How should we think about "the Gathering"?
Faith Matters resources to accompany your Come Follow Me study: March 31-April 6
The Lord welcomed questions in 1830, and He welcomes our questions today.
Jesus Christ is gathering His people before He comes again. Jesus Christ invites me to help gather His people before His Second Coming.
The Body of Christ is very diverse, and we need everyone… The interesting thing about the gathering of Israel is the G-word—gather, right? Sifting comes later, and it’s not our job.
Remember, we’re fishers of men. God is the sorter of the fish.
—Jeff Strong, “The Ongoing Tug-of-War Between Tradition and Change”
What does “The Gathering” look like in the 21st Century?
Read Richard Bushman’s thoughts from Issue 1 of Wayfare:
In the first decade and a half of the Church’s life, we sought to save the world by gathering converts to Zion. During those years, we concentrated the gathered membership in single cities. Independence, Far West, and Nauvoo took turns being Zion—the safe havens in the coming apocalypse. After the move west, new converts gathered to a new Zion: a region of Great Basin villages, more or less patterned after the original plat for the City of Zion in Missouri. In the twentieth century, gathering took still another form as saints planted “stakes” throughout the world and gathered locally to build mini-Zions. Stakes were established first in Denver and the great western coastal cities—Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle—and then by the 1940s in New York and Washington D.C. We were to save the world by gathering people into these stakes, which theoretically could be planted anywhere. Today, there are Latter-day Saint outposts in virtually every part of the world where the law permits. Gathering now is not only to the cities of the midwest or Great Basin villages, but likewise to stakes in Indonesia and Africa and across the world.
In all of this expansion, we are left with a pressing question: what of those who do not obviously want to be “gathered?” Missionary efforts go on apace—we continue inviting the world’s citizens to gather into worldwide stakes by joining themselves formally to the Church. But what about the vast majority of the world’s population—those who either never hear the call to gather or who hear but, for any of a thousand reasons, never heed it? What is our responsibility toward the billions of our brothers and sisters who do not heed our message? I believe that we are beginning to understand that we have a responsibility to better the world for all of its citizens, whether they choose to be gathered or not.
—Richard Bushman, “How to Save the World”
In 2022, we spoke with Jeff Strong about the experience of missionaries in today’s mission field, including the unique challenges and opportunities they face. This conversation was based largely on a document Jeff wrote, called “What One Mission President Would Tell His Own Grandchildren About Serving a Mission.”
You can also hear about Jeff’s experience as a mission president of the Bentonville, Arkansas Mission where he and his wife led a phenomenally successful pilot program with their missionaries. For us, the story of the Bentonville, Arkansas mission has totally revolutionized the way we imagine missionary work.
Learn from Patrick Mason in Restoration:
God's great restoration project seeks to unite all generations of the human family from the beginning to the present and onward all the way to the end of time.
…Yes, there are many “things” to restore. But ultimately God isn't concerned with restoring “things” as much as he is with using those things to restore what really matters—“his people.” So the “restoration of all things” is designed with one grand aim in mind: restoring God's people—our Father and Mother's children, their eternal family—to wholeness.
—Patrick Mason, “Restoring the People of God” (an excerpt from Restoration)
Our encounter with the larger world is forcing us to ask new, and challenging questions about our place in it. What does it mean that only 1/10th of one percent of the world’s population are members of “the only true and living church”? That means at least 99% of people around the world know little or nothing about Joseph Smith, let alone Russell M. Nelson. If the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is true, and if God wants all his children to be members of it, shouldn’t it be…bigger?
And what about all those really good people—our neighbors, coworkers, even family members—who are members of other religions, or no religion at all? Can divine love, favor, and revelation really be concentrated on just 0.1% of God’s children?
My head and heart both say no. The scriptures and prophets of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints do too.
—Patrick Mason, “True and Living Church: Bearer and Receiver of Gifts” (an excerpt from Restoration)
Go even deeper with The Big Questions project: In what way is our church “the true church?”
And learn from the wisdom of Joseph Grenny in his 2022 Restore presentation The Other Side Academy: “Zion with F-Bombs”
I've come to believe that I understood the atonement far too small. I think at its smallest, we think it's about being forgiven of sins. A little larger, and we think it's about changing our character. But you and I have the opportunity to understand that it's way bigger than that. President Nelson says that the gathering of Israel is the most important work taking place on the Earth, and that is atonement work. Atonement work is about sealing relationships. We understand that exaltation is collective, not individual. And what that helped me start to appreciate is that the path to peace, the path to hope, the path to a sense of power, is that when an individual that you are concerned with wants nothing from you, what you do is you get involved in collective atonement.
… The misery and the hardship we have in our lives, the specific hardships we have are designed to create generalized abilities in us. And those generalized abilities are about the gathering of Israel. They're about serving others who suffer similar afflictions, not just the ones that aren't having help that you were hoping that they would receive.
… When the tree that you want to serve isn't having it, you serve others. You take the generalized abilities that God has given you by dealing with your hardships and you serve where you can serve. Because atonement work is atonement work. The gathering is the gathering.
…When the tree that we can't help, the tree that wants no help from us is refusing that help, what heavenly father hopes that we do is take the generalized abilities we've got and start getting involved in atonement work and just gathering the family of Jesus Christ and the family of God.
“All things unto me are spiritual.”
