Mormon Missionaries Mocking

Jason Janz, site publisher and founder of the megablog, Sharper Iron, no- Jason Ehmann, pastor in Rigby, Idaho, just sent me this link.

I guess LDS missionaries carry the same fallen nature as the troublesome, notorious street preachers at Temple Square.

We all have depraved human natures.  Thank God for the work of Christ.

22 comments

  2. I go beyond discipline. Clark, I visibly, publicly separate myself and our congregation from the “notorious” street preachers. When on temple grounds, I would seek to minister to them the gracious gospel as much as I would desire with LDS friends.

    And have not there been others doing this in the conservative evangelical community, Clark?

    And sometime, it would be good to explore the fundamental presuppositions that I carry and LDS friends carry about the vital topic of church discipline. What requires church discipline in the local ward? And why?

  3. Missionaries who behave like this do not deserve the title they use. If you leave on a mission to behave like this please stay home.

  4. What a sad sad thing to have happen. I was glad to see the LDS Church denounced the actions of these boys. I hope they do the right thing and pay for the damage the boys did while representing the Church as well as discipline them. I guess the bar still needs to be raised a bit higher.

  5. I’m pleased you do that Todd. I’ll confess I don’t know the actions of conservative Evangelicals with regards to street preachers. I am interested. Do you have links to articles you’ve written on this?

    As to the issue of discipline in the local ward that doesn’t really apply in this case since Missionaries aren’t properly a part of any ward. (Unless they have completed their missions and are home I suppose) As to what demands church discipline it is usually significant illegal actions or certain kinds of sexual sin. In a few cases false teaching are brought before a council.

  6. “One wish there were some way of the Evangelical community doing that to the street preachers.”

    Huh???

    How do you draw a similarity between trespassing and destroying someone’s property, and “street preaching”? The two are not one in the same.

    That’s like linking a drunk-driver accident with…well..just driving down the road.

    I appreciate the efforts to shift the focus from these LDS young men to someone else, but in this case it falls a bit short of successful.

  7. Mike, I think he means similar in the sense that both are forms of misbehavior and disrespect of other religions. Very different forms, of course.

    I agree though. Maybe it’s best to just let the Mormon misbehave-ors have their time in the spotlight without trying to point fingers elsewhere. After all, Todd has done posts critical of the street preachers already. This post isn’t about them. It’s about the transgressions of Mormon missionaries.

    Mike’s right. Stay on topic.

  8. Clark, scratch that. My brain’s not really working today. I just noticed that Todd specifically mentioned street preachers in his original post. So I guess they were actually fair game.

    Doh!

  9. For the record from the Photos I could hardly tell what was happening in the Catholic Church in one and the one with the statue head, it looked to me like the Missionary was picking it up and seeing if it could be put back or repaired. The picture of the statue was not very telling if the missionary was in the wrong. However the one Mocking another faith was not the actions I expect from a messenger of God.

    About disipline I think they should be shiped back home if they are in the wrong. But How can I tell what happened I wasn’t there.

  11. ditchu

    Good on you. You are the only person that seems to have noticed that there was question on whether they had removed the head. Everyone else seems to have found them guilty. tsk tsk. What happened to all that “Christian” stuff?

    As to respect for pagan rituals, while I agree that we should show respect to people believing them, I can understand private disrespect of the thing itself. They didn’t do this as a public demonstration, but believed they were sharing private feelings. It seems to me that the thing they were guilty of was being caught on camera.

  14. An MTC teacher would regularly tell us missionaries-in-training that “the Church is true or else the missionaries would have destroyed it a long time ago.”

    At the time we thought it was a funny remark due to the nature of bumbling 19-year-olds who might not grasp cultural nuances or who mis-speak. But as I look back on that remark, I now know that the actions of 19-year-olds do far more damage than any naiveté.

    Time and time again, we (my comp and I) would see and hear of other missionaries do the dumbest things. Often we would brace for backlash from the community. Sometimes it would come, othertimes it would be mild. Miraculously, the work went and still goes on today.

    At least where I served, far worse happened there than in Colorado. But where I served, there was no national media and so the “news” remained local.

  15. Mike, on the street preacher point, Todd and Clark were referring to specific anti-Mormon street preachers who desecrate objects sacred to Mormons at General Conference in front of the thousands of Mormons walking to the Conference Center and waiting in line to enter.

  16. When I arrived in my first town in Japan as a missionary I soon discovered that there were almost no young single adults still attending in our branch. I later heard that this was because about one year before my arrival, a missionary had personally given marriage proposals to every single one of the young single sisters.

    Jerk.

  17. Seth, I really shouldn’t be laughing heartily in my chair upon reading the actions of that crazy, young LDS elder.

    But everybody be at ease – that story probably won’t end up in a comedy LDS missionary movie.

  18. Privat or Public… It seems to me this is a warning for all missionaries. Though you are most likely paying for this opertunity you are never in a situation that is private unless you shut yourself in your closet to pray. That may be the only private place left to you. A lesson to us all, there is nothing private anymore when we are in a public place. the camera is always watching. Also there are loads of worse things on the television during primetime, As people I understand these actions (if they indeed happened) but for missionaries they need to hold themselves to the highest standard.

    A note on the captions of an image. There is a term in the poprizzi and they are the freelance news, it is “The Money Shot.” The Money Shot may be of an innocent action that looks as if someone id doing wrong, and with the right caption can sell the general public on it. That is the business the news is in.

  19. “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.”

    May we all come to know Christ’s love and forgiveness this Easter.

  20. Easter?

    Easter!

    I am about ready to burst, Steve.

    My debt was so great. So awful.

    But talk about resurrection power!

  22. I once went to a Catholic shrine as a missionary. We put up a respectful enough face, but inside our heads all we were thinking about was how odd, terrible, and in some cases, humorous, the Catholic traditions had become over the years.

    How outward must our disrespect become before it is offensive?

    Although I don’t think anyone is applauding these young elders, I can sympathize with their mentality.

    What Do Mormons Believe?

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