The Gift of Discernment

In Mormonism, I was taught that the leaders had something called the Gift of Discernment. It basically means that your bishop or other high ranking leaders are blessed with a special gift from God when they are called to their positions. It's suppose to work this way:

If you are in an interview with your bishop and lie to him about something, then the "Spirit of the Lord" is suppose to inform him that you are lying. In practice it's less reliable than Sylvia Brown.

During the time I was a member of the Mormon leadership (First Councilor in a Branch Presidency) one of the toughest things to admit to myself was that there was no special power by which the Branch President and the rest of us ran that branch. Our decisions of who should fill the various callings in the branch were based on educated guesses, hunches, and how we felt things should be run. We prayed and tried to "seek God's help" but I never felt that our branch was lead by any spirit of inspiration and certainty not by any Gift of Discernment.

In a case like ours it was really no big deal. The callings were filled and we functioned as normally as possible. But what happens when members trust that their bishop really does have the Gift of Discernment and can see the evil in other people? Sometimes that sort of blind trust can lead to tragic consequences as evidenced in the following news item from England:

A MORMON involved in youth activities at his church has appeared in court accused of years of sexual abuse. Martyn Conway, a former member of the congregation at the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints in Cambridge's Cherry Hinton Road, is alleged to have committed serious sexual indecency on two boys under the age of 16 in the 1980s and 1990s. One incident is said to have taken place in a room at the church after Conway - entrusted with the building's keys - let himself and the child in after hours.

The 48-year-old former postman, of Princess Court, Hills Road, Cambridge, faces eight charges claiming he carried out persistent abuse over several years on one of the boys. Conway, who denies all charges against him, is also accused of carrying out a serious sexual act on the second youngster in the 1990s. Opening the trial at Cambridge Crown Court, Tim Brown, for the prosecution, told the jury: "The thing common to both boys is the church and Conway became someone to be trusted to look after and mentor the children."This case is about events that took place a long time ago. It is a feature of these sorts of cases that, very often, it takes time for things to come out."

It was not until last year that the younger of Conway's alleged victims - both now grown men - felt able to go to police to explain what had happened to him, although he had confided in his mother two years earlier, the court heard. After police became involved, the older alleged victim also "found the courage" to speak out. In video evidence, the first man described how Conway began the abuse by being "huggy", which Conway said was alright because it was "a church thing". "He would say he loved me, but said that was fine because that was a church thing too," he said. The abuse escalated from fondling over the boy's clothes to Conway's insistence on being massaged. Trips to the seaside and camping followed which the alleged victim described as "just an excuse to get me in a place where I was naked", followed by more serious sexual acts.

Conway, he said, made his "skin crawl" but made him swear to secrecy. Making it clear he did not want the sexual activity to continue, the boy made a pact with Conway and got him to sign it, in a bid to get him to promise that he would not touch him any more, the court heard. But Conway soon reneged on the deal, he said, and the boy felt there was "no escape" from him.

Now, if the charges are true....where was the bishop? Where was the famous Gift of Discernment? The above story has been repeated time and time again in Mormon Churches all over. Yet the response I get from most LDS members is "well, it happens in other churches! Look at the Catholics". Yes, but still...what about the Bishop's Gift of Discernment? If he can be mislead by molesters and other liars, then what else can he be mislead about? After all, we have seen how Mormon Prophet Spencer Kimball was fooled by a conman's fake documents.

In the winter of 1829 Joseph Smith said that God had revealed to him that he should send Hiram Page and Oliver Cowdery to Toronto, Canada. There they would sell the copyright to the Book of Mormon. But their mission didn't turn out the way the revelation had said it would. Smith then got another "revelation" from God which said:
Some revelations are of God: some revelations are of man: and some revelations are of the devil.

Perhaps it is time for the Mormon Church to come clean and admit they are just trying to figure out things like the rest of us are instead of claiming some special spiritual power of "discernment" that they've never had.

Perhaps it's time to introduce the Gift of Reason and Common Sense. The problem is, if they did this, it would lead to questioning and as we have seen in other posts here questioning your leaders is a pretty big sin in Mormonism.

So keep on discerning! Hey if Sylvia Brown can get away with her false predictions and misfires, Mormonism can too!