Straight Forward Questions

[darinhouston]

Besides a group dividing itself based on different beliefs, teachings, or teaching by one man only, as many groups do... The LDS has different meeting formats, styles, and policies. There is no clergy nor live ministery and is an entirely local unpaid lay group. You meet within the wardship boundary where you reside. Most people that attend on sunday have a "calling" or job within the group. Its mostly a service group rather than a church ministry per se. After the blessing and passing of the bread & water (instead of wine), singing some general protestant hymns, and listening to 3-4 (:10) talks by group members, we then break off into various groups for sunday school, youth, and children's meetings. Some people may just prefer a livelier ministry perhaps, but this is standard LDS. We do use learning materials sent out to all the buildings from SLC,UT which can be found on line at LDS.org. This is standard. The LDS is a tithing based administration out of SLC,UT where all tithes & gifts collected are sent.

The format actually sounds nice, though there are a sufficient number of Catholics who I've heard say similar things about their own parish experiences notwithstanding my knowledge of their beliefs that I dare say that I suspect your experience may not be normative for LDS. Maybe you've been lucky, and as long as the members of your group are somehow authentic Christians in spite of their church doctrines, and you can avoid being "contaminated" by wrong doctrine, then maybe there's little to worry about, but I suspect it's difficult to avoid the effects of false doctrine and one might wonder whether it's even a Christian fellowship -- hence the interest in getting to the root of what appear to be the doctrinal errors of the LDS church (official or otherwise).

[Jill]

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[Jill]

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[Joshua]

Joshua and darinhouston, your drills and comments have been so helpful, thankyou.

Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions.