My Companion and I Attended Other Christian Churches on Sundays

Thanks to Dan Shaha for contributing this article. You can > follow him here.

When I was a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I spent a lot of time out trying to contact people. I knocked on a thousand doors, stopped a thousand people on the streets, and played a hundred games of street ball all in the pursuit of spreading the restored gospel of Jesus Christ.

In my first area, Kalamazoo, MI, Sunday was always the hardest day for us. The ward we were assigned to started Sacrament Meeting at 1pm. Most people in the area attended one of a dozen mainstream Christian churches in the area. No one was home on a Sunday morning. For a couple of weeks, we’d spend 2-3 hours out trying to find people with no luck.

My companion at the time had a bright idea; if most people are going to Church in the mornings, why don’t we start attending various Christian services on Sunday morning. We get to experience other people’s belief systems, we get seen by people, and maybe we can find someone willing to talk to us.

Every Sunday going forward, we would pick a church to attend, usually based on the title of the sermon they put up on their church billboard. We had mixed results over that 6-week transfer. A handful of churches refused to let us stay for their service. Some invited us in with cautious optimism, and we had a handful of interesting conversations. And some services were really just local concerts in disguise.

One theme connected them all for me. And it helped me to adjust my efforts to share Christ’s gospel. Without fail, every church we attended shared essentially the same message: “Don’t worry about life, what you do or who you are, all you need to do is accept Jesus into your heart, and life will be okay.” I coined the message the “Feel-Good Gospel”, and I understood the appeal. It required no effort.

I also understood why people were so hesitant to hear our message, especially when we started to ask them to do things as part of our lessons. The people we were trying to share the gospel with were used to a message that essentially broke down to “Jesus will save you, so you don’t need to worry about anything.” And here we were, asking them to do things to help them draw closer to Christ; pray, read the scriptures, attend church, be baptized, participate in activities, make friends. People just weren’t interested in a religion that required them to do more than attend a weekly, one-hour sermon.

This experience helped shore up my own testimony of the restored gospel and of modern prophets. In my mind, being part of an organization that doesn’t require something from its members isn’t worth participating in.

Jesus Christ asks us to, at a minimum, follow His example and keep His commandments. He gave us a blueprint to follow that leads to a happy, productive life. When we read the scriptures, when we serve our fellow man, when we pray, we are inherently drawn closer to Jesus Christ; we are changed on a fundamental level, and we can become the best versions of ourselves.

King Benjamin taught in Mosiah 2:17:

17 And behold, I tell you these things that ye may learn wisdom; that ye may learn that when ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God.

Joseph Smith taught in Lectures on Faith:

“Let us here observe, that a religion that does not require the sacrifice of all things, never has power sufficient to produce the faith necessary unto life and salvation.”