🤔 Lifetime Protestant Visits a Mormon Church

[Music] so so good morning my name is david welcome to week nine of 52 churches in 52 weeks feel free to hit the like button and subscribe that helps the youtube algorithms reach out to more people and if you like to read about the first 52 churches in 52 weeks that's on amazon i'll leave a link in the description box below today we are in madison wisconsin we're going to be checking out my first ever mormon church the church of latter-day saints when it comes to the mormon faith i know next to nothing about it i'm a complete newbie when it comes to this so my understanding is there's the majority of mormons are in utah there's a brigham young university um mitt romney and then there's a book of mormon so on my drive over here i try to do a real quick hour crash course to understand what the mormon faith is all about it's different to me uh for someone that is just learning about this on the spot basically today with joseph smith and gold plates and creating a bot like so you have the bible mormons believe the bible and then there's a book of mormon um which comes after that so like i don't even know what a latter-day saint is but i'm guessing it's something to do with joseph smith and everyone else that derived from whatever happened with an angel called is it moroni ronnie it's not macaroni i know that i could really go for some macaroni right now anyway it's probably not funny anyway i'm gonna go inside uh my understanding in my crash course is dress your sunday's best there they're two or three hours for the service split up hourly so the first should be like a sacrament meeting second should be some type of class and then a third hour possibly is like a priesthood hour i don't know i'm gonna find out so stay tuned [Music] foreign [Music] so not only did i get one book of mormon i actually got two books of mormon a lot of good first impressions especially when it comes to the people that i'm that i met at the same time i'm on information overload i'm still in the church parking lot i've been here for four hours so uh a lot of that is by choice a lot of that is due to ignorance so let me explain i had the understanding looking at information that a church starts all mormon churches start at 9am as i learned that is not the case anymore so uh when you look and you google a mormon church you try and find the website because typically you can find church times well google doesn't have any type of church times when you click on the website it takes you straight to the all-encompassing church of jesus christ of latter-day saints there's no individual websites so for me it was very difficult to locate what service times were i didn't find it out until after the fact i was here so i basically waited an hour in the parking lot when the church finally opened its doors around 9 30 10 o'clock i got inside and it's i never had seen portraits and imagery used like i've seen this before so yeah you would have images of jesus christ you'd have images of uh god the father but a lot of them had god the father god the son and joseph smith joseph smith is the founder of the mormon church 1800s he was trying to find what was the one true church when he had when he was 14 years old and i'll get more into that later but again with the images i've never seen anything like that before i think the biggest thing when it came to the church i really enjoyed was there were people that did come up to me so one service member her name was june um you know she was she was wearing an n95 mask but she still had no problem coming up to me without a mask and welcomed me to their church she invited me to sit with her and her husband and i politely declined mainly because i want to get a little bit of footage and not look like a complete outsider you know with my phone recording hymns and stuff um later then another gentleman came up to me his name was kevin and uh kevin was very personable kind of asked a little bit about me and you know i had a couple questions for him about the mormon faith and let him know this was my first time experiencing the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints so eventually it was time for the sacrament meeting is what it's called so saying two hymns and then after that um was communion so i'm not used to communion being so early here's what's different with the mormon church you get your bread to symbolize it to symbolize christ's body but then you also get water not wine not grape juice water and it was very difficult for me to pray i know this sounds silly but any time i receive communion i'm praying you know thank you for the body and blood thank you for the bread and wine but now because it's bread and water not wine i'm so used to wine being associated with blood so with water like i was having trouble making the connection where that is blood it was so bizarre but it completely just crisscrossed me in terms of how i typically pray after communion i don't know how else to explain it was just so different to me i asked kevin later it's like why do you use the water instead and he wasn't sure um what's interesting with the mormon church then is there's a bishop up front but from what i learned he doesn't actually get paid he has an actual job he's just appointed so the sermons are really actually talks and the talks come from congregation members so what i learned is the bishop has a revelation in terms of who's going to speak when it comes to the talks he'll come up to those people and they will either accept or reject these two members it was a husband and a wife the hus and they were separate when they gave their little talks or their sermons as soon as the husband got up to the pulpit and started talking that's when like almost every kid decided that hey it's time to become restless and i don't blame him it was like 30 minutes in and so many kids were crying so many kids were trying to have fun trying to just not be bored so for the husband and wife who give the talks or anyone that gives a talks props to you because to be not distracted with so many kids yelling all over the place i don't know how they did it after the sacrament meeting that's when everyone transitioned to classes and i kind of held back and eventually kevin asked if he could sit in the pew i was in and i'm like you know come on in and we talked a little bit i kind of expunged the information that hey i visit a new church each week last week i did amish mennonite type of church service today i had a friend in the past who asked if you know why why didn't i do a mormon church when i did this before so this time i'm like yes i got to do a church of jesus christ of latter-day saints type of church i had a lot of questions and kevin took a lot of time to answer the questions because when i first introduced myself he kind of he he was very upfront it's like oh yeah you know when people come in the first