Faith Matters Foundation aims to create a space in which an expansive, radiant approach to the restored gospel can be considered and discussed.
Our goal is to provide a powerful and widely engaging platform for exploring ideas, practices, and initiatives that provide deeper engagement with our faith and our world. All who are involved with Faith Matters share a deep commitment to the restored gospel tradition, and a profound desire to see it thrive and remain vital and relevant to rising generations.
In 1863, Brigham Young voiced a theme repeated often in the early Church:
Our religion… embraces all truth, wherever found, in all the works of God and man… (Journal of Discourses, vol.10:50)
Four decades later, Elder B.H. Roberts, an LDS General Authority and official Church Historian, issued this provocative challenge to church members.
I believe ‘Mormonism’ affords opportunity…for thoughtful disciples who will not be content with merely repeating some of its truths, but will develop its truths …The Prophet planted the germ-truths of the great dispensation of the fullness of times…The disciples of Mormonism, growing discontented with the necessarily primitive methods which have hitherto prevailed in sustaining the doctrine, will yet take profounder and broader views of the great doctrines committed to the church; and, departing from mere repetition, will cast them in new formulas…until they help to give to the truths received a more forceful expression, and carry it beyond the earlier and cruder stages of its development. (The Improvement Era, 1906)
We believe that we, as a people, have fallen well short of that challenge in the century-plus since Elder Roberts issued it. We believe the restored gospel has an important and prophetic role to play in the world. We believe it’s time, as Terryl Givens has suggested, to foster “a new vocabulary for a dispensation in which all things are made new.”
Advisors and Contributors
Jennifer Finlayson-Fife
Rosalynde Welch
Liz and Chris Crittenden
Executive Board
Zachary Davis