A spiritual fellowship in exile

Lord, you have commanded us to call upon you,
so that from you we may receive according to our desires.
(Ether 3:2)

Those who have been scattered shall be gathered.
(D&C 101:13)

I have a desire—a vision, if you will. On this Pentecost, the day that liturgical Christians commemorate the pouring out of the Spirit on the body of believers, I want to lay this desire before God publicly in the hope that there may be others out there, within the sound of my online voice, who share this desire. Despite the optimism of the verse from Ether I quoted above, I know that we don’t always receive according to our desires. So perhaps my vision will never be anything more than a pipe dream. But for what it may be worth, I offer the following.

I envision a spiritual fellowship of Mormons in exile. It’s nothing as organized as a "church" (or as preoccupied with questions of ecclesiastical authority). It’s a fellowship, or a loose network of local fellowships, composed of people from the LDS tradition who remain committed to Mormons symbols, texts, and practices as means of encountering God, but who are alienated from the conservative-dominated institutional church.

This fellowship exists to worship together. This is a spiritual fellowship. It’s not a therapeutic support group or an intellectual study group. Members come together to be nourished by the good word of God, to fast and pray, to speak with one another concerning the welfare of their souls, to partake of bread and wine in remembrance of the Lord Jesus (Moroni 6:4-6).

This fellowship offers the full range of Mormon ritual practice. This fellowship in exile believes it is empowered to perform cherished Mormon rituals for its members, independent of LDS Church authorities: baptism, the sacrament, baby blessings, health blessings, patriarchal/evangelist’s blessings, sealings, the endowment, priesthood ordination if that’s something the fellowship decides to do.

This fellowship explores the untapped possibilities of Mormon tradition. The fellowship’s primary goal is to discern what the Spirit has to teach them through Mormon texts and practices. Because Mormon tradition includes an invitation to embrace truth wherever it is to be found, the fellowship might embrace teachings, practices, symbols, music, etc., from other traditions as these seem to resonate with aspects of Mormon tradition. But the fellowship is distinctively, centrally, richly Mormon in character. It isn’t a fellowship of people who are in the process of moving into some other tradition or for whom Mormonism is just one of a number of traditions from which they mix and match. If a Jewish analogy makes sense to you, what I’m envisioning is Reconstructionist Mormonism, not Reform Mormonism.

This fellowship seeks innovative ways to understand and live Mormon tradition. In response to the invitation to conduct their meetings according to the promptings of the Spirit (Moroni 6:9), the fellowship experiments with different worship styles—liturgical, contemplative, charismatic, contemporary. They write new songs, or chants, or liturgies, based on Mormon texts. They forge new traditions for commemorating events in Mormon sacred history or for sacralizing major life events. They find imaginative ways to enact gospel principles such as service and consecration. Acting in the faith that God unfolds truth line on line, precept on precept (2 Nephi 28:30), in ways adapted to our limited understanding (D&C 1:24), the fellowship develops new ways of reading and interpreting the LDS scriptures, and they revise rituals and other traditions to reflect changes in their theology.

This fellowship operates democratically—ideally, by consensus. This fellowship is not for would-be prophets in search of a following, nor for followers in search of a new prophet. Discerning God’s will for the group is the privilege and responsibility of all members of the fellowship, equally and collectively. There is no hierarchy of authority, except to the extent that the fellowship may agree to temporarily delegate certain responsibilities to individuals as “stewardships.”

This fellowship does not insist on the historicity of Mormon claims. My personal preference would be to see the fellowship simply reject historicity, but at least they should develop ways of engaging with Mormon scripture and ritual that don’t depend on historicity—that don’t depend, in other words, on the Book of Mormon being an ancient document, or on the literal, historical reality of priesthood restoration, or the resurrection, or the Atonement, or pre-existence, etc. The fellowship is prepared to welcome those who approach these traditional teachings as symbolic rather than literal truth.

This fellowship is committed to the full, equal participation of women and of GLBT people. Among other things, this means rejecting a male-only priesthood. What to do instead is a question on which the fellowship will have to arrive at some kind of common consent. I’m prepared to adopt a radically “Protestant” position: In baptism, we take upon ourselves the name of Christ; thus all baptized people are empowered to act in the name of Christ, which is the same power that priesthood ordination is supposed to confer. Priesthood ordination is therefore entirely superfluous, although it may offer practical benefits as a way of organizing an institution. The fellowship might agree on a less radical solution than this, but somehow the fellowship needs to break down exclusions based on gender.


I want to reiterate: What I’m envisioning here is a fellowship in exile from the LDS Church. This is not a fellowship of people who are hoping to reform the LDS Church from within. This fellowship is not worried about staying within the bounds of what LDS authorities would find tolerable or about avoiding offense to orthodox sensibilities. It’s a fellowship of people who are prepared to follow the Spirit wherever they decide, collectively, that it is leading them—with the understanding that what they are asking to Spirit to teach them is how to more creatively use the resources made available to us in the Mormon tradition.

Maybe there’s no one out there interested in this vision. Maybe it’s just a quirky, idiosyncratic dream of my own. I often suspect that the majority of Mormons—conservative or liberal—aren’t as passionate about devotional practice as I am; their attachment to Mormonism has more to do with social bonds, or heritage, or intellect. (Or maybe that suspicion is just a kind of arrogance on my part.) Possibly most Mormons who have become as theologically liberal as this vision requires have also moved beyond such an exclusive interest in Mormonism as this vision requires. But I’m going to keep operating on the assumption—the faith, the hope—that someday, somewhere, a fellowship like this might come into being.

The first thing I want to do is develop a new version of the endowment, with which I have been in love since I was first endowed in 1991. I’m creating this new endowment in the faith that someday there will be a community to whom I can take it and say, “Shall we try it out?”—and they’ll read it, discuss it, revise it, perform it, discuss it again, develop yet other versions that innovate in different ways. I’ll be working on this in my Sabbath reflection time, little by little, over the next several months, I would imagine. So I may not post to the blog as regularly for a while, though I’m sure I’ll want to post in response to current events that strike my nerves, and I may post updates to the new endowment project as it comes along.