time to these type of churches we're kind of on the defense because there's so many misconceptions about our church we're always preaching about jesus christ but so many people think negatively due to the book of mormon and all the additions and what typical christianity will have and i told them yeah you know i i don't feel comfortable um with books being added on but i don't want to be rude i want to understand because oftentimes when i actually confront different things i take on a new perspective and i learn something new and um kevin he kind of talked to me about the whole backstory with joseph smith uh 1800's how in new york um he joseph smith he kind of kevin kind of told me where it's like he's almost kind of like you where you're trying to find the right church you're trying to you're trying to understand all these different churches and with joseph smith what he eventually did is he was praying to god 14 years old and all of a sudden the story goes god the father and god the son basically appeared to him and um if i'm understanding this correctly again information overload um but he was challenged where you had to find some gold plates and the gold plates was like from some type of ancient i i can't say everything off the top of my mind all right i'm a newbie on this um but eventually the big thing is the church of latter-day saints is more geared towards the later days and with the book of mormon joseph smith he wasn't very educated but he was able to translate based off these gold plates to a transcriber to write out the book of mormon so the book of mormon is essentially a third testament it is a continuation of the old testament and the new testament that's how the story goes during my discussion with kevin eventually he went to go find me a book of mormon from our discussion and that's when i had two missionaries walk up to me i won't say their names but they're both i want to say maybe 22 23 years old young kids and both dressed very well they had the whole name tags on and they just got talking to me and after kevin kevin kind of transitioned me off to them and uh we talked a lot because i had a lot of questions i want to understand a little bit more um what is the mormon church all about and they took the time and i think this is one of the most interesting church experiences i've had because it was so much one-on-one or in this case two on one we'll do it like that and um had tons of questions like how did you get into this um one of the questions i had is because i want to kind of in a in a kind christ-like fashion here are the arguments against the mormon church that i've understand how do you address them and one of the biggest ones is from revelation because revelation talks about well you should not be adding or detracting from this word uh they mentioned that with revelation that's more those words are more for john's prophecy in revelation it has nothing to do with the rest of the bible because more books in the bible more books in the new testament were written after revelation was written revelation is just at the end of the bible when they were moving all the books around so i'm like huh that's an interesting argument an interesting answer to that um i had so many questions and again i'm on information overload i can't tell you everything but i want to understand a little bit more about the whole joseph smith situation how did he get into it one question i had is okay if the bible can be a continuation where you can have a third testament is there is there room in this for a fourth testament of a book of later ladder ladder days i don't know either way my my questions aside i was talking with those two guys for about an hour and a half and i think the thing that um was most encouraging to me is they were genuinely excited and passionate to talk about jesus christ yeah i had questions about the joseph smith stuff and gold plates and something about a seer seeker seer stone something like that um just because it's so weird for me coming from a protestant christian background to even consider that oh yeah like god he may still he may have he may still be using people with prophecies not too long ago because the way that the two elders explained to me is the the idea of priesthood where god can kind of have priesthood with it was kind of like the ark of the covenant like god will have profits at during one time but then if things get really bad or prophets are getting killed off god will take the priesthood away and he brought the priesthood back again when he came to jesus christ and the apostles and peter and everyone else but then as soon as the apostles started getting killed off again the priesthood was taken away and then with joseph smith priesthood came back so that's a very they kept telling me about keys like the keys of the priesthood and again i'm i'm wrestling with a lot of information right now long story short mormon church they were trying to get me to read the book of mormon i'll give it a look um but i'm curious but again i have so many so many things at this point in my life where it's like you can't just break everything that you've believed your entire life and then just change in one sunday service so it's got me thinking and i think one of the things i took away most from this church visit is i've never met anyone or any people who were so devoted to taking so much time out of their day to speak with me about their faith and i know they're trying to convert me to mormonism i understand that um but i don't think many people will sit down with you for as long as they did so to me uh so for me props uh to this particular church for just taking time and listening and explaining a bunch of questions that i had because i had a lot of questions and as i'm doing this video i can't think of half or nearly half of what i talked about with them so that's going to do it for week nine uh 52 churches in 52 weeks uh hit the like button and subscribe so you can stay up to date for future visits as always if you'd like to read about the first 52 churches in 52 weeks there is a book it's on amazon you can read the paperback ebook hardcover or read for free if you have a kindle unlimited subscription so that's it for me thanks for watching and hope you have a good one

Channel: 52 Churches in 52 Weeks

Views: 52,178

Keywords: mormon church, book of mormon, latter-day saints, why i left the mormon church, first time mormon, mormon missionary, joseph smith, mormon no more, mormon documentary, mormon stories, mormonism, 52 churches, mormon crickets, John Dehlin, Zelf On a Shelf, My Great and Spacious World, mormon marriage, My Spiritual Life, ExMoLex, Mormon Parenting, mormon enlightenment, Emancipated Molly, Mormon Newsroom, heart of the matter, fair mormon, Dave Bartosiewicz, saints unscripted

Id: oMW_NxZW74M

Length: 18min 16sec (1096 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 29 2022