a hostile world, is of course another good example.

Their current answer is to send out the young people to handle all the conflict with society while they stay in Salt Lake City and hope that everyone in the world will love them and they will experience no conflict. At times, they seem more concerned about suppressing conflict between members and the central church, than they are about the necessary and righteous conflict between the gospel and those who are outside the church who would resist it. This demonstrates the strength of their desire to live a peaceful harmonious life without conflict from any source.

The leaders seem to be claiming that the church is not growing because the world is too wicked. But I don't see the evidence to support that claim. It appears to me that there are still a very large number of good people who are keeping our society from collapsing, and the bulk of those people are not associated with us or in league with us in some way. If we were doing and promoting the right things, it's likely that they would want to join with us. There are many of these people who cry out for a return of the prophets or wonder why the prophets we have are so silent and timid.

Since the LDS church is itself indulging in some of the administrative errors and inefficiencies that these politically conservative non-members disapprove of concerning our state and federal governments, that observation would naturally make these outsiders less anxious to join up with us. If we could fix that, I believe more of them would join with us in the grand Christian freedom project which began hundreds of year ago and resulted in the rise of the United States.