I have added a Mormon Mission Prep Widgets page on the site for widgets and other tools to share Mormon Mission Prep content through your sites and blogs.  There are current three widgets to choose from including the newest one which uses the latest logo image shown on the right.  Please use these resources on your site or blog to link back to Mormon Mission Prep and to share the content you find valuable and useful to future LDS missionaries.  Thanks.

Any of you who have visited Mormon Mission Prep since the beginning of the new year will have already noticed this, but over Christmas break I redesigned the Web site.  Actually, I have done far more than simply redesigning the look of the site, I added a Spanish version of the site and I changed the underlying technology the site is built on. I hope you all enjoy the new site design and new features.  Feel free to give many any feedback you have.

Spanish Version of Mormon Mission Prep

From the beginning, I have wanted to do the site in both Spanish and English.  Up until recently, though, I have used my limited time and resources to simply get the site up and running in my native English.   But with recent requests from readers, and the opportunity provided by the technology change, I decided to go ahead and create a Spanish version of Mormon Mission Prep.

Not all blog posts have been translated yet, but I will slowly be working on them.  What I have translated thus far is about 8 of the most recent blog posts, and most of the other pages in the top navigation menu. I’ve also created a Spanish Facebook page and a Spanish YouTube channel for the mission prep videos, though I’ve only translated one of the videos so far. Here’s a run down of the Spanish and English content:

Under the Hood Technology

For those of you interested in the technical details, I moved the site from being run on the Windows-based BlogEngine.net, to the Linux-based WordPress.  BlogEngine was okay during the first year of running the site, but I began to run into more and more limitations with it.  WordPress is a powerful free blog platform that provides me all the resources I need to run the site now and long into the future.

I’m happy to announce that the Mormon Mission Prep site has a new design.  I hope you like it, but feel free to give me feedback, good or bad. 

The new design is intended to reduce clutter and make the site more clean. I improved the navigation to make the most used content and features more prominent, and I also made the site more compatible Safari and Firefox for Mac.

You’ll also notice a new Mormon Mission Prep Widget in the right hand navigation.  This widget has the new look and feel of the site and has improved functionality from the old widget, including links to recent posts.  To add the widget to your site, click on the Get Widget link at the bottom of the widget and you will be shown several options to install it on Facebook, your blog, or code to install it on any Web page.

Today’s post is in response to a question received on the Web site.  A young man who is preparing for his mission asked me how I would respond to his non-member friend who asked why Joseph Smith practiced polygamy.  The polygamy question is one I got only a time or two on my mission, but one that missionaries should be prepared to answer.

First, I would answer that polygamy is part of our past, but not part of the present Mormon Church.  Joseph Smith began teaching the principle of plural marriage (polygamy) in the 1840s, but by the year 1890 (119 years ago), polygamy was officially discontinued by the Church.  You can read President Wilford Woodruff’s official Church declaration ending polygamy on LDS.org.  Also, last year, the Church created a site with a lot of good resources for people seeking the truth about Mormon polygamy. Bottom line, today there are over 13 million Mormons around the world, and none of them practice polygamy. 

Now, having established Mormons do not now practice polygamy, it still doesn’t address the question of why Joseph Smith instituted the practice in the early days of the Church.  To answer the why question, I’d like to quote the Church’s official statement on polygamy. It reads:

“At certain times and for His specific purposes, God, through His prophets, has directed the practice of plural marriage (sometimes called polygamy), which means one man having more than one living wife at the same time. In obedience to direction from God, Latter-day Saints followed this practice for about 50 years during the 1800s but officially ceased the practice of such marriages after the Manifesto was issued by President Woodruff in 1890. Since that time, plural marriage has not been approved by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and any member adopting this practice is subject to losing his or her membership in the Church.” (emphasis added)

The statement from the Church goes on to cite instance in the Bible where Abraham, Jacob, and others of the Lord’s servants had plural wives (see Genesis 16:1–3; 29:23–30; 30:4, 9; Judges 8:30; 1 Samuel 1:1–2).

