Lesson 26 - "Go Ye Unto All the World, and Preach My Gospel"

This week we return to missionary work. 42:6 and 88:81 are the two verses of focus from the lesson, but we will also talk about declension--apostasy in Kirtland. The lesson also includes the Lord's instructions to the first quorum of the Twelve in Section 112:12-34.

There are a wide variety of options to talk about the restored gospel being preached around the world.

We talked about missionary work previously here. The post links to "Testimony and Exhortation Among Early Mormon Women" and a biographical piece on Rebecca Swain Williams, focusing on her lifelong attempt to share the gospel with her father. Here is the fantastic letter from Rebecca to her father mentioned in the Ensign article. Official missionaries are never the only ones doing missionary work.

BYU Studies offers the seminal book on the mission of the apostles to Great Britain in the late 1830s and 1840s--Men with a Mission--here. The lesson in the manual has some good 19th century examples.

Some of the earliest female participation in LDS General Conference included returned missionaries in the early 20th century. Read their talks here and here and here.

BYU Studies has likewise done some great work on the gospel being spread throughout the world in the twentieth century into the twenty-first century. Steve Harper has a fantastic article on Mongolia here. A US Ambassador said Mongolia is 99% Buddhist and 1% Mormon. There is a little hyperbole there (it is .1%), but really interesting. There are also articles on Taiwan, Bulgaria, and Russia.

The transformation of the church during the 1837-1838 period should be its own lesson. 10-15% of church membership was lost between 1837 and 1838. Church leadership had a dramatic turnover losing  2 members of the First Presidency, 6-8 members of the first Quorum of the 12, the Presidency at Far West, all Three Witnesses, and 3 of the Eight Witnesses. Here are a few of W.W.Phelps' letters during this period (he was one of those who left during this period--he later returned in Nauvoo). For a long time the focus of this period was considered to be based in the failure of the church's bank - the Kirtland Safety Society. Read the classic revision of our understanding of this period here. Those most involved in the rejection of Joseph Smith and the church structure he established were not those who lost the most with the failure of the bank. More influential were ideals about democracy and fears of Joseph Smith becoming a sovereign. Oliver's brother Warren published the following in the Messenger and Advocate in July 1837: “If we give all our privileges to one man, we virtually give him our money and our liberties, and make him a monarch, absolute and despotic, and ourselves abject slaves or fawning sycophants.  If we grant privileges and monopolies to a few, they always continue to undermine the fundamental principles of freedom, and sooner or later, convert the purest and most liberal form of Government into the rankest aristocracy.  These, we conceive, are matters of history, matters of fact and cannot be controverted.  Well may be said, if we thus barter away our liberties we are unworthy of them.” William McLellin wrote that church leaders were guilty of “grasping like the Popes of Rome, both the temporal and spiritual powers of the Church.”  Many of the outside critiques of Mormonism sounded very similar, being called a Pope is never a good thing in early 19th century America. This was a critical moment to see if the fledging church would survive.