One of the new elders could be Elder Scott Snee from Scotland? Going to Paris? Maybe? He is a good friend of mine and this all sounds too coincidental not to be him.

PS: The Blacks in the Scriptures people sent me the DVDs, and it is so amazing. Thanks for being a part of all that, with Darius Gray and such.

In regard to #12, I think that the Perpetual Education Fund might be one part of the answer to preparing the members of the church to lead and bring up the poor of the world who will flock to the restored gospel.

Interestingly, when I was growing up in the Mormon Corridor (Sandy, UT) in the late ’60′s and early ’70′s, we actually had an Arab Bishop in our ward (his family of origin was from Lebanon). As I recall, he was a really good Bishop, especially with the youth.

I can think of only two times in history that the church faced comparable challenges. In the first century BC as relatively poor and wealthy, and vastly divergent Greek and Jewish cultures tried to meld into a single church. Communication simply wasn’t good enough, and reading the New Testament epistles and then some of the post-NT histories and epistles is a heart-rending view of how the church just couldn’t survive the circumstances. The other was the early days of the restoration as Saints, many (most I presume?) were impoverished to begin with as they crossed the Atlantic or Pacific to gather to Zion and build the kingdom. A solution was found in the flight to Utah and the ability to build a relatively isolated community that was able to meld diversity into a relatively homogenous whole. A nice piece of work by the Lord and his people, but not terribly applicable to a church that aims to be literally 1000 or more times bigger, scattered across the entire globe, unable to cloister itself for shelter in the same manner. Opportunities and challenges. Questions we are all going to have to consider, cherished cultural and organizational assumptions which will undoubtedly have to drop like scales from our eyes as time goes on, but all for the greater glory of God.

someone asked me why Mormons insisted on going into Third World countries, implying that we were taking advantage of folks who didn’t know better

Missionaries get it coming and going. In Europe everyone wanted to know why we weren’t in less developed countries where we could do some good instead of waste time preaching to the choir.

I have found, in general, that people unencumbered by wealth are more spiritually sensitive and indeed more inclined to have visions etc.–and also more inclined to sacrifice. (I love your perspective, Ronan. I hadn’t really thought how huge the sacrifice of that scholarship was for this young man.)

Once, on a call-in radio interview, someone asked me why Mormons insisted on going into Third World countries, implying that we were taking advantage of folks who didn’t know better and so let themselves be pushed into a baptismal font. As I recall, I gave a stupid answer. (I don’t remember what I said, just that it was stupid.)

I think the best answer would be one which showed proper respect to who those in the Third World really are–and also to the teenagers and slightly olders who give up two years to serve them.

When I’m with these missionaries I think of the parable of the olive tree and the branches that were once scattered in the farthest parts of the orchard being grafted back into the original tree to reinvigorate it.