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On August 13, 2008, the church released a letter explaining why it believed that same-sex marriage would be detrimental to society and encouraging California members to support Proposition 8 [33] which would bar anything but opposite-sex marriages. The letter asked members to donate time and money towards the initiative.
The organization runs support groups led by a priest to encourage its members to abstain from acting on their homosexual desires and to live according to the teachings of the Catholic Church on homosexuality. Courage also has a ministry geared towards the relatives and friends of gay people called Encourage. [2]
The church does not do any outreach programs or encourage its members to participate in charities. The church does not have official headquarters or official publications. The church does not explicitly publish any doctrinal statements, insisting that such tenets may only be directly imparted orally by its ministers, referred to as "workers".
"The Church is the congregation of saints, in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the Sacraments are rightly administered." –Augsburg Confession [8] Christian theologians such as Bostwick Hawley teach that church membership is commanded in scripture, grounding this in the fact that "apostolic letters are addressed to the Churches", "Apostolic salutations are to Churches", "Jesus Christ is ...
According to the Salt Lake Tribune and The Daily Beast, the letter has been influential in the decision of many now-former members of the LDS Church to resign their membership. [26] [27] [2] Writer Jana Riess has argued that the impact of the CES Letter has been overstated, yet important. She argues that most members who leave do so for reasons ...
The letter came while Smith was in prison after a period of intense persecution (see 1838 Mormon War), now canonized by the church (D&C 123), that directed church leaders to establish a committee for "gathering up a knowledge of all the facts, and sufferings and abuses put on" church members, and the "names of all persons that have had a hand ...
The classification depending upon whether they have been drawn up more as letters, or have been issued by a synod or the diocesan chancery. [1] The pastoral letters are addressed either to all the members of the diocese (litterae pastorales) or only to the clergy, in this case formerly in Latin (litterae encyclicae). The mandates, decrees or ...
Founder Alan Scott has been accused of having a messiah complex, [31] and in 2023 several of his family members had to resign from leadership positions in the church following historic allegations of spiritual abuse. [32] The church's founders, Alan and Kathryn Scott, had left and moved to Anaheim Vineyard, California, in 2018. Before Alan and ...