Elder Oaks gave a talk titled The Plan and the Proclamation in last weekend’s General Conference. He testified of the truthfulness of the teachings in the document and gave history of how it was created, implying it was a revelatory process. He also used the opportunity to ‘weaponize’ the Proclamation to denounce gay marriage. This caused pain […]

    Earlier this year, Bryce Cook published the article ‘What Do We Know of God’s Will For His LGBT Children? An Examination of the LDS Church’s Position on Homosexuality’, which discusses the logic and history on Mormon LGBT views and raises the question whether a revelation accepting gay marriage could ever be possible. The […]

  Why did you choose the domain churchistrue? It’s a fair question. I sometimes regret taking the domain churchistrue and going by that userid. My site and my ‘ministry’ had been in the works for several years previously, so I didn’t take it lightly, but I have been a bit surprised how it’s been perceived. […]

This report is for 2016 published in 2017. For the new report published 3/31/2018 for calendar year 2017 click here. Here are my charts for the LDS Membership Statistics Report, updated with the numbers reported April 1, 2017.   Total members of 15,882,417, raw growth of 1.56% on prior year.     Total Units (Wards and […]

  Earlier this month, Bill Reel did an interview with Samuel Brown, Mormon Scholar, where Sam gave some fascinating insight into the cross pressure many of us feel between religion like Mormonism and intellectualism or the secular.  The interview was for the purpose of introducing the day long seminar on Book of Mormon translation held […]

  One of the most obvious observations is that there is a lot of King James Bible language in the Book of Mormon.  Most obvious are the large portions of Isaiah, Malachi, and Matthew.  There are also well known references to New Testament passages concerning the gifts of the spirit and faith, hope, and charity or […]

Richard Bushman did an interesting interview with Gina Colvin on the Thoughtful Faith podcast on the topic of Book of Mormon translation, as he’s getting ready to present on the subject at the Faith Matters conference on Book of Mormon translation Thursday March 16 at Utah State University.   Anytime you get to listen to Richard […]

The Book of Mormon contains a lot of unique sounding Protestant doctrine, language, and phraseology coming from Joseph Smith’s day of the 19th century. Richard Bushman on this topic said: I think right now the Book of Mormon is a puzzle for us. Even [for] people who believe it in every detail, it’s a puzzle. […]

  Why are people leaving the Mormon Church?  A document from MormonLeaks has caused a stir this week, attributed to Church employee Clint Melander as a Powerpoint for a meeting of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. The most controversial and interesting part of this Powerpoint presentation was a slide titled ‘Issues and Ideas Leading […]

This post is a write up of some random thoughts of the past few weeks while working on Sunday School Gospel Doctrine lesson preparation the last month, covering multiple First Vision accounts, seerstone translation, and Oliver Cowdery’s divining rod. I continue to be impressed with the church’s efforts to transition from the old way of […]