LDS Worship

The argument

Adherents of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly called Mormons, describe their worship as the weekly enactment of a covenant rather than as a purely devotional gathering. Services are held in meetinghouses and take about an hour, and their centre is the blessing and taking of the sacrament in remembrance of the body and blood of Christ. Once a month the service also makes room for personal testimony offered by members of the congregation, so that what the community believes is voiced by the people who hold it rather than delivered only from the pulpit. What distinguishes the practice, on this view, is the standing given to the rites themselves. The sacraments of the LDS church are called saving ordinances: they are not merely signs of an inward state but acts through which salvation is actually worked out. That vocabulary follows from how Mormons understand the conditions of salvation. Faith and repentance are necessary but not sufficient; a believer must also be baptised, by immersion and by a Mormon priesthood holder, and must bring forth good works. Baptism on this account is a threshold rather than a conclusion, and the weekly sacrament is understood as the renewal of that baptismal covenant, a repeated cleansing from the sin accumulated since the last renewal. This is why the grace of Jesus, though it plays a real part in salvation, is not treated as the whole of the story. Each member must, in the phrase Mormons use, work out his own salvation. Worship so understood is less the celebration of something already secured than the regular, disciplined maintenance of a relationship the believer is himself responsible for keeping, and it is that combination of ordinance, effort and grace that defines what Latter-day Saint and Mormon Christians believe.

Premises

Counter-arguments

A rebuttal is that the worship described — weekly sacrament services in remembrance of Christ, congregational testimony — is largely shared with Christian worship generally, so it identifies little that is distinctive to Latter-day Saint belief. The account tells us the LDS meet and take a sacrament, which most Christian traditions do. More pointedly, the works-inclusive soteriology it states — that each member must "work out his own salvation" through faith, baptism and good works — is one that many other Christian traditions dispute, and mainstream trinitarian denominations contest whether LDS theology falls within "what Christians believe" at all. Presenting it plainly as one entry under that heading glosses a genuinely contested classification.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Weekly sacrament services in remembrance of Christ describe a practice shared broadly across Christian worship, so they identify little distinctive to LDS belief. [Rejecting P3] That "each member must work out his own salvation" through works marks a soteriology many other Christian traditions dispute, so presenting it plainly under "what Christians believe" glosses a contested classification.