New direction for Sunstone?

Dehlin said the word "open" in Sunstone's new vision statement "means we can discuss things openly people can't discuss elsewhere." Whatever the questions, "I need a safe place where I can talk to people like me and know they won't judge me," Dehlin said of Sunstone participants.

"Faithful means we're trying to deal with history and facts, finding the best of academia so opinions are informed rather than dogmatic."

He believes Sunstone has a larger role to play among Latter-day Saints who are not necessarily disaffected but who encounter information about the faith that they didn't learn from the church's formal education programs.

The belief comes from his own experience. Called to be a seminary teacher five years ago while working at Microsoft, Dehlin had gone through all the church's programs for youths and had served an LDS mission. But when he began studying the faith in order to teach his students, he came across aspects as an active member in his early 30s that he'd never known before.

"I had no idea Joseph Smith had multiple wives, that he translated the Book of Mormon by putting a peep stone in a hat, or that the practice of polygamy was continued unofficially in the church for several years after the Manifesto.

"The immediate reaction was to say 'I've been deceived, they've been hiding this stuff because it's embarrassing.' The whole framework of what I believed was challenged by a radical different reality."

When he approached people in his ward to discuss the issues that troubled him, he learned quickly that "you can't bring those topics up." His bishop "wasn't comfortable and didn't know about it."

Then he went to the Internet but found the information there was overwhelmingly anti-Mormon. He realized immersing himself in those sites was "a fast path out of the church. They're all about anger and bitterness and misrepresentation."

Another alternative was apologetic forums, like FAIR or FARMS at Brigham Young University. While he respects those entities and understands their role, "there is a group of people who find the way apologetics are done not only is not helpful but in many ways it accelerates their disaffection from the church," he said.

It was finally at Sunstone that he found a physical community he could interact with and ask questions of. That community was, he acknowledged, a less strident one that many Latter-day Saints became jaded about in the early 1990s when six of Sunstone's most outspoken authors and writers were excommunicated from the LDS Church.

Shortly afterward, top church leaders warned their members to avoid alternative forums for discussion of history and doctrine, and the faculty at Brigham Young University was particularly cautioned to avoid participation.