The Kingdom of Heaven, Jesus said, is within us. It’s not just in a far-away celestial land where God will make everything right that is currently wrong. As co-creators with God and co-builders of Zion, we can harness grace to intervene in the stickiness now—to merge the disparate visions of a glorious family-centered heaven with each heaven-centered human of earth’s family who wants to be there.
—Hannah Packard Crowther, Gracing
If I were to boil down the meaning of Joseph Smith’s restoration to a single aphorism, This is where everything happens might be my best try. This idea was the engine of the early church’s first migrations. As revelation began to flow, the earth under Joseph’s feet became holy ground in widening circles of sacred geography. The remnant of the house of Israel? They’re here, just down the river. New Jerusalem, site of the second coming? Watch this space, coming soon. The garden of Eden, primordial belly button of the world? It’s here too, in Missouri. Eve ate the apple on the same Ozark highland where my robin ate the inchworm.
If you find a touch of the absurd in this, I agree. We’re accustomed to thinking of the sacred as something apart, exalted. And we have good reason: the roots of the word sacred contain the idea of something protected and removed from ordinary settings, everyday experience. Sacred space is an ancient land, a walled garden, or the top of a mountain, the higher the better. But the restoration introduced a low-elevation version of sacred geography. Right here, at ground level, among normal places and events, sacred things happened.
—Rosalynde Welch, “Airborne at Low Elevation” from Wayfare issue 1
A journaling invitation from At-One-Ment, by Thomas McConkie: “What if this very body, this very world were already heaven? Rather than relating to this life as a test to get somewhere better, what if you treated this very moment as the better place you were hoping to get to? You’ve already arrived. This is it. How would you act differently if this were the case? In what way do you start to perceive things differently when you take this to be true?”
I’ve stopped focusing on the Jesus who will come into my future and have started focusing on His coming into my present. The lines between a religious life and an everyday one blur. My search for a life in Christ requires a new kind of seeking and an entirely different orientation to my works. Works stop being a way to carry me into future grace and start being a way to orient me to present grace.
…I’m inspired by those who have shown me how this is possible. The Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren describes something similar in her book Liturgy of the Ordinary. Liturgy is not a word Latter-day Saints use frequently, but it refers to religious rituals and habits such as the sacrament or daily prayers. Warren explores the idea that the common daily liturgies of making our bed, brushing our teeth, or checking our email can be opportunities for practicing holiness. They can be practiced as liturgies to experience God in even the most mundane tasks.
In addition to the many chore-like daily routines, a more intentional motherhood has often involved reaching for what lights my children up. With my Minecraft-loving son, that might mean some stumbling around in the game. With my math-loving son, that could mean learning about the Fibonacci sequence and how its mathematical patterns show up in nautilus shells and galaxies. Too often I’m cluelessly going through motherhood, not paying attention. But my experience changes when I reach for connection with my children through the things they love. I bring God into the dance.
…Embracing these moments leads me to God in the here and now. In all the works I do, from math, to raising children, to taking the sacrament, to belting Queen, I can live more fully in relationship with Christ. I can stop living a severed life. I can learn that life in Christ has been the natural state of affairs all along.
We have a divine and willing partner.
And an invitation to join the dance.
—Hannah Packard Crowther, Gracing
Heavenly Father has a plan for the salvation of His children. Jesus Christ redeems us from the Fall.
In All Things New, and in our conversation with them about it, Fiona and Terryl Givens address everything from our concepts of heaven, sin, salvation, exaltation, and family togetherness in the eternities. We found the work they do in this important book to be immensely healing and hopeful.
“It’s long past time for us to think more deeply, bravely, and creatively about what love, grace, sin, and justice mean in light of the Restoration. And, equally, it’s long past time for us to break with the traditional Christian grammars of original sin and retributive justice as we do so. All Things New is important work of just this kind.” —Adam S. Miller, author of Letters to a Young Mormon and An Early Resurrection
“Fiona and Terryl Givens have provided all of us a clarifying and powerful way to raise our understanding of the truths of the Restoration, and the spiritual light that has been present between the time of Jesus’ original church and that of the Latter-days. Imbuing familiar words with glorious new understanding allows us to see ever more clearly the transformative power of Christ’s pure love, and to increase our gratitude for the urgent desire of our Heavenly Parents to include each of us in Their work and glory.” —Tom Christofferson, author of That We May Be One
For even more, check out Challenging Terryl Givens — A Conversation About "All Things New,” or listen to “Atonement: From Penal Substitution to Radical Healing — An Excerpt from "All Things New" by Terryl and Fiona Givens.”
You can go even deeper with The Big Questions Project: Do we misunderstand Christ’s Atonement?
And watch Jared Halverson’s teach about Creation, Fall, and Atonement in his presentation from Restore 2022: Don’t Let a Good Faith Crisis Go to Waste
Jesus Christ will come again.
Early Christians believed the return of Christ was imminent. When his return seemed delayed, Paul reassured them that Jesus would return soon, that the righteous would be lifted up, and that the dead would be raised to meet him. As the years continued to pass, Christians developed different interpretations about when Jesus would return and what that return would look like. In this episode of Meet the Early-day Saints, we discuss Frederick’s chapter, “Facing the End: The Second Coming of Jesus Christ and the Millennium” in Ancient Christians: An Introduction for Latter-day Saints.
