Hi readers,
For a while now, the Lord has made very clear to me that:
- There is more that can be done to share the truths contained in the Book of Mormon with the world--outside of the context of the LDS church.
- The best way to do that is NOT to hand people copies of the LDS-published Book of Mormon.
A while back, I became aware of at least one project which published a no-footnotes, at-cost, non-denominational Book of Mormon, which I was happy to see.
We need to do more.
Handing a person a book that requires them to read it diligently more than once presents a high bar for delivery of the truths contained inside. Meanwhile, the world is flooded with references to the Book of Mormon that either come from people who don't believe it or tie to people who teach many things that will keep a person from Christ (and who also don't believe it, even though they pretend to).
The project I linked above contains a shorter selection of chapters from the Book of Mormon that contain what the editor believed were important sermons from the book. I like this idea. It is easier to persuade someone to read ~50 pages than ~350 pages.
Still, it is asking a lot from a society where people are accustomed to sound bytes and tik tok videos.
I encourage all people reading this to think and pray about what you can do to make independent, bite-sized snippets of content that you can publish to the world to help make more available the truths in the Book of Mormon.
My thoughts are focused on a particular ideas, and I wanted to ask you if you were aware if anyone has done anything like them before I spend any time on it.
A topical list of Book of Mormon verses
I'm thinking it might be helpful to publish a topically-organized list of quotes (no commentary) from the Book of Mormon. The objective would be to make it 200 pages or less, with headings such as "Jesus," "salvation," "eternal life," "forgiveness of sins," "strength in trials," "purpose of life," and so on. Under each heading would be lists of verses or short passages. This would allow a person to instantly access information on whatever topic they wanted, without needing to wade through history or context.
Obviously, the LDS church's topical guide does this to an extent, though this would be organized differently (by topic, not a complete reproduction of the full text Book of Mormon, and not exhaustive - with far fewer references).
Do you know of anything like that? Would you share something like that with others? Is this something you have done or would like to do?
A video about why all people should read the Book of Mormon
Has anyone put together a video on why all people everywhere (not just LDS or Mormons) should read the Book of Mormon? Is this something you would share? Is it something you would like to make?
Let me know
You can reach me at upwardthoughtelephant@gmail.com, but remove the word elephant. Or don't, and confuse a random person with a very weird email address.