Preparing to Witness to Mormons at Upcoming General Conference

And welcome to The Dividing Line this Saturday afternoon. My name is James White. And during the next week, starting Tuesday evening, members of Alpha Omega Ministries, our volunteers, will be heading out for, sometimes I lose track anymore, I think it's our 17th year, 16th, 17th year, in distributing tracts and witnessing to people as they gather at the Easter pageant of the LDS Church.

The Easter pageant is a play, a passion play, put on by the LDS Church each year called Jesus the Christ. Last year, about 120 ,000 people, they estimate, attended the Easter pageant. It is held on the front lawn of the Mesa Temple, which is between Hobson and Lesur on Main Street in Mesa, Arizona.

And for the past decade and a half or so, we too have been at the Easter pageant. No, we do not go on the grounds. No, we do not in any way try to dissuade people from attending or watching the play. It is a live play.

There are all sorts of people involved with it. It is very nicely put on. It has become one of the largest. I think it's either the largest or the second largest play put on by the LDS Church in the United States, which would also mean in the world itself.

But then again, that would also mean in the universe. That's not overly relevant at that point. But it's a very large play. They put a lot of money and time and effort into the production. Of course, it's also one of the main proselytizing times of the year for the local LDS missionaries.

Because when you attend the Easter pageant, you will be given and outlined a program. And in that program, of course, there will be a means of contacting the various and sundry LDS resources that you might want to avail yourself of.

And of course, if you want a free book of Mormon, you'll get a free book of Mormon. However, the free book of Mormon will arrive attached to two smiling LDS missionaries. And so, for the months after the Easter pageant, the missionaries are very, very busy tracking down all of the contacts that they made during the Easter pageant.

Now, the pageant itself doesn't promote a whole lot of LDS theology. In fact, if you are not really familiar with Mormonism, you would have a hard time coming up with anything specific in the Easter pageant that would automatically make you go, oh, this is Mormon.

This is Mormonism. This is a system that holds to many, many different beliefs other than Orthodox Christianity, and in fact denies the most fundamental, central, and definitional beliefs of the Christian faith.

You will see the story of Jesus, and you'll see the story of the crucifixion and the resurrection, and so on and so forth, and if you don't really know what you're watching, you wouldn't be given any specific information as to how Mormonism differs from Christianity.

In fact, one of the things that has always bothered me the most, as I walk around the public sidewalks that are around the Easter pageant area, around the temple area, is listening to the music that is played over the loudspeakers prior to the beginning of the pageant.

You will hear many Christian hymns being played, normally instrumentally, over the loudspeakers as the people are gathering, and many of the people who gather are not LDS. In fact, I would estimate that it's probably, it may be a 50 -50 split between Mormons and non-Mormons.

It used to be more Mormon than it is now, but it's become much more of that proselytizing effort, and so Mormons are very strongly encouraged to bring their neighbors and friends, and so on and so forth.

It's good family entertainment, anyways. And so, what has always bothered me and concerned me, of course, is the fact that here you have music playing, and I've heard songs like, Holy, Holy, Holy, which of course has words in it that would refer to God's eternally being God, even though Mormonism says He hasn't eternally been God, and God in three persons, Blessed Trinity, and yet Bruce R. McConkie, one of the Mormon apostles back in the 1970s and 80s, identified the doctrine of the Trinity as the whisperings of Satan, of Lucifer himself.

So, it's quite obvious that the LDS Church is doing everything in its power in the presentation of the LDS Easter pageant to attract the non-Mormon, to attract especially the Christian non-Mormon, and to present to them not the differences, not the uniqueness of the Mormon faith, but the idea of a sameness, but a freshness.

A sameness, but a freshness, because you see the young LDS missionaries standing out there and distributing their programs, and they look very nicely dressed, and here's young men giving two years of their life at the very prime of life in service to their church, and they have the young LDS ladies, the sisters out there doing the same thing, and it just looks so alive, so much more alive than many Protestant churches.

And so, it is their main proselytizing effort and, as I said earlier, for about the past 16 or 17 years, we too have been at the LDS Easter pageant. Started off only hearing about it shortly after I began to study Mormonism, and I and my young wife, God bless her soul, rode with me on a Kawasaki 440 at that time.

Just to show you how long ago it was, the freeway ended at Country Club, and you had to get off at Country Club and go up to Maine and over there. Those of you who use the Superstition every day and weren't around back then may be amazed at how little it once was, but bear with me, it was a long time ago, and we went out there and were amazed at the number of people began attracting and witnessing at that time.

