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Hi friends~

As Richard mentioned recently, The More Good Foundation is in the collaborative process of creating Christ.org–a new, comprehensive website about the ministry, life, and teachings of Jesus  Christ.  It’s magnificent to comtemplate. 

As part of the website, we’d like to create music videos related to various aspects of Christ’s life, teachings, and ministry.  We’re currently in the process of selecting the most loved songs and/or hymns about the Savior–including those by artists of other faiths.  We’re currently considering the following:

Amazing Grace
How Great Thou Art
I Believe in Christ
I Need Thee Every Hour
I Know That My Redeemer Lives
Abide with Me; ‘Tis Eventide
El Shaddai by Amy Grant
Never a Better Hero by Kenneth Cope
His Hands by Kenneth Cope
I Can Only Imagine by MercyMe
This is the Christ (lyrics by James E. Faust)

We value your input. What are your personal favorites?  What would you add to the list?  We invite you to send this out to friends and let us know their top selections as well.

Thank you, kindly, in advance, for your time. We look forward to hearing from you. 

Karen

Facebook now allows advertisers to discover the size of specific demographic audiences. By doing a few searches related to the Church, I was able to get an idea of the number of Mormons on Facebook. (See image below.)

The number of people in the U.S. who listed a Church-owned university as their college*:

• 20,660 - Brigham Young University
• 9,300 - Brigham Young University-Idaho
• 1,200 - Brigham Young University-Hawaii

*A small percentage of BYU students are not Mormons, and I think this figure only includes students. The BYU network, which includes alumni and faculty, has 37,395 people.

The number of people, by country, who listed “The Book of Mormon” as an interest:

• 11,880 - United States (1 in every 1,679 Americans on Facebook)
• 700 - Canada (1 in 10,516)
• 140 - United Kingdom (1 in 45,768)
• 40 - Australia (1 in 37,458)

These interests are, of course, self-selected and don’t reflect the actual number of Mormons on Facebook. I personally have several Mormon friends who do not list The Book of Mormon as an interest or did not attend a Church-owned university. Though Facebook users can specify a religion, Facebook does not allow advertisers to see demographics by religion.

Other interests listed by people in the U.S.:

• 696,120 - The Bible
• 281,380 - God
• 46,160 - Spending time with my family
• 38,940 - Religion
• 26,420 - Going to Church
• 18,000 - Jesus Christ

The More Good Foundation is pleased to announce a partnership with Dr. Richard Holzapfel to create the #1 website about Jesus Christ at Christ.org. (In the meantime, we are redirecting traffic to Mormon.org.)

Dr. Holzapfel is a BYU professor of Church History and Doctrine and a prolific author. We are very excited and honored to work with him.

Christ.org will include top articles, music, and videos on the life, death, resurrection, and mission of the Savior Jesus Christ. It will be well documented, well designed, and translated into over a dozen languages. We hope it will bring everyone who visits it closer to Christ.

Question for Commenters: What resources or features should the top website on Jesus Christ include?

The More Good Foundation is growing. We’re pleased to have two new people on our team:

• Karen is our new editor, the quality control expert for all the published content on our websites. She brings an extensive background in writing and editing, including writing for the Ensign and Meridian Magazine. She speaks a bit of German and French. She’s the mother of two daughters.
• Heather is our new community manager. She’ll work with and communicate our gratitude to all the participants on our forums, wikis, blogs, and social news sites. Heather is a native to the Web, publishing her first web page in 1996 and having created and built several websites and online communities since then. She has two sons.

We’re a small team, we each wear lots of hats, and we depend on the kind contributions of member missionaries all around the world, but we’re thankful to have two talented women join our staff.

Eight videos of Elder Ballard answering common questions about Mormonism are now available on YouTube. The videos were first posted on the Church’s own Newsroom site but are now available through the Church’s new YouTube Channel:

http://www.youtube.com/LDSPublicAffairs

(You can also subscribe to these videos by RSS.)

Elder Ballard answers questions like these:

• Are Mormons Christian?
• Why do people say Mormonism is a cult?
• How Do Mormon Beliefs Differ From Other Christians?

Very savvy of the Church to go where the traffic is.

Online missionary work can be like fishing or like hunting.

Sometimes we cast our line and then wait for someone to come along. For example, our website about Mormon beliefs sits idly until someone types “Mormon beliefs” into Google, and then it is found. Other fishermen are there too.

18 And Jesus, walking by the sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers.
19 And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.
(Matthew 4:18-19)

Other times we hunt; we seek out people interested in learning more about the Church. If you want a missionary opportunity right now, visit Yahoo Answers and type in “Mormon” or join the forums at LDSForums.com. You’ll find plenty of people with questions about the Church.

