MERRY CHRISTMAS

I wanted to wish you all a very merry Christmas and thank you for all your help with my project this year. I will take a break from the blog, but I might return next year while I'm writing my thesis. I hope you will have a great Christmas and a happy new year.

Friending?

I read an article about mission "methods" in the LDS, and one of them was to spread the word of the gospel through friendships. Many of the converts I have met, found the church via friends, and it seems to be a "natural" way of getting to know the church and the faith. I have also read this article by President Eberhard, that step by sted explains how to go about sharing the gospel to friends. Another term I have stumbled upon is the frase "friending". Is this a word that members use, or is it only non-members taht use it to describe the method of mission within friendships?

MISSION

One of the first meetings people have with the church might be through one of the many thousands of missionaries that serve throughout the world. I find the missionary aspect of the church very interesting, and a witness to the efficient organisation of the church.

I've heard many times that it is to give everybody here on earth the chance to hear the gospel and to decide for themselves if it is true or not. But still it seems like a huge sacrifice to leave your home and family for 18 to 24 months. 

In Denmark most people are religious in a different way than other places in the world. Religion is not something you talk about, and is sometimes seen as an embarrassing subject. So when missionaries knock on your door and say they want to talk about religion, it is often just seen as an inconvenience or maybe even rude. 80 percent of the Danish population are members of the Danish Peoples Church, which is a Lutheran church, as I might have mentioned earlier. But only very few of them attend church on a regular basis, and many have very different believes from what is normally categorized as "christian", for an example a survey showed that a fair amount believed in reincarnation. My point here is that Denmark must be a very challenging place to be a missionary.  

I would love to hear your thoughts on missionary work. Have you served a mission, and why did you choose to do so? Maybe you wish to serve a mission in the future?

I'M BACK

I am back from a month of learning and experiencing Utah and the mormon culture there. I had the most wonderful hosts, who made my stay easy, fantastic and very informative. I hope to share some of my new questions with you soon. Hope you had a great October.

UTAH

Hello from Utah! I'm sorry that I have not posted here for a while. I'm sitting in Utah right now and I am really busy doing fieldwork and running around to amazing things. I promise to have the blog up and running when I return with all my new material in a few weeks. Thanks for your patience.

NEW MEDIA MORMONS

This Mormon Message invites members to use the new media and share their faith.

- Do you use the new media, blog, tweet or anything else?

WAS JESUS MARRIED?

Painting by Alexander Ivanov 1834, "The Appearance of Christ to Maria Magdalene"from here 

To keep this blog up-to-date I feel I must write a post about this subject, since it has been floating around in the media recently. We talked about this in seminary the other day, and I would love to hear your point of view on this as well.

In this article  from Harvard magazine you can read about the papyrus fragment that emerged from a private collector and ended up on the desk of professor Karen L. King. It is estimated that the fragment dates back to the fourth century, but the dating of the ink is not completed yet. Furthermore experts believe that the writing on the papyrus is a copy of a text from approximately 150 A.D. and is translated from Greek to Sahidic.

The most newsworthy part of the text, is that it says : "...Jesus said to them: 'My wife...'" Which of course has called a lot of attention to this - perhaps - history changing papyrus.

But professor King ask us to remember that even though the ink, and the text is real, it is not a proof that Jesus in fact has a wife, but only that some people at the time of the production of the text, believed that he had.

I wondered if it wouldn't actually make a lot of sense in your theology, that Jesus was married, because of the emphasis on the family and the marriage as a key to the Celestial Kingdom. But maybe Jesus didn't need this? And would he have had children, and thereby great grandchildren, still living on this earth ?

- Do you ever think about the "historical Jesus", and how does his life affect your religious belief?