The next year we went out for a couple of nights, and at that time were accompanied by Wally Tope. Wally Tope, some of you may remember if you're familiar with Ministry to Mormons, was a very zealous individual and sharing with LDS people all over the United States.

He was killed during the L .A. riots. He was beaten to death by rioters outside of a grocery store that he tried to witness to them, and they beat him to death, and he was in a coma for quite some time, was the last person to die from the L .A. riots.

And then the next year, we began specifically attracting all six nights of the pageant. It's only five nights now. It goes Tuesday through Saturday now. It used to be Monday through Saturday. And we began printing tracks and organizing people and covering each of the corners and working much more specifically on covering all the nights of the Easter pageant out there in Mason and have been doing it ever since then.

Now it's not the most enjoyable work in the world in the sense that by the fifth night, you're tired. You've been standing from about 6 p .m. till 9 .30 or 10 o 'clock at night. Each night, you're normally on your feet.

You are frequently in conversations, though there are periods of time, especially in the first few nights, when there isn't anything spectacular going on, especially during the presentation itself. For the first hour or so between 6 and 7 p .m., there's not a whole lot of people coming in, but then after 7 o 'clock, it really starts getting busy.

But you also get a lot of, quite simply, nasty comments from people. Many of the LDS people will tell you to get a life, get a job. How dare you stand out here and tell us we're not Christians? Don't you know the name of our church is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, etc., etc.?

And many of these folks don't want to talk to you. They just want to vent at you for a moment and then walk off. The Mormon missionaries in the past have done everything in their power to try to get tracks out of people's hands.

We have pictures from years ago of missionaries with bulging pockets showing them to us, crowing about the fact that they were finding people who were reading our tracks. And we even have had people come back to us and say, you know, they took the literature you gave me.

Could I get another one? And, of course, we always give them another one and say, now hold on to this one. So we've had that type of experience, and we frequently have the young LDS people get downright nasty.

I've been hit in the back with a snow cone. I've had a half-eaten Arby's roast beef sandwich thrown at me and hit me in the chest. Didn't hurt, but certainly did look strange. And we've even had the windows of our office, when we had an office that was available for people to visit, smashed out by young Mormon men that we had talked to that evening.

They smashed the windows about 2 o 'clock in the morning and then left a phone message for us, just so we knew who had done it and, of course, why they had done it as well. We didn't have their names, obviously, so we couldn't do anything about it, but that has taken place.

But it has also been a time of tremendous sharing. And if you can look past the rejection, if you can look past the individuals who try to treat you like you are not even a human being, those who make the snide and nasty remarks, if you can look past all of that, there has been a tremendous opportunity of sharing with people of every age group.

Certainly, especially on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings, there's a lot of young people. And many of these LDS young people have come to this pageant since they were knee-high to a grasshopper, and they are bored stiff.

And so their parents let them leave and go do something else, and they decide to go talk to the strange people up at the corner. And we have had some tremendous opportunities. Yes, sometimes we've actually had to leave the corner, because an entire group would get together, would get very rowdy, frequently be riled up by some adult who would be acting like a child.

And we've had to leave the corner, because they were just getting so loud and obnoxious and pushy and so on and so forth. But most of the time, the conversations are very, very good. Very intense, yes.

You're talking with maybe 5 to 15 people at a time. You try to focus your attention upon a particular individual, but you will have some very intense conversations. And these young people have never heard the Gospel of Grace.

They've never heard of the idea of man being dead in sin. They've never heard of the idea of God's grace in a biblical fashion. The LDS concept of grace is far removed from the biblical concept of grace.

And so tremendous opportunities of sharing with young folks, with young men who are about to go on a mission, planting seeds in their mind of truth that you pray that God will allow them to see come into fruition.

We've had many conversations with Mormon missionaries out there. Some of the most amazing encounters we've ever had with missionaries have been out there. We've given my book, Letters to a Mormon Elder to young Mormon missionaries.

And we remember just about 3 years ago now a young missionary who took the book, I think on a probably like a Wednesday night. And when we talked with him, it began on a Friday night. He had already read about half the book.

He was his own leader, so he had a little more time than most missionaries did. And we were in one conversation with some young LDS people and they asked some questions about the Bible right as these missionaries walked up.

And this one missionary who was reading my book said, oh, oh, can I answer that? And he gave the answer to how we got the Bible and how it was translated directly out of my book, Letters to a Mormon Elder.

That's how closely he had been reading it. And he wasn't mocking it. He even said to the young LDS people who were standing there, he said, hey, you ought to listen to these folks. They're missionaries like we're missionaries.

And they've done their homework. And they know what we believe and they respect us. And you should have seen the young Mormon people standing around. If they had had dentures they would have dropped them right then and there because they couldn't believe these missionaries were saying these things about us.

Especially since obviously a whole lot of other missionaries don't say those things about us. So we've had some incredible encounters with those young LDS missionaries, with returned LDS missionaries, with older people, people of every race, every male and female, every age group.

Tremendous conversations with these folks. And frequently, even when we're having a conversation that we just don't feel like it's really going anywhere. We don't feel like this person's really listening.

They're just there to argue. When you maintain a Christian testimony and a Christian attitude and you speak God's truth, God honors His truth. And frequently what'll happen is you'll give your all in a conversation but you know this person just really isn't listening.

And when they walk away you sort of take a deep breath and turn around and lo and behold, maybe a number of yards away, maybe behind you, you didn't even see them, didn't even notice them, there's someone else that's been listening.

And maybe they won't approach you right at that time. Maybe they will but maybe they'll come up to you a few minutes later, later that evening, a couple nights later, you never know. But they come up to you and say, you know, I heard what you were saying to that person and you know that that person didn't treat you very well and I'm very sorry for that.

And I've never heard anyone talk about what you were saying. Could you tell me more about that? And then you have those wonderful opportunities of sharing your faith, sharing the Gospel, talking about who Christ really is.

Why it's vitally important to have the right Jesus Christ. Not the Jesus of Mormonism but the Jesus of Scripture because the Jesus of Mormonism cannot save. And the right Gospel because the Gospel of Mormonism cannot save.

Wonderful opportunities to share those messages that you didn't even expect that you're going to have. And of course you're distributing thousands and thousands of tracts. Over the past week and in fact this very day, the president of Alpha Omega Ministries, Rich Pierce, has been slaving away, working extremely hard in retype setting some of the tracts we've distributed for years and printing those tracts himself, putting the paper in and putting the ink on and running the tracts and cutting the tracts and folding the tracts.

Rich is up to his eyeballs in responsibilities and duties right now. You might want to pray for him and for me as I am very busy speaking this day, in fact, today, Saturday, in Chicago. I won't be back until Wednesday of this week to join in with the ministry out there.

We are very, very busy right now and could really use your prayers for all the opportunities that are being presented to us. But we're distributing thousands and thousands of tracts. Now you say, yeah, and a lot of them get thrown away.

Yeah, they do. They do. There's no question about that. We call them fallen warriors. Sometimes they're returned to us crumpled up, thrown in our faces, torn up, spit upon, various and sundry other things like that.

We find them in the street and try to pick them up. We don't want to litter. Many people do, but we don't. And yes, many of them get trashed. But not all. And it's always tremendously encouraging to see one of two things.

A, a person taking the tract and maybe sticking inside a Book of Mormon. That frequently happens up in Salt Lake City as a person's walking into the general conference, which, by the way, program note, is where we'll be next week.

But next week we'll try to do this program live from Salt Lake City so that we can share with you from the very gates, talk with some of the folks that are out there passing out tracts and witnessing to people, and try to take your phone calls.

That's not going to be easy, but we're going to do our best to try to make it all work out next week as we're Lord willing at the general conference, the Mormon church in Salt Lake City. If I can make it up there, transportation wise, that'll be my 30th consecutive general conference there in Salt Lake City.

But those tracts get put into pockets, get put into purses, get put into books, whatever, and they get read at another time. They get read at a time when there's not a confrontation going on, when there aren't people standing around who will try to encourage you not to read it.

They get read at a time when a person's maybe at home, alone, when a person, that person has had questions on their forgets. So just a few years ago we were contacted right after we had been passing out tracts at the general conference, the Mormon church in Salt Lake City by a young lady, about 17 years old as I recall, and her friends had been putting tremendous pressure upon her to join the Mormon church.

She grew up in a somewhat Christian church, a sort of nominally Christian church. She had received some biblical teaching, and she knew there was something wrong here, but she couldn't put her fingers on it, and she really didn't have any resources available to her that would explain to her where the problems really were.

And so as she and her friends, their friends had brought her to the general conference, and it's very impressive to go up there and to see Temple Square and to see the thousands of people gathered and to attend conference with 10 ,000 people in the Mormon tabernacle, and the Mormon tabernacle choir singing, and it's very impressive.

