As a new missionary, I was in the (common?) position of having never really leveled with my local bishop back home about grave sins like masturbation and/or looking at pornography. Before the MTC, I had convinced myself that looking at my dad’s erotic photography books (or Showtime: After Hours) in the privacy of my own bedroom (or mom’s TV room) and/or masturbating, was a victimless crime–if a crime at all, and certainly not something that required shouting from the rooftops, for goodness sake. After a couple of weeks in the MTC, however, I was convinced that I had to confess my adolescent sins to somebody with authority from God to make the sins go away. I tried to find an opportunity to discreetly meet with a member of my missionary branch presidency, and found that there was a line of male missionaries waiting, outside an empty classroom, for a meeting with him. I decided that I would just blend in with them and wait my turn.

While I stood there, my mind began racing. “What if I what I’ve done is actually really bad? Have I broken my temple covenants? What will happen to me? Can I be sent home from my mission for this? How will I face everybody back home? What will I do? Is confession worth it? I definitely won’t ever masturbate again–do I even need to confess? Should I just get up and leave?”

Too soon, it was my turn. I entered the classroom to find the first counselor in the branch presidency waiting for me. He was a tall skinny man with wire-rimmed glasses, completely bald on top. He seemed like a nice enough guy. He exuded confidence and wisdom. He seemed comfortable talking to me, but I was not comfortable. I was worried that my life was going to suddenly go sideways, spinning off in the wrong direction.

He made an attempt at small talk. He asked how I was doing, whether I was used to the schedule, learning a new language, getting along with my companion. I played along. After a minute, he asked me why I wanted to meet with him. Was there anything he could do for me?

I was brave. I didn’t cry or anything. I confessed to (most of the) bad stuff. He asked me how often I had masturbated. I told him. He asked me if the pornography and the masturbation had ever happened at the same time. I told him yes. I braced for the consequences of my awful deeds.

He smiled and told me that he was glad I had confessed. He told me that he generally considered habitual masturbation or pornography viewing to be sins requiring confession to a church leader. He told me that when masturbation happened while viewing pornography, that was a sin that must be confessed, even if it happened only once. He told me that my repentance was now underway, and that the next step was to never do it again. I told him I was already there.

I walked out of the meeting feeling light and happy. I wasn’t going to be sent home, humiliated. In fact, I was now actually worthy of the companionship of the Holy Ghost. It was now possible for me to be a decent missionary. I would never masturbate again.

(And I didn’t do it even once for the balance of my mission. Two+ years of perfect sexual “purity”. Been there, done that.)

-PWM

A very popular LDS scriptural example of this process is found in the Book of Mormon, in the story of a man called “the brother of Jared”, who lived at the time the Tower of Babel was built, and who was commanded by God to build a fleet of submersible ships to cross the ocean. The problem was that no light could reach the inside of the ships, and windows couldn’t be installed. The brother of Jared climbed a mountain and talked to the Lord about it :

23 And the Lord said unto the brother of Jared: What will ye that I should do that ye may have light in your vessels? For behold, ye cannot have windows, for they will be dashed in pieces; neither shall ye take fire with you, for ye shall not go by the light of fire.

25 …Therefore what will ye that I should prepare for you that ye may have light when ye are swallowed up in the depths of the sea?

See Book of Ether 2:23, 25

The brother of Jared then set out to answer the Lord’s question. His solution was to melt a rock (don’t ask me how) into 16 small stones that were as transparent as glass and ask the Lord to touch them and make them glow. The Lord obliged, and Jared had his solution to the problem :

2 For it came to pass after the Lord had prepared the stones which the brother of Jared had carried up into the mount, the brother of Jared came down out of the mount, and he did put forth the stones into the vessels which were prepared, one in each end thereof; and behold, they did give light unto the vessels.

3 And thus the Lord caused stones to shine in darkness, to give light unto men, women, and children, that they might not cross the great waters in darkness.

See Ether 6:2-3

Among Mormons, the brother of Jared story is considered a classic example of working with the Lord–and invoking his divine power–to solve real-world problems that might normally impede a person from doing the Lord’s will. The Covenanting with the Lord concept applies that process to missionary work in a fairly straightforward way. It should have worked–and I had a testimony that it would work, and was right for me–but it didn’t.

