The Personal

"The goal here is for people to understand that any institution, any collection of people, is really just a manifestation of the beliefs of its members."
--Scott Swofford, director of media in the LDS Church's Missionary Department

The Church published this on their blog after the release of mormon.org 4.0. The point of the new site is to facilitate, "...more effective person-to-person connection modeled after unique qualities found in face-to-face communication." We send over 51,000 missionaries out to all countries of the world, attempting to teach people this message through face to face communication. Indeed, Christ himself went among the people, teaching His sermons, appointing his disciples to go and do the same. It seem the key form to liberating this gospel out of obscurity, the key to spreading the church, is person to person communication, is personal, is the individual.

I commented in my earlier posts that the Book of Mormon, a key to conversion, is a personal account of the happenings on the American continent. Here's my thought process:

• The Church's strongest tool for conversion is the "personal"...so what.

• Through launching mormon.org 4.0, the Church has utilized the resources available through the internet to put a personal face on the church...so what.

• While this has increased the viewings of the website ("Visitors to Mormon.org have nearly tripled over the past year to 650,000 per month, thanks to promotional efforts and a growing public interest in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" -- LDS Newsroom), we as members of the LDS church can take it a step further. We can further liberate the messages of the gospel from the stigma of "Mormon" or self-marketing by creating our own forums where we share our thoughts about our religion.

What is more liberating than the breadth and depth one gets through reading others' interpretations? The reason literature exists at all is because personal interpretations differ. There is no one reality to which we all subscribe, for each person's understanding of existence makes for as many realities as there are people to create them.