But as they're walking toward the south gate, her friends saw us standing outside the gate passing out tracts. And her friends immediately began talking about how terrible we were, and how hateful we were, and how nasty we were, and these terrible anti-Mormons.

Well, all that did was made her interested in what in the world we had to say. And so she managed to sneak away just long enough from her friends to pick up some of our literature. She couldn't talk to us, she had to sort of swing by and grab some tracts and hide them real quickly, and then rejoin her friends and then leave.

Well, those tracts gave her the information that she had been looking for. She knew it was there somewhere. She knew there was a problem someplace, and she found out what the problem was when she read our tracts, and she contacted us and thanked us, and informed her of her story.

We don't know how many times that happens. Many people say, well, how many people repent when you're out there sharing with the Mormons? How many people walk up to you and say, I just prayed the sinner's prayer, or something like that?

Well, very few. Very few. Yes, we do know of Mormons who have left the LDS church, but not because of a single tract. But that tract was instrumental in getting them to start thinking, in getting them to start considering these issues, in getting them to start doing some research, and the result of that over time, and leaving Mormonism is an issue that takes quite some time, the result of that over time was that they did come to know the Lord and they left the LDS church.

But far more than that are the number of people that we have helped to see through the charade, see through the smoke and mirrors, through the public relations get-ups, to see what the Mormon church is really all about in its doctrine, its theology, and that of course is the message of any church, is its doctrine, is its theology.

Yeah, I know that makes us somewhat backwards to be so focused upon that. There are many Christian churches today that de-emphasize the concept of doctrine and theology, but what you teach defines who you are.

What you teach about who Jesus Christ is, who God is, what the gospel is, that defines who you are. Why else do we have a purpose for existing as a church? And so in that very situation, we have been able to help many people to be warned, to realize what Mormonism's all about.

We've had many people come up to us and say, you know, up until the point where you talked to me and the point where you gave me this information, I just sort of thought Mormonism was just sort of another religion.

It was just, you know, the difference between being a Methodist and a Lutheran. You know, just different denominational type stuff. I didn't know that they taught that God was once a man who lived on other planets.

I didn't know they taught that men could become gods and that Jesus Christ is the first begotten offspring of God the Father and we're all begotten offspring of God the Father in a physical or spiritual pre-existence.

I didn't know any of that. And of course, the Mormon church is more than happy to get you into the Mormon church, to get you into the LDS church, get you into that baptistry and get you baptized on the minimal amount of information it takes to get you to agree to do so.

I'll never forget when I first wrote letters to a Mormon elder. It was not even published yet. It was in that manuscript stage where it's all written and it's being proofread and of course people are ripping apart your grammar and things like that if it needs to be ripped apart.

We all need editors and I'm very thankful for mine. The book wasn't out yet, but someone from a large Baptist church called me and said, you know, we just lost someone to the Mormon church, a member of our Bible study just informed us that they joined the Mormon church and we'd like to bring this person by and have him talk to you.

And I said, sure, that would be no problem at all. And so this person came by and so I started the conversation by saying, so what convinced you, though you were once a monotheist, you believe there is one God, what convinced you to become a polytheist and believe in many gods?

And this person looked at me and said, what are you talking about? I don't believe in more than one God. Oh, well, what convinced you to believe that Jesus is the spirit brother of Lucifer? What? I don't believe that.

And so I went down the line and all down the line this person went, what are you talking about? I've never heard anything like that before in my life. I don't believe any of that. Mormonism doesn't teach that.

And so I gave this person the manuscript of Letters to a Mormon Elder. It had notes scribbled in the margins and it wasn't overly pretty, but it was the material anyways. And about two weeks later, they came back and said, I cannot believe what I got myself into.

This person said, you know, you'd document something and you'd give the reference in these books. And I had been given these books. Mormons have been giving me books like a Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith and Mormon Doctrine and Doctrines of Salvation.

And these were all sitting on my shelf, brand new books, but I hadn't read them. You know, I sort of looked through them and just looked like books on God and the Bible and stuff like that. And I hadn't read them yet.

And so I looked these things up and lo and behold, that's exactly what it says. And I've told them, excuse me, remove my name, I made a mistake. But you see what happens with a lot of folks is they don't run into someone who can explain where the differences are.

And so what happens is over time, they develop friendships, they develop a connection to the organization. And very slowly, and for some people it almost never happens, but very slowly for most people, these concepts, these doctrines are introduced slowly over time.

