Faith Reimagined | Small Organization

Here you'll find 9 short videos that you may find helpful as you facilitate your Faith Reimagined group.

As you come to Faith Reimagined, you may not be sure what to expect. Whether you are going through this material in a group or with a mentor, this first session is an overview to introduce you to what this series is about, how it will operate, and how to make the most out of your experience. Today’s conversation will identify some attitudes and guard rails that will lead to a positive experience.

Since Mormonism is an all-encompassing way of life, leaving the LDS Church and culture often involves some degree of emotional turmoil. While not everyone will have the same emotional experience, many will face unsettling, even traumatic, feelings. In this session, we will identify the emotional challenges associated with trauma, including loss, grief and betrayal, and provide tools for a constructive response.

In the last session, we explored how leaving a religion often involves some degree of unsettling and even traumatic emotional turmoil - at varying levels for different people. In this session, we will identify further emotional challenges associated with religious trauma, including anger, fear, shame and regret, and provide tools for a constructive response.

A person leaving the tight-knit social and family environment of Mormonism may face broken or confusing relationships with people to whom they were once close. For many, this is the most difficult aspect of changing faith allegiance. In this session, we will identify some relationship challenges, and explore strategies for navigating changing relationships with friends and neighbors, extended family, and parents, with the goal of preventing unnecessary alienation. We will come back to relationships with spouses and children in Session 5.

In our last session, we brought up many of the challenges that arise in relationships when family and friends learn about your journey out of Mormonism. A unique set of difficulties emerge in relationships with immediate family members, such as spouses or children. Those closest to you are often hurt or confused when you move away from Mormonism, and they may become antagonistic. Our goal in this session, as we talk about the range of responses spouses and children may make, is to maintain family harmony. We will explore some helpful approaches to communicate, lead, and serve in our homes.

Faced with relationship challenges as they leave a well-defined and familiar relational network, former Latter-day Saints may not feel comfortable building new relationships, or may not know where to find a sense of belonging. In this session, we aim to identify the elements of any healthy community, in order to explore how to find new, healthy relational options after Mormonism. These options include connecting with the people in a traditional Christian church, even though this presents a variety of obstacles to people leaving the LDS Church.

Many feel they were taught as Latter-day Saints to question the trustworthiness of the Bible and to be wary of trusting apostate churches and pastors. A faith crisis likely also involves a loss of trust in the LDS Church and its leaders. So it’s not surprising that people leaving Mormonism may be cynical about anyone’s truth claims. Yet trust is possible and reasonable in many cases. How can appropriate trust be recovered?

As we explored in Session 7, people leaving Mormonism often lose trust in the LDS Church and its leaders. We also considered how the LDS Church and culture undermines trust in the Bible and in traditional Christianity. These factors make it hard to trust again. In this session, we think about how trust in churches or church leaders might take shape differently compared to LDS expectations, how to maintain trust in God apart from any particular religious institution, and why it is responsible to trust the Bible.

Having been taught core ideas about reality from one perspective, people in a faith transition may struggle to decide what is ultimately true about God and more. In this session, we will explore what a “worldview” is, and present a broad template for how to think about truth. We then use that template to summarize LDS, secular, and traditional Christian worldviews.

Having been taught core ideas about reality from one perspective, people in a faith transition may struggle to decide what is ultimately true about God, humanity, eternity, and more. They may also feel confused about how to decide what is true. In this session, we will discuss the core biblical framework of reality (introduced in Session 9) in greater depth, as a credible alternative to LDS and secular perspectives.

Religion tends to define proper behaviors for adherents. People going through a religious transition face the question of how to make responsible lifestyle decisions after rejecting that past framework. Rather than providing a new set of dos and don’ts, this session will suggest a broader biblical framework for how mature lifestyle decisions are made. You may disagree with this framework. But please remember that whatever choices you are making about how you live, you are entirely welcome here, without judgement.

As with any religious system, depending on how deeply rooted you were in Latter-day Saint culture, practices, and heritage, your sense of identity may be significantly disrupted when you leave the LDS Church. In this session, we’re seeking to understand how identity is formed, and how, as a Christian, a new identity is not rooted in our association with any group, but in God’s creation and calling. We will also talk about how to cultivate and express that new identity.