My Covenanting with the Lord missionary experience is not unique; it has been implemented in many missions, with similar results. Despite its universally spotty success record, the principles behind it are solid, mainstream Mormon beliefs about God’s way of working with people, so it is very hard for Mormons to reject. See, for example, this By Common Consent blog post, in which the author acknowledges the general failure of the concept in LDS missionary work, yet blames only abusive and “destructive” implementation (rather than a problem with the underlying concepts) for the failure, and expresses the belief that “when done out of personal volition [the program] does work”.

I don’t know precisely what he means by “personal volition”, but when I covenanted with the Lord, I felt like I was trying the program of my own volition (despite there being obvious external pressure to get results). I think I employed as much of my own volition as the brother of Jared did when all of his friends’ and family’s futures depended on him solving their lighting problem. I was a willing participant in the process.

Several commenters to the BCC blog post go further than the original poster does in trying to marginalize the Covenanting with the Lord concept. Some dismiss the entire premise and attack (criticize!) the judgment of the mission presidents and General Authorities of the Church who allow the program to resurface from time to time. The general critique is that “you can’t tell the Lord what to do”. Another recent BCC blog post adopts the pejorative descriptor “manipulationist” for people who subscribe to this mainstream LDS concept. The critique, however, misapprehends how the concept works–at least as I experienced it. The idea is to confirm, through the Holy Ghost, what criteria the Lord would have you follow in order to bind him in a personal covenant. Thus, the Lord isn’t being told what to do, rather, he is dictating the terms in essentially the same way that he does through any other divine covenanting process found in Mormonism.

Covenanting with the Lord is not “manipulation” of God, it is a test of the Mormon concept of the Holy Ghost as the messenger of God, and a person’s ability to communicate with the Holy Ghost. It tests the LDS concept of personal communication with God. That is the most interesting part to me.

-PWM

When I had been proselyting as a missionary for just about three months, my Mission President (the volunteer LDS clergy supervising the activities of the entire mission) assigned me to work in a new city with a partner (i.e., a “companion”) who was in the final month of his two-year term of missionary service. The Mission President met with me to tell me I was chosen for the assignment because this missionary needed a faithful, enthusiastic companion to try a new method of proselyting that had the potential to usher in a surge of baptisms in the mission. It was called “Covenanting with the Lord”.

The idea behind Covenanting with the Lord was the fact that Heavenly Father has a system in place for helping people achieve their righteous goals. Jesus Christ touched on it in Luke 11:9-13 when he said “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” But for Mormons, the concept has another dimension–the Lord explicitly promises that if a person has faith in him, that person shall have power to do whatever “is expedient” for the Lord. And the Lord is obligated to make good on his promises when people hold up their end of the bargain. We had answered Jesus Christ’s call to be missionaries, so clearly our desire to be the best (i.e., “most successful”) missionaries we could be was expedient for him. All we had to do was properly ask for Heavenly Father’s help and demonstrate our unwavering faith in him. We would pray, asking Heavenly Father to send the Holy Ghost to tell us what we needed to do in order to strengthen and demonstrate our faith and invoke the Lord’s obligation to make us successful (i.e., “baptizing”) missionaries. Once the Holy Ghost told us what we needed to do, we just had to take up the challenge and covenant to do it, and the Lord would have to give us people to baptize.

I learned that the Mission President had taught the whole mission to follow this Covenanting with the Lord program just a couple of weeks before I had arrived in the mission, and my new companion had been one of his shining examples of success in following the program and finding people to baptize. Now the Mission President and my new comp were looking at me to get in gear and continue the process.

The day I arrived in my new apartment, my companion told me how the program worked, and how I needed to join him in covenanting with the Lord for baptisms. I needed to sit down with him and prayerfully determine (through the guidance of the Holy Ghost) how many Book of Mormons we needed to distribute, and how many missionary lessons (i.e., “discussions”) we needed to teach people each week in order to demonstrate the level of faith necessary to bind the Lord in granting us success.