And at first there might be some resistance, but as long as you don't show too much of the doctrine, too much of what the differences are, you can slowly bring that person in to where they begin to accept things that initially they never would have accepted at all.

Mormonism has learned public relations. Mormonism has learned the key to getting people to accept doctrines that initially they would reject vociferously. They've learned this in the missionary lessons.

If you took the missionary lessons 20 years ago and compared the missionary lessons today, you would be shocked at the vast difference between what was presented to you then and what's presented to you now.

The missionary lessons are far less doctrinally oriented and teaching oriented than they ever were before. And Mormonism has learned to really quiet down its criticism of Christian churches. The first thing you hear today in the Mormon presentation is not Joseph Smith's first vision, where he sees two gods, God the Father and Jesus Christ in separate and distinct physical bodies, and that these two gods say that all Christian churches are corrupt and their professors are an abomination in his sight.

You don't hear that first thing. Instead, you hear a nice, innocuous, non-specific, rather ambiguous discussion of families being forever and being together forever and yadda yadda yadda with pretty pictures and so on and so forth.

And of course, if that's enough to get you to join, that's good. That's enough. Let's go with it from there. It's a shame, but that's the way that it works. And so people are brought into the church without having much knowledge of what the church teaches.

Well, when we're out in Mesa this following week, Tuesday through Saturday nights, or when we are in Salt Lake on Saturday and you may be going, how can you be in both places? Well, we need volunteers to be in both places.

When we're out there doing this work and we pass out literature to non-Mormons, at the very least, those who have any interest in truth at all, those who have any interest in being careful about what they join, being careful about what they agree to, are going to have to ask certain questions of the Mormon missionaries they probably would rather not answer because they read our literature.

Now, that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to get an honest answer. They may still join because they won't contact us and say, okay, the Mormons said this, what do you say? And only rarely do we get those opportunities.

We do get them, but rarely do we get those opportunities where we get to sit down with the missionaries and the prospective convert and lay everything on the table. You would think if Mormonism was really true that they would invite that kind of encounter.

In fact, Doctrine and Covenants section 71, part of the LDS scriptures, tells Mormons to call upon their enemies in public and private and that if they are faithful that the errors of their enemies will be exposed.

And the early Mormons did that. The early Mormons were not like modern day Mormons. The early Mormons would arrange debates with ministers and pastors and they would publicly proclaim their teachings in an open fashion.

I could only wish to have been around at a time like that to have been able to engage in that type of thing, but they won't do that much anymore. That's not the public relations direction that the church has chosen to take.

So, at the very least, we're making the Mormon missionaries answer questions they'd rather not answer. And of course, they then have to run the risk that those people are going to come back to us and say, this is what they've said and then we can document from their own literature what their own leaders have said.

And of course, if that's happening while we're out there, then that give and take is certainly an opportunity for God's truth to be proclaimed and people to understand what the issues really are. So, pray for us this week.

Pray for us that we will speak God's truth in a proper fashion and that He will be honored and glorified in what we're doing. Lots more to talk about on The Dividing Line today, but we need to take a break and we'll be right back right after these messages.

Training and Witnessing at the LDS Easter Pageant

Welcome back to The Dividing Line. My name is James White. I'm the director of Alpha Omega Ministries. I'm an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church. I also teach for the Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary.

In fact, let me just mention in passing, one of the most common requests that we get at Alpha Omega and in the various things that I do is the question, when are you going to be teaching Greek again? When can I take a New Testament Greek class?

And I just want to let you know that I am scheduled to be teaching Beginning Greek on Thursday evenings starting around the end of August for the Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary's Arizona campus.

And so if that isn't a subject you've wanted to tackle, it is a seminary class, so it's graduate level, master's level. But I know that you can take the class on an audit basis, for example, if you wished to.

You can take it for credit. You can do either direction. And that'll be beginning at the end of August going into December. So it'll be the fall semester. Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary. Give them a ring.

Talk to them and let them know of your interest so you can get the necessary forms filled out. And we'd be more than happy to see you this coming fall in the Greek class there at Golden Gate Seminary if that's something that you'd be interested in doing.

And let me just put in a plug here. People have asked me in all of my Bible college and seminary training what was the single most important class that I took in regards to helping me with apologetics, with defending the faith.

And I say, well, there were two. The single most important one was New Testament Greek. Being able to look at the New Testament documents in their original language, that's probably the single most useful class that I took.

But the second was church history. Knowing church history, knowing how we came to believe what we believe today and what the events in church history were, the Council of Nicaea and the Reformation, whatever it might be.