Joseph Smith also asked God why he had been commanded to restore the practice of plural marriage and was told simply that the Lord has His reasons.  One of those reasons given by the Lord is mentioned in the Book of Mormon: “If I will, saith the Lord of Hosts, raise up seed unto me, I will command my people; otherwise they shall [have only one wife]” (Jacob 2:30; see also v. 27).  In other words, it was to bring more children into the world who would be raised up faithful to the Lord.  (sourced, again, from the Church’s official statement on polygamy)

The polygamy question is a tough one to answer, and missionaries should know it’s okay to say they don’t know all the reasons why.  We know Joseph Smith was a prophet of God, and we know it came as a commandment from God. As a missionary, the conversation should then turn to helping the investigator gain their own testimony of Joseph Smith which can be gained by reading the Book of Mormon and praying to know its truthfulness. (see my previous post on The Power of the Book of Mormon)

Finally, I’ll leave you with two video clips.  The first is from President Hinckley’s October 1998 General Conference talk where he reiterated the Church’s position against polygamy.  The second is from Truman Madsen where he explains more of the history of Mormon polygamy and the doctrinal reason’s why Joseph Smith was commanded to do it.

I’ve added a new section to the Web site called Mormon Missionaries in the News. 

I have found, in my daily perusing of the news, that I often run across articles in which Mormon missionaries or LDS Church missionary service is highlighted.  The Mormon Missionaries in the News page has about six articles posted there now, and I will add to that over time.

If you know of a news article about Mormon missionaries that is not listed below, please contact Mormon Mission Prep.com and I’ll add it to the page.

Also, don’t forget about the page of recommended reading on missionary preparation with LDS.org articles from Church General Authorities. I recently added a good article for the youth called Spiritual Crocodiles, and a good one on leadership skills called Jesus: The Perfect Leader.

Giving impromptu Church talks is a pretty common request of missionaries, therefore, knowing how to write a talk is an essential missionary skill. 

I gave at least one talk in every ward or branch to which I was assigned as a missionary. My first talk was my first Sunday in Argentina.  I arrived in my area mid-week, and one of the first people my senior companion took me to visit was the branch president.  I didn’t understand much of the conversation, but I did understand that he wanted me to give a five minute talk on Sunday. 

The Gazano branch was very small; we only had 20 or 25 people attend Church each week.  One of the active members was our landlord, Brother Cabrera, who rented us a room in his house.  The branch president didn’t assign me a topic, so I basically just bore my testimony of Jesus Christ and the restored gospel.  If new missionaries can do nothing else, they can bare their testimony, even if it is in broken Spanish.  I can remember struggling through the talk with Brother Cabrera, sitting on the front row prompting me, correcting my Spanish, and encouraging me. 

Through my two-year mission, my Church talks, along with my Spanish language skills improved.  It got to the point where being asked to give a talk with only five minutes notice was no big deal, which, though rare, did happen a few times. 

In the ten plus years since my mission, those impromptu speech skills have diminished, I’m sure, though I was probably never an expert on how to write a talk.  BYU Professor Randy Bott, who teaches a Mission Prep class, though, is an expert on how to write a talk for Church. In a recent article in BYU Magazine called How to Write a Church Talk, he discussed the four elements a sacrament meeting talk should have: 1) a purpose, 2) main ideas, 3) expansion or validation, and 4) your testimony.

• Purpose: “Once a person has the purpose, the rest of the talk is easy.”  If your topic was faith, for example, you could come up with a purpose statement like “The purpose of my talk is to teach people how to recognize the power of faith in their own lives.”
• Main Ideas: You will need one or two, or perhaps more, main ideas that support this purpose. One might be “Faith is the very motivating power that enables us to act.” A second main idea might be “I can increase faith by recognizing it in my life.”
• Expansion or Validation:  You can expand or validate the main ideas with stories, scriptures, or examples of faith (or whatever your topic is) in your life.
• Testimony: Says Professor Bott, “I would honestly evaluate how strongly I feel about the principle I am teaching and then testify about that principle.”

Professor Bott says this method can be used to write any talk in five minutes or less. In fact, he says he once gave a twenty minute talk with less than one minute’s notice and did so by simply following the steps above. 

So you future missionaries, learn these steps for how to write a talk.  By learning the gospel principles missionaries teach and by having organization to your talk as Professor Bott indicates, you will be able to deliver great sermons when called upon.  D&C 84: 85 “Neither take ye thought beforehand what ye shall say; but treasure up in your minds continually the words of life, and it shall be given you in the very hour that portion that shall be meted unto every man.”