Witnessing to Mormons: Jeff Durbin - The Street Apologist

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So, as I said about in the prayer, talking to the

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Lord, I've been involved in ministry to the LDS community since really I first heard the gospel.

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I wasn't raised in a Christian home, and so I wasn't raised in the theological context and course.

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I didn't understand really who Jesus was. My only understanding of Jesus really came from watching, I think at Easter time, really watched a movie at Easter that was on television about the life of Christ and everything else, and that was the context of that.

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I understood there was a guy named Jesus who claimed to have died and rose again. At about 17 years old, I heard the gospel for the first time, interestingly, from Billy Graham on television.

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That's where I first heard the gospel, thought what I had was a conversion to Christ, and so my story is not necessarily overly important here about God's work in my own life throughout the years.

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But when I first heard the gospel and I turned to Christ and I experienced really this life change, and I was bringing a

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Bible now to school because I couldn't get enough of it. I was reading it in classes, getting in trouble for reading it in classes, reading it at lunchtime, and it wasn't long after I had experienced this transformation and really this love for God that I ran into a person in theater arts class while I was reading the

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Bible in high school, and while I'm reading the Bible, he sat down next to me and he said, Hey, what are you reading?

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I said, it's the Bible. And he's like, are you Christian? I said, yeah, I'm Christian. Are you Christian? He said, yeah, I'm Christian too.

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And so we're chatting and we're rapping a little bit, and then he says to me something kind of peculiar. And I'd only been a

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Christian for a very, very, very short time. We're talking like a month, maybe three months I was a believer, and he says something odd to me that struck me as odd, even as a new believer with really no theological training.

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He says to me, he says, so what level of heaven do you think you're going to? And I thought, oh, that's, um, uh, hopefully the highest level,

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I guess, I suppose that'd be the good thing to do. Right. Uh, that's what I aim for right there. And so through talking, I asked him, you know, where are you from?

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And he said, well, you know, my denomination is the church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints. And I had remembered that a couple months prior to that, there was a guy that came to my door and gave me a card to visit the

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Washington DC temple. And I lived around DC. And so I remember this vividly. So I go to this

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Christian bookstore down the road from my house. I'd become like a fixture there. I was there all the time reading books on the floor and I knew the owner named

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Tony and I walked in one day after school this day and I said to him, I said, hey, Tony, could you give me any information on the denomination of the

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Mormons, the church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints? And he says, Jeff, that's, that's not a denomination, that's a cult. And he runs to the back, he says, hang on a second, and he comes back and he basically drops a load of books into my lap.

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And he says, here, just take it. You don't need to pay me for it. Just read it. There you go. And so I went home and that night

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I watched some, some film, some documentary on Mormonism and I also read some books and I ended up not sleeping that entire night.

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I didn't even sleep. I went to school the next morning without sleeping the night before, just reading and digesting all this.

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And I was in awe of the fact that we were using the same language, but we were not talking about the same things.

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And I knew very little at the time, but I was just, I just couldn't believe. And I was really stunned by the fact that this guy

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I was talking to that I thought, you know, was claiming to be a Christian was in fact not a Christian. And so I had gone to this photocopy place before school and I remember vividly photocopying pages and pages and pages of scripture, highlighting stuff, pages and pages and pages of Mormon stuff.

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And I even got a photocopy of Joseph Smith's arrest record in 1826 in Bainbridge, New York for crystal ball gazing and, and the fine that he paid.

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And I remember that I came with this docket of my case against Mormonism and I came to my friend and said,

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Hey, you're in a cult, take this. And you know, I thought that was, you know, done, he'll be saved.

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Right. And so what ended up being the course of my relationship with him is that for a period of about six months, we developed a really good friendship and we talked all the time.

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And I ended up actually meeting with Mormon missionaries, numerous sets of Mormon missionaries from his ward.

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I went with his family during Christmas time to go to the Washington DC temple. And I remember on the car ride home,

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I'm sitting in the, in the van with a guy who was a black Mormon. And I remember that I'm in this hour long car ride home talking to him about the racism and early

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Mormonism and how could you be black and be a Mormon? And you know, I'm just, I, you know, I don't really know quite what

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I'm doing, but I'm doing everything I can to reach this guy. So as time went by, I remember vividly, we were in my bedroom one day with my friend and we're talking and, and he started, he started crying as, as I'm ministering to him.

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Again, I'm, I know very little at the time, but I just had this passion to reach him. And after the course of our relationship and all this conversation leads up to this moment where I'm giving him the gospel and he says to me, finally, as he breaks down, he says,

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Jeff, I know everything you're saying is true. He says, but I can't leave