Chapter 41: "Every Member a Missionary" (Part 1)

A couple of years ago, Elder M. Russell Ballard gave a General Conference address in which he suggested a tool Church members could use in sharing the Gospel:

“You may want to prepare your own list of talking points that will assist you in explaining what we believe to your friends and acquaintances of other faiths. It may be helpful for you, as it is for me, to have on one page a few facts about the Church as it is today to give to them along with a copy of the Articles of Faith” (M. Russell Ballard, “Faith, Family, Facts, and Fruits,” Ensign, Nov 2007, 25–27.)

Did you try this? (If so, I'd love to hear about your experience!) When I heard this talk, I thought, "That's a great idea!" I wrote it down, and then I never seemed to get around to doing it. A few months later, I was assigned to teach a Relief Society lesson on Elder Ballard's talk, so I decided it was time to make my own one-page summary of beliefs.

Now, I have not yet had the opportunity to use the summary I created, but I did learn something very important from the experience--that it is amazingly difficult to summarize my beliefs in one page! When you stop and think about it, we as Latter-day Saints believe so many things. We believe in prophets. We believe in tithing. We believe in food storage, family history, and the pre-mortal existence. And the list goes on and on. How do you choose what to put on that one-page summary and what to leave off?

The answer, I believe, is that we need to understand how those doctrines all fit together. In the Church, we most often study the Gospel topically--focusing on one doctrine at a time, but seldom stepping back to see how everything connects in the "big picture". The key is to "boil down" the Gospel to its most basic level and work out from there.

So, what is the Gospel in its most basic form? Doctrine & Covenants 76:40-42 teaches that the Gospel is

"That he came into the world, even Jesus, to be crucified for the world, and to bear the sins of the world, and to sanctify the world, and to cleanse it from all unrighteousness; That through him all might be saved."

In other words, the core of the Gospel is the Plan of Salvation. Every doctrine, if it is true, must somehow connect to this core.

Because the Plan of Salvation is very simple and, at the same time, very profound, people have come up with various models that can help us visualize the Plan. (See this Ensign article in text or pdf format for a great discussion of several such models.) The most commonly used model is one we could call "circles and lines" or "circles and arrows". (Click here for a visual.) The strength of this model is that it answers the questions, "Where did we come from?", "Why are we here?", and "Where do we go after we die?" One major weakness of this model, though, is that it leaves out what Bruce R. McConkie called "The Three Pillars of Eternity": the Creation, the Fall, and the Atonement.

Another way to look at the Plan of Salvation is represented by the words found in Moses 1:39: "For behold, this is my work and my glory--to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man." This is truly the Gospel in a nutshell! For all of you Star Trek fans, this reminds me a lot of the concept of the Prime Directive--a basic principle that we can refer to when we have a question about something or a difficult decision to make. Moses 1:39 really should be our "Prime Directive"! Everything we do--especially in our families and in the Church--should be referred to it by asking: Is this helping to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man?

So the next question is, what is our role as Church members in the Plan? As President Ezra Taft Benson taught, "We have a sacred responsibility to fulfill the threefold mission of the Church--first, to teach the gospel to the world; second, to strengthen the membership of the Church wherever they may be; third, to move forward the work of salvation for the dead" ("A Sacred Responsibility," Ensign, May 1986, p. 77). So, basically, the purpose of the Church is "to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life" of three groups of people: Church members, non-members, and those who have passed away. In other words, all of God's children.

How do we do that? By bringing others to Christ, so that He can bring them to the Father. I love the imagery found in 3 Nephi 27:13-15 of Christ on the cross--lifted up with arms outstretched, inviting us to come to Him: "that as I have been lifted up by men even so should men be lifted up by the Father" (v. 14). Our responsibility, then, is to lift each other up toward Christ.