I served a mission\u00a0back when the commitment pattern was king. Prepare\u2013Identify\u2013Invite\u2013Follow Up; those were the rules of the game. If we could get investigators to make and keep commitments, they would feel the spirit and ultimately receive a testimony of the gospel.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m wondering though, what this tells us about the role of doctrine (loosely defined) in the conversion experience. Does doctrine serve a functional role, where it is a means to an end? Is the value of doctrine, perhaps, more in its ability to bring about a particular result, rather than in its systematicity? To make it more concrete, the way I viewed \u201cteaching the gospel\u201d in light of the commitment pattern was not so much in getting people to understand the gospel as a comprehensive theology, as much as it was to get them to take action and experience the gospel for themselves.<\/p>\n
My hunch is that the value of things such as the BoM is not so much in its ability to present a coherent argument for a certain ideology, as much as it is in its capacity to generate a conversion experience. It\u2019s a raft of sorts, meant to get us to the other shore, and not to be mistaken for that shore itself.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I served a mission\u00a0back when the commitment pattern was king. Prepare\u2013Identify\u2013Invite\u2013Follow Up; those were the rules of the game. If we could get investigators to make and keep commitments, they would feel the spirit and ultimately receive a testimony of the gospel. I\u2019m wondering though, what this tells us about the role of doctrine (loosely […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":452,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n