To Publish Pamphlets and Papers

When my dad started down the path of Mormon fundamentalism, he started to have meetings in his own house.  He served the sacrament to his own children and would hold testimony meetings with just the family.  He told his children, particularly his teen boys like me, that they had to attend some sort of religious meeting.  They could go to the LDS Church, or they could attend the family meetings at home.  Most of us went to both.

Around 1991, the whole family got involved with the Apostolic United Brethren (AUB) in Utah, a polygamous group known as "The Group" to its members.  It was mostly a positive experience.  The AUB descended from early Mormons who were given a commission to keep plural marriage alive since the mainstream LDS Church abandoned the practice.  They were given a very specific instruction when they were organized - they were not to do anything that the LDS Church was capable of doing.

For this reason, the AUB did not practice many things.  For instance, they did not begin doing temple endowments until 1981, because the question arose - if the LDS Church is changing the ordinances of the temple, are they valid anymore?  So it wasn't until 1981 that the AUB began instituting temple rites.

Another practice was missionary work.  The AUB did not send out missionaries.  They viewed this also as the responsibility of the mainstream LDS Church.  Whereas the Church may have abandoned many principles, it was still perfectly capable of sending out missionaries to teach about the Book of Mormon, to "teach the First Principles".  And so the AUB strongly discouraged proselyting.  Yes, they did have a Quorum of Seventy whose responsibility was to teach the gospel.  And you can argue this point with me if you'd like, but it is true - the Seventies in the AUB were mainly there to screen out undesirables.  And that's about it.  There was no real push to proselyte.  There was no real push to send out missionaries.

Oh yes, there were exceptions.  There were a few in the AUB who did try to go out and teach as often as possible, and the branch of the AUB in Central Mexico did send out missionaries, as I have already posted.

But mostly they avoided missionary work, because their responsibility was the perpetuation of plural marriage.  Nothing more.

A side note - in 2006, I was told by someone in the AUB that the Council had created their "No Internet Teaching" policy because of me.  At the time, I was very actively teaching the fullness of the gospel on the Internet.  There was nothing so sacred that it could not be taught through cyberspace.  This rankled them.  Not wanting to sound too critical, the reason for this is that this information, to them, must not be wholesale.  It should come from them, and not be disseminated to the masses.  And there was nothing that I was afraid to talk about.  This upset them, and there "No Internet" policy came about.  Because of me.  I wear that badge with pride.

But I digress...

Eventually, most of my family came to  leave the AUB.  That is a whole story in and of itself.  The family went back to Arizona, and we continued having meetings in our living room.  My father had never been satisfied with the lack of missionary work in the AUB.  After all, he had spent most of his life as a missionary in the mainstream Church.  It was hard to put that aside.  He started to ask me about what we could do get the message to members in the Church.  He asked if I could write some sort of pamphlet, something that could be handed out to people.  The reason he asked me - I have always shown a talent for writing.

So I sat down and tried to write something.  Talk about writer's bloc!  I could not come up with anything!  My dad came to me a couple of weeks later to ask me how the pamphlet was coming.  I told him that it wasn't coming very well.  He told me to keep trying.

Then he took me and my younger brother aside and ordained us as Seventies, which is the office that he had originally held in the mainstream LDS Church, and also in the AUB.  As I mentioned earlier, the duty of a Seventy is to be a teacher - a traveling teacher, to be exact.

That evening, I sat down to write a pamphlet, not really knowing what I was going to write.  I picked up an LDS hymn book and opened it to a hymn by Eliza R. Snow, who was a plural wife to both Joseph Smith and, later, Brigham Young.  The hymn was "The Time is Far Spent".  I read the first verse:

The time is far spent, there is little remaining

To publish pamphlets and papers by sea and by land,

Then hasten, ye heralds!  go forward proclaiming:

Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.

I read this and smiled to myself.  "To publish pamphlets and papers.."  How appropriate, I thought.  And then I wrote my pamphlet.  It flowed out of me.  I wrote it in one sitting.  The pamphlet started with the above verse.  Whereas I had struggled for two weeks previously, it was like I knew what to write.  I believe to this day that it was the spirit of my calling, the calling of a Seventy, that came upon me.

That night, I sat down to Sunday dinner and shared with my family the experience that I had writing the pamphlet.

"The hymn said, 'To publish pamphlets and papers by sea and by land'," I said.  "I just thought that was kind of appropriate since I am writing a pamphlet."

My brother frowned at me.  "That hymn does not say 'publish pamphlets and papers'.  It says: 'To publish glad tidings'."

"No, it doesn't," I retorted.  "It says pamphlets and papers.  I read it."

After arguing about it for a while, we went and got the hymn book and turned to that particular hymn.  Sure enough, it said:

To publish glad tidings by sea and by land

I stared in disbelief.  "I saw it.  I read it.  It said pamphlets."

My brother smiled at me.  "I think you just had a vision."

So over the course of the next couple of weeks, I typed this pamphlet.  Then we printed it out en masse and got ready to distribute it.  Next time, I will discuss what happened when we started handing these out, which is a very interesting story.

Subsequently, this pamphlet became the first issue of "Truth Never Changes" magazine, several issues of which you can find here.