'Grounded' firms up faith tradition

As a Christian with beliefs about God and salvation, Josh was comfortable in his faith. But when he met Megan at college in San Diego, things started to change.

Firm in her LDS faith, Megan talked about her beliefs in basic terms Josh recognized — Jesus Christ, salvation, scripture — and their dating relationship moved deeper. Josh recently told his family he was leaving his faith to join The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and that he and Megan were getting married.

A family crisis ensued, and a desperate mother called on a Utah pastor she'd heard of who knows about Latter-day Saints to counsel her son. The Rev. Greg Johnson, director of a local evangelical group of churches called Standing Together, talked with Josh for two hours earlier this week, asking about his decision and what factored into it.

What he found was a young man unsure about the specifics of his faith, who had fallen in love with a girl who was grounded in her own. Though their names have been changed, their story is as old as religion itself, as people leave the faith of their birth to follow a different path — whatever the extenuating circumstances.

So a group of local Christians, looking to alter that path for many of their young members, has begun distributing a new video and training manual to help secure teens in their own faith.

"Grounded: Relating to Your Mormon Friends In Truth and Love" was produced by the Salt Lake Theological Seminary to provide youth ministers in traditional Christian churches with strategies to help secure young people within their own faith tradition. The premise is that Christian teens living within a dominant LDS culture need to be "grounded" in their own theology as a way to engage — rather than avoid or simply capitulate — when religion becomes an issue in their peer group.

The Rev. Johnson asked "Josh" whether he thinks he's taking a large step in looking to become a Latter-day Saint — whether he sees it as a lateral move within the Christian tradition, like moving from Calvary Chapel to Trinity Baptist, or whether he sees it as more dramatic, like leaving Christianity to join Islam.

His response: "I don't know."

After the LDS missionaries finished teaching and committed him to baptism, Josh isn't sure whether he'll be embracing a whole new world of faith or simply moving from one Christian church to another.

"The world of Mitt Romney makes it sound like they're minor differences," the Rev. Johnson said. "But the language of the (LDS) restoration is not that we just need to fix a few little details. It's a pretty significant claim Mormonism makes that historic Christianity was all wrong and there was a need for a brand new start. (Josh) didn't know anything about that."