Church history and Koine Greek, those were the two classes that have helped me the most in doing apologetics. So, some people say, come on, you're inviting people to learn Greek? Yes, I am. Well, isn't that a little intellectually arrogant?

No, it's not. It isn't. I don't accept the dumbing down of the Christian faith, the dumbing down of the Christian church. Think about the time we invest in things that will have absolutely positively no eternal value at all.

Don't we have time to invest in things that do have an eternal value? Don't we have time to invest in learning how to read the New Testament in its original language, which the greatest commentary on the New Testament is the New Testament in Greek.

There is no question about that. And so, I don't in any way, shape, or form apologize for challenging people. Look, if you're an engineer, if you're a computer person, if you're a professional, you've shown your ability to master difficult subjects, and it's not easy to cover beginning Greek in 15 weeks, which is how we do it.

It's fast-paced. It's going to take work. But you know, most of us in our secular employment put that kind of work in all the time. And there's absolutely nothing in Scripture and nothing in the faith that says we shouldn't put just as hard work, in fact, even harder work into our Christian faith.

Wouldn't you like to be non-dependent upon reading a commentary someplace and just simply assuming that the commentator is being perfectly honest with the text when he says the Greek means such and so?

Wouldn't you like to be able to check out the commentators? Let me tell you something, folks. Scholars who write commentaries, scholars who write books on theology, they're not perfect. In fact, they have their own traditions, they have their own pet doctrines, their own pet positions, and those things sneak in, and the only way to check them out is to be able to look at the original languages yourself when they make those types of claims.

So consider it, this fall. Maybe you might need to not commit yourself to some other things, just so you have some extra time to do it. But think about this fall, taking Koine Greek through the Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary's Arizona campus here, and I'll be the instructor there, and we always have an interesting time, and yes, apologetics does enter into the class.

Often I will share instances where that language has come up and been very, very important to me in my work. And of course, I suppose if I'm telling you to give them a ring, it would be good if I gave you their number.

It's 240 3284, area code 602 240 3284, regular business hours, Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary's Arizona campus. And since we're talking about it, going every which direction today, since we're talking about it, I was just invited to teach a, well, it's technically called Christian Philosophy, but it in essence is a Christian apologetics class on the main campus at Golden Gate Seminary, and that main campus is in Mill Valley, California.

Now, Mill Valley is a beautiful area. It's just south of San Francisco. Golden Gate's main seminary campus in Mill Valley sits on a hill, and when you're in certain of the classroom buildings, you can look out the windows, and literally look across the bay at downtown San Francisco.

It is gorgeous, beautiful, beautiful place. And you may say, why are you mentioning teaching a class in San Francisco? How in the world would any of us go to that? Well, it is a four-day intensive class, and when they say intensive, they mean intensive.

8 a .m. to 5 p .m. Thursday, Friday, Monday, Tuesday. It is the weekend after the July 4th weekend during the summer. It is a two-hour class, graduate level. We'll be doing apologetics, which would include the issue of worldview presuppositional versus evidential apologetics.

We would also be discussing Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses, the role of the Trinity in these issues, as well as taking some time to listen to some key issues on the subject of authority regarding Roman Catholicism.

All in four days. Eight hours a day. Well, it is not actually eight hours a day. Well, actually, that would be eight hours a day because you take an hour break, and glucose intravenous feeding in the afternoon would probably be a good idea to stay awake and to stay with it.

But if you are interested, that is only a four-day class with a weekend in between that may be a way of, maybe you need to get some graduate credits for whatever profession you are in, and they allow you to take whatever you want.

Think about it. This summer, July, I believe it's July 8th and 9th, and then 12th and 13th, if I'm recalling correctly off the top of my head, they would have that information here at the Golden Gate Campus locally at 240 -3284.

That may be something that you might be interested in participating in. So, back to what we're doing this particular week after a rather large detour there. We're going out and we're sharing with the LDS people.

And you know, it's not actually a detour. Because one of the things that we try to do when we share with the LDS people out in Mesa, when we explain the Christian faith to them, is to do so in a positive manner.

And I don't mean that in the way that our society currently interprets that positive. Well, if you're going to do it positively, you can't say anyone's wrong. You can't say that anything is false or untrue.

You just have to be very vanilla and plain and everything's wonderful and cool and so on and so forth. That's not what I mean. When Jesus refuted the Sadducees in Matthew chapter 22 about a false teaching, he did not start off by saying, well, that's one way of looking at it.