I was honored that the Mission President had chosen me, of all the new missionaries, to take up the challenge. I was also taken aback by the audacity and ambition inherent in developing a formula for calling down the power of God to serve our desires as missionaries. It made sense to me, though–we were on the Lord’s errand, so he’s got to support us; this could be how.

My companion and I fasted for 24 hours, prayed, and wrote up a plan laying out, in addition to a commitment to be perfectly obedient to all mission rules, all of our performance goals for the next four weeks. Each week, we figured, our faith would need to increase, and that increased faith would show forth in increased statistics–more Book of Mormons given out, and more discussions taught. The first week contained pretty ambitious numbers, and each week those numbers increased, until, by the last week, the numbers were ridiculously high–equal to a month’s worth of work for most missionary companionships. This was my companion’s last month as a missionary, and he was going to go all out.

We prayed together for the Holy Ghost’s confirmation of our plan, and my companion received that confirmation. I, on the other hand, did not feel anything I considered communication from the Holy Ghost. My comp was absolutely convinced that our plan was right, and as the senior companion, he could have just told me to go along with it, but he was also convinced that the plan wouldn’t work if I wasn’t fully on board. We went back to our apartment and he waited in the front room while I retreated, plan in hand, to the study, where I was to pray until I got my answer.

After about 15 minutes of continuous pleading with the Lord for an answer, I started to feel a light, almost tingling sensation in my spine that grew into a wave that passed through my whole body. I took that as confirmation from the Holy Ghost that our plan was approved of the Lord, and his promise of success would have to be fulfilled as we completed our plan.

The details of the plan and how we went about completing it are the subject of another post, but for the purpose of this post, I’ll just say that we worked like crazy each week, meeting our goals–miraculously, it seemed, as the goals got bigger. The third week, we achieved our goal with five minutes to go before the end of the week. The Lord seemed to be helping us meet our goals–rewarding our faith and tenacious desire to do his will. The fourth week, we were worn down from weeks of non-stop working, but kept at it through the end. After giving our all, we were both very disappointed to find we had come up just barely short of our final week’s goals.

After covenanting with the Lord, we put up what were easily the biggest numbers of any companionship in the mission, but in the end, we baptized nobody during that month (not even close), had no additional serious investigators, and to my knowledge, nobody we met with during that month was baptized at some later date either. We had absolutely zero success, despite our testimony that our plan was a divinely approved path to baptisms. The Mission President never talked to me, or the rest of the mission, about Covenanting with the Lord again. It was abandoned as if it never existed.

-PWM

There are so many programs run by the LDS Church (in other words, run by the people in each LDS Church congregation, using curricula, guidelines, and financing supplied by Church headquarters in Salt Lake City) that full participation can take up a significant amount of a person’s free time, particularly for families with children, which are a key focus of Church programs.

For Mormon families, the Church forms a support system–a virtual village–in which people help each other out with babysitting, nursery school, packing and moving, meal preparation, house cleaning, and other day-to-day activities, as the need arises. In my opinion, this trusting, give-and-take environment makes it possible for Mormons to have bigger families and to otherwise live the lifestyle of conservative values for which Mormons are well known. (It also, in my opinion, enables the questionable multi-level marketing companies and fraud victimization (e.g., THIS, THIS and THIS) that Mormon communities are also increasingly becoming known for. ) The interconnected nature of Mormon communities means that when a family–or even one member of a family–decides to withdraw, it affects (and inconveniences) everybody in the community in some way.

But the “virtual village” aspect of Mormon social life is not the main reason why leaving the fold is such a big deal. The main reason is that Mormons believe that the act of leaving is a sin against God, to whom every baptized Mormon has promised to “mourn with those who mourn, and comfort those who stand in need of comfort” (in other words, to form and participate in a virtual village). It is morally wrong to sin, and therefore morally wrong to leave. This legalistic concept of promises (or the more common Mormon term “covenants”) made between a person and God is a central motivation for much of what Mormons do and believe. Here, the concept of “covenants with God” changes the choice to stop participating in LDS Church programs from a simple matter of personal taste (or scheduling) into a grave matter of personal morality–effectively raising the stakes for a Mormon who is considering deviating from community norms of participation.

-PWM