December 15, 2015 J. Max Wilson

LDS Conference April 1971 – Meetinghouse Libraries and UX for Gospel Learning

Continuing our ongoing series retrospectively writing about sermons given in past LDS General Conferences, today we are looking at talks from the Priesthood Session of the April 1971 General Conference. Articles by other bloggers about this conference session will be included at the end of this post.

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Today in the church we take resources like teacher training and meetinghouse libraries for granted. It is really interesting looking back at when these programs were new to the church and get a glimpse into the reasons and ideas behind their introduction.

In the Priesthood Session of April 1971, in a talk titled “Prepare Every Needful Thing,” Elder Howard W. Hunter spoke about the progress of establishing resource libraries in every church meetinghouse to facilitate better teaching in the church. He explains:

“The Church Library Coordinating Committee was organized in 1968 under the direction of the First Presidency and has been given the responsibility of coordinating the methods and procedures to be followed in all of the library functions of the Church. This committee supervises the meetinghouse library program, which has been in operation for only a short time. Details of the program were carried to all areas of the Church during the first half of last year.

[…]

The meetinghouse library program is now a permanent program of the Church to assist in better teaching of gospel principles. The quality of teaching will be greatly improved by the implementation of this library of instructional materials, and it will be needed in every meetinghouse. The statistics presented yesterday to the meeting of the Regional Representatives of the Twelve indicate that 72 percent of our meetinghouses now have such libraries. We strongly urge that those who have been slow in moving forward do so as rapidly as possible.”

Continue reading →

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December 8, 2015 J. Max Wilson

LDS Conference April 1971 – The Sexual Revolution and Entertainment Media

As part of an on-going project to study the teachings of the authorities of the church over the years, several LDS bloggers are posting today on sermons given during the Saturday afternoon session of the April 1971 General Conference of the LDS Church. Links to the contributions from other bloggers are included at the end of this post.

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Pleasure Island Entrance – From Disney’s 1940 film Pinocchio

It is interesting to look back after half a century at what the leaders of the LDS church were saying about the Sexual Revolution as it was happening. In the April 1971 conference, Elder Milton R. Hunter spoke on the topic in a talk entitled “Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery“.

Elder Hunter is not well known to most LDS members today. He received a PhD in history from Berkeley in 1935, but rather than continue a career in academics chose to spend his career in LDS religious education. He was called as a member of the  First Council of the Seventy in 1945.

As a general authority, Elder Hunter was well known for early research into archaeological evidence for the Book of Mormon.  He was partially responsible for popularizing the theory that the mythology of the Mayan god Quetzalcoatl retained remnant similarities to the account of Jesus visiting the Americas in the Book of Mormon, albeit distorted through centuries of apostasy– an theory that subsequent research suggests is very unlikely, even though the oversimplified idea that Quetzalcoatl was Jesus is still common in Mormon folklore.

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At the time of the talk I am discussing, Elder Hunter had been a general authority of the church for 26 years. He passed away a few year later in 1975.

Elder Hunter describes the current setting in 1971:

“We are living today in a very permissive society. Having abandoned the ancient Christian morality, many people claim to accept a new morality, which in reality is to live contrary to the laws of chastity as proclaimed by God. We are living in a day when a sexual revolution is being proclaimed. Enticements to illicit behavior are found everywhere. Day by day a flood of them is growing worse in novels, magazines, movies, TV, and advertising.”

The role of entertainment and media in influencing people’s ideas about sex and sexuality cannot be overstated. Continue reading →

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December 1, 2015 J. Max Wilson

LDS Conference April 1971- Hippies, Drugs, and Failure in the Home

Recently I told a friend about how I have been studying past LDS General Conferences and what an interesting and uplifting experience it has been. He suggested that it would be fun if several bloggers would read through past conferences and post about it on their individual blogs at the same time.

Back in the heyday of blogging there was this thing called a “blog carnival” in which several blogs would all write about a common theme and then interlink each other’s posts. We’ve recruited a few bloggers and we’re resurrecting the blog carnival concept. Today we are posting about sermons from the first session of the LDS General Conference of April 1971. Links to the contributions of other blogs are included at the end of this post.

It was the beginning of 1971. The United States was still enquagmired in the Vietnam War. Charles Manson had just been convicted of conspiracy to murder. The ban on TV advertisements for cigarettes had just gone into affect. The sexual revolution was in full swing and the ethos and styles of the Hippie subculture had entered firmly into the mainstream, including the recreational use of mind-altering drugs.

In this context, Elder Marvin J. Ashton of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles who would become a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in December later that year, gave a message entitled “Love of the Right.” Continue reading →

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November 29, 2015 J. Max Wilson

10 Year Blog Anniversary

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Today is the 10 year anniversary of Sixteen Small Stones.

The volume and frequency of my posts here has never been great, and I do not have a large, active community of commenters, but I hope that my small contribution has had a positive influence on those who have read my thoughts here and that what I have lacked in volume I have made up for in quality and clarity.

When I started Sixteen Small Stones, MySpace was a promising new website offering a new social web experience, Facebook was exclusively for college and high school students. YouTube was less than a year old and still in beta. Google Maps was brand new. Windows XP was still the most current operating system from Microsoft. And Twitter, iPhones, iPads, Kindle e-Readers, and Netflix didn’t even exist yet. Continue reading →

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November 8, 2015 J. Max Wilson

God’s Human Delivery System – Sustaining Living Prophets, Seers, and Revelators

 

The following is a slightly edited copy of remarks I gave in the sacrament meeting service of my LDS congregation today. Long time readers will recognize some parts that were adapted from previous essays.

 

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Regarding personal testimony in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, President Uchtdorf, of the First Presidency of the church, has taught that even though each of our individual testimonies are unique and may be a little different from each other, there are five truths that a testimony of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ will always include.

The five truths are:

  • That God lives and He is our loving Heavenly Father
  • That Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of the World
  • That Joseph Smith is the prophet of God through whom the Gospel of Jesus was Restored
  • And that the Book of Mormon of Mormon is the Word of God.
  • That current President of the Church, his Counselors, and the members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles are Prophets, Seers, and Revelators in our day.

It is this fifth truth that is essential to a testimony of the Restore Gospel that I wish to address.

Sustaining the prophets and apostles has become increasingly difficult and controversial. It used to be that what was expected of good members of society aligned reasonably well with the teachings of the church.

But that is no longer true.

In the General Conference of April 1975, Ezra Taft Benson, who was the President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles at that time, said that “practically all objections that have ever been made against the Church by nonmembers and dissident members alike […] hinge on whether Joseph Smith and his successors were and are prophets of God receiving divine revelation.”

In my experience, President Benson was right about this. Objections to the church almost always to boil down to whether or not the modern prophets are really receiving direction from God or not. Continue reading →

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