"Many that do not respond will be left with a false understanding of how mormons celebrate Easter."
Will you be seen at Easter Sunday sunrise services, glorying in the resurrection of Our Lord?
“Many that do not respond will be left with a false understanding of how mormons celebrate Easter.”
- - - - - - - - - -
I was discussing this with my SIL just last night. If the LDS ask why they don’t use Crosses they will say “we don’t focus on His death, we focus on the resurrection.”
Yet, they don’t do anything special for Easter either. No sunrise services, nothing, just a regular meeting with occasionally a talk on the resurrection. So they really don’t focus on the RESURRECTION either.
Except THIS year. THIS year Easter falls on the weekend of the all important “GENERAL CONFERENCE”, so the LDS will gather to watch a satellite feed of their apostles and prophets from SLC rather than their normal meetings.
I went to my first sunrise service last year and WOW it was awesome. Worshiping God as the sun came up and rejoicing in the resurrection of my Lord.
Reaganaut is mostly accurate on our Easter services. It is not a tradition for Mormons to have an Easter sunrise service, although I have been in a few stakes with them and have attended several.
These day (since the consolidated meeting schedule that started in the '80s, I think) there are few meetings or services outside of the standard schedule. But it would be a very poor ward that did not have the resurrection as the topic on that day.
And yes, we do sing Easter hymns. "Christ the Lord is Risen Today" is my favorite.
When Easter falls on the first Sunday in April, it alligns with General Conference. We have 10 hours (!!!) of services generally originating from church headquarters in Salt Lake. I am extremely confident that Christ and His resurrection will be the topic for a significant number of the talks/sermons.
Your question raises an interesting question to me. Is one of the qualifications to being a "true" Christian the attendance at an Easter sunrise service?
There are differing levels of mis-representation. Distortion and implication are one thing. Flat out lying is another.
For example, here are some quotes from the hymns thread last month.
greyfoxx39 in post 4: So, when you hear the beautiful sounds put forth by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir listen, listen to the words. You just think these are the hymns you know from old...but they are carrying the message that the mormon church is NOT the church of Christ, and specifically not the church of the Cross.
In the same post you quoted the "Familiar version of Hark the Herald Angels Sing."
This is an example of of distortion and implication. You were implying that we change the words to a non-Christian version. Nope, we do not, and I corrected this mis-representation.
I responded in post 21 with the words to the "Mormon" version and commented - OH MY HECK!!!!! We changed "With angelic" to "With th’angelic." And "Risen" to "Ris’n." We must not be Christians because of that, and that alone.
As for a flat out lie, the original post contains this gem from, also, greyfoxx39 (in post 1): Note, mentions of the Cross are deleted from the mormon versions.
In post 19 I corrected this lie by posting several hymns where "cross" was not deleted. And I give you significant recognition for acknowledging such in post 23 where you say Well, I'll be...thanks for correcting me. I didn't have time to go through ALL the hymns, and am glad to see that you haven't done away with the Cross in some.
If I were thin skinned or paranoid I would think that the phrasing "in some" implies that we have "done away with" it in most, but I really didn't think that way at the time, and only notice it now to comment on the level of mis-representation.
And, by the way, I appreciate the level of discourse with you on that thread.
This compares the the flat out fictional creation of reaganaut as quoted in post 114 of this thread (which is being quoted from an earlier thread). I knew it was a joke at the time, but it was not presented as a joke. It was presented in the original thread with only the comment So the 300,000 could have just been mormons obeying their bishops ???.
There were eight replies to that post that treated it as if it were truth. I saw a few of these, and stepped in to point out that the letter was a fake. To which I was ridiculed. I feel that reaganaut and I have significantly improved our level of discussion since then, and I generally respect his postings. But it is the type of thing that shows up in later threads as proof that mormons aren't Christians.
What I see mostly on these threads is implication or distortion. There are few flat out lies, and most are corrected by folks like reaganaut (thank you for doing that).
When I have time, which is seldom, I will try to correct the flat out lies. But I just don't have the time to respond to all. The reason I do this is for the reason you stated - for those that are readers but not regular posters. The regular posters, for the most part, are not here for genuine enlightenment. They are here for the battle. But for the bystanders this may be their only exposure to mormonism. And while I don't mind them seeing the discussion, I don't want them to only see lies.