Quick Pageant Update

As many of you who listen to the Dividing Line know, we were very concerned that our outreach at the Mesa Easter Pageant would be ended by the arrival of KJV Only street preachers, some of whom have become regulars in Salt Lake City at the General Conference. Well, it has been a pleasant surprise. We still firmly believe signs are not effective for Mormons; of that there is really no question from our perspective. But since they are there, we have to adjust. The folks who have come with Jim Webber have good signs: Scriptural, and not designed simply to offend. The KJV Only guys have less useful signs, and are still antagonizing folks, but again, what can we do about it? So we have started trying to use their presence to get our own conversations going, and who knows, maybe by trying to help them “tune” their message, might influence them in the “right” direction, even if not all the way to our viewpoint? In any case, I was talking to an LDS woman this evening who was just absolutely certain that we shouldn’t be there because we had not studied Mormonism enough to say it was wrong. As we tried to reason with her, we eventually came to the issue of the nature of God, and I mentioned the LDS distinction between Elohim as the Father and Jesus as Jehovah, the Son. “We don’t believe that!” she insisted, and even though I pointed her to “The Father and The Son: A Doctrinal Exposition by The First Presidency and The Twelve” found in Talmage’s Articles of Faith (p. 466) she refused to believe me. Well, we tried. Keep us in prayer as we have two more nights of work in Mesa.