General Authority Visit - How People View The Church

What a week! The highlight was having Elder Oaks come to visit Northampton stake. Here is what I summarised from my scribbles of

notes:

Today was an amazing experience to hear President Kieron of the Europe Area and Elder Oaks of The Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, and their wives.

The opportunity to hear Elder Oaks from the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles was an indescribable joy and blessing. First his wife spoke, telling us how he loves ice cream and him and Elder Bednar need to be kept apart from each other in the store whilst buying ice cream, because they both love it. She told us a lot of funny stories, and then Elder Oaks spoke of some funny stories of her as well. One general story Elder Oaks told us was from a zone meeting in Denmark he was at once, where a zone leader told his missionaries "get up and get out and knock on those doors! For every door you knock on, someone gets baptized in Mexico!" I know this to be true in England as well. It is great to see them as real people, because that's what they are.

On a more serious note, Elder Oaks spoke of some very practical and straightforward points for us. One of which relates how people view our church. We make some pretty bold statements of our beliefs. We believe in modern day prophets and revelation, we believe in an open canon of scripture, we believe that the same authority Christ had on the earth and gave to His apostles is back on the earth, and ultimately that Christ's original church is restored in its fullness to the earth, never to be taken again. Lots of bold statements that tend to rattle a lot of people's cages when we declare this message.

But the message concerning this was direct: we do not force anyone to believe this. We simply want to say: "come, join us. Take the light that you have already, and see if you can add more to it", which is something President Kieron mentioned as well. He mentioned many times "by their fruits ye shall know them", then mentioned some of the fruits: a full-time missionary force of ~75,000, 5M/15M attending church services each week regularly, and so on.

Elder Oaks also drew a line between "mistakes" and "sin". In short, he said that we all make mistakes, but it would be wrong to call everyone to repentance for all the mistakes we make. Looking right at us missionaries he said "looking at this group of missionaries right here, I bet they make lots of mistakes", to which we nodded our heads in agreement. Sin on the other hand, needs to be repented of. This brought comfort to me to know that as long as I am trying my best keep from "sin" and repent when I do, the mistakes I make (which are daily) are ok, as long as I learn from them like anything else in life.

Finally, he spoke of the worlds current condition. It is deteriorating pretty quickly, but we need not fear! We are not to fear as things head down hill. As long as we stand in holy places, we have no reason to fear. A holy place can be anywhere, as long as we are living righteously and trying our best.

The best part is, we get to hear him again tomorrow! We go onto London to have a combined mission conference with the England London South Mission. It will be interesting to see how his message to us will change for a group of almost 400 missionaries.

Cheers!

Elder Spencer Ammermon