16 Behold, I will send for many fishers, saith the LORD, and they shall fish them; and after will I send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain, and from every hill, and out of the holes of the rocks.
(Jeremiah 16:16)

Among the most recurring themes in scripture is “seek and ye shall find“. We should make that true for people searching online.

Last week at the Utah Open Source Conference, Tom Welch, Technology Community Manager for the Church, spoke about his work as CTO of Linspire. While at Linspire, they created a tool called IRMA, by which volunteers could participate in the translation of their software. For example, a volunteer with a few minutes on her hands might visit IRMA to translate text like “Your file was not found” into Spanish, Arabic, or Swahili. The IRMA project resulted in the full or partial translation of their software into 59 languages. Instead of paying for the work, the company was able to harness the collective intelligence of the community to get the work done:

• 59 languages
• 3,246 translators
• 2.6 million translations
• top translator completed over 13,800 message translations

This is precisely the type of project that would be interesting for sharing the Gospel. The Church member might visit a website and be presented with a few options:

• Will you please translate the phrase “Joseph Smith is a prophet of God” into Portuguese?
• Will you please write a paragraph about what it’s like to visit a Mormon temple?
• Someone at Yahoo Answers has a question about the Book of Mormon. Please follow this link to answer his question.
• Will you please hit record and look into your web cam as you explain how you gained a testimony of the principle of tithing?

The work produced by volunteers would be published where persons of other faiths could find it. The site would have to be as accessible and easy to use as FamilySearchIndexing.org. There would be plenty of work, and this would make sharing the Gospel easier for Church members.

Two years ago, I started a niche website with my BYU roommate, which became very popular, drawing thousands of people every day. When we sold the website this May and said our goodbyes to the readers, Brian posted a link to his personal blog.

On his personal blog, Brian posts photos of his family and newborn son, writes on a variety of topics from being a father to owning an iPhone, and, importantly, shares elements of his beliefs. After writing about tithing recently, Brian discovered that one of the visitors to our website had begun reading his personal blog.

Brian, you don’t know me in person but I’ve been reading [your] blog for a while. (I found it thru freemacware.com when you owned that.)

Anyway, I’m not Mormon but I appreciate [the] things you write about. There’s just one thing I have a question about with the mormons. every other religion (including mine) sees commandments as burdonsome and limiting. But in your posts and other mormons I know seem like they appreciate commandments. Why is that? maybe you or some of your mormon readers care to respond.

Several of us responded to Michael’s question, and eventually he asked to be visited by the full-time missionaries. I spoke with Brian today and he confirmed that the elders have now visited Michael and his family several times.

Brian didn’t intend to preach a sermon, but by simply sharing his faith online, he was able to reach someone who wanted to hear it. I think this is an exemplary model of online member missionary work.

Do you want to start a blog? We’ll help!

Last Thursday and Friday I attended the FAIR Conference in Sandy, UT, for the second time. The purpose of FAIR is explained well in their flyer:

When people first encounter the Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research, or FAIR, the first question they often ask is: “Why are you apologizing for being a member of the Church?” To aid in answering this question a formal definition is in order:

Apologetics is the “branch of theology that is concerned with defending or proving the truth of the Christian doctrines.” …

Far from apologizing for the Church, LDS apologists are seeking to defend the Church. (source)

Among the speakers and attendees were several Church employees, BYU professors, and other friends of the Church. I found the talks, most of which are scholarly in nature, to be both interesting and faith-promoting.

Apologists don’t attempt to prove the truthfulness of Mormonism but, rather, prevent so-called scientific or scholarly attacks on the religion to go uncontested, thus preserving faith. Apologetics makes faith in unseen things plausible.

One of my favorite presentations was by Darius Gray and Margaret Young. They are creating a documentary on the experiences and stories of Black Mormons, a project similar to our own Mormon Testimonies. The trailer for their film was excellent.

Mike Ash’s article Hard Questions and Keeping the Faith is one of the best I’ve seen on the role of apologetics in preserving and defending faith.

The Deseret News recently announced that it will add “an interactive component [including] blogs and reader comments” to its LDS Newsline product. Its first call for bloggers goes out to Education Week attendees who are willing to blog about what they’re “thinking, feeling and experiencing as [they] enjoy the spirit and opportunities of Education Week.”

This sort of blogging by Church members about their thoughts, feelings, and experiences is precisely in order.

Kudos to the Deseret News for encouraging Church members to blog.