Authority

by redrose416

For the second time, I went with the sister missionaries to teach a gentleman from Ghana.  He asks us to call him “Echo”.  He is in the beginning stages of his quest to find truth in a church, and in joining in his education over the past two days, I found myself wondering about authority.  One of his questions tonight was, why are there so many Christian churches if they tend to teach (essentially) the same thing?  Is there something different about the Latter-day Saints and what our church teaches?  Why does he need to be baptized again?  It’s a valid question, and one that, initially, I didn’t have an immediate answer to (which made me feel pretty foolish, honestly.  Why had I been baptized if I couldn’t call up the immediate reason for that baptism?  There are the obvious reasons–feeling at home in a church, loving the people who are there with you, comfort in the way that a pastor, priest or leader presents a message…but all of these things are human reasons, social comforts.  And I knew that those things were not the reasons that I, at 30 years old, had decided to be baptized for the last time.)  No, the reason that there are so many churches is because the original teachings that Christ brought to us were passed, en masse, in one complete, finished package to his apostles, and those pieces were eventually scattered, passed on in an incomplete manner, retaught and interpreted incorrectly, or lost entirely.
I think about my students.  There are only so many ways that they can be expected to retain the information I teach in a complete, unadulterated form–