Why People Leave the LDS ( Mormon ) Church, and How We Can Help.

1. Why People Leave the LDS Church, and what family/friends/community can do about it By John P. Dehlin

4. Worldwide Church Activity Rates Inactive 7-8M Active 4-5M Salt Lake Tribune, Merrill Bateman

6. Why would anyone leave the LDS church? (What are they thinking/feeling? You cannot befriend/reach/help them if you don’t TRULY understand them)

7. Here’s how it happens (This is not to expose you to dangerous things…it’s to bring you to where they are if you intend to help)

9. Southpark -- ”About the Mormons”

10. Larry King / Gordon B. Hinckley On Polygamy: “It’s not doctrinal” On God once being a man: “I don’t know much about it. I don’t know that we teach it.”

11. Newsweek “After Smith ordered an antagonistic printing press destroyed …” “By the end of his life, he had accrued some 30 wives, massive debt and hundreds of enemies. ‘I never told you I was perfect,’ he told his followers. “ "Decades of serious and honest scholarship have failed to uncover credible evidence that these Book of Mormon civilizations ever existed," --Southerton

12. Mark Hoffman “ But why, some still ask, were his deceits not detected by the several Church leaders with whom he met?” -- Dallin H. Oaks

13. Brigham Young – Journal of Discourses "You see some classes of the human family that are black, uncouth, uncomely, disagreeable and low in their habits, wild, and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the intelligence that is generally bestowed upon mankind. …the Lord put a mark upon him, which is the flat nose and black skin. Trace mankind down to after the flood, and then another curse is pronounced upon the same race — that they should be the 'servant of servants;' and they will be, until that curse is removed; and the Abolitionists cannot help it, nor in the least alter that decree" --Brigham Young JOD v. 7 p. 290 "Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so" --Brigham Young JOD vol. 10, p. 109

14. Written by David O. McKay’s Neice

15. They go to Google

17. How we’re taught things are/were…. Bad/Black Good/White How things really are/were…. Shades and color Simple Complex Notice the dramatic difference. This “gap” realization is what they are going through “The Gap”

18. Their world falls apart

19. An Introduction to the Major Issues

29. Again…NONE of this proves the church is false. Much of it has very reasonable explanations. But….think about the gap between what was taught or understood/believed, and what really was/is. It’s HUGE.