President Benson said, “The Book of Mormon is the instrument that God designed to ’sweep the earth as with a flood, to gather out [His] elect.’ (Moses 7:62.) This sacred volume of scripture needs to become more central in our preaching, our teaching, and our missionary work.”

One way we could encourage friends of other faiths to read and experiment on the Book of Mormon is to write a book review on sites like Amazon.com. Do a simple search for “Book of Mormon”, select one of the many editions of the Book of Mormon, then rate it and and write a review about it. Explain an experience that’s occurred when you read the Book of Mormon. I’ve added this to our (non-comprehensive) list of ways to share the Gospel online.

Bookslinger uses his blog to write about ways he is sharing the Book of Mormon in person.

How can we better share the Book of Mormon through the New Media?

If you have a blog, you can participate in a Testimony Tag by
1. Creating a blog post about a Gospel topic
2. Linking to another positive website or resource about the Church
3. Encouraging (”tagging”) your friends to do the same

For more information, read Testimony Tag.

Thanks to David for sending this in. I thought this was a great idea.

By the way, for an example of being a missionary online, see Matt Asay’s post “Five things you don’t know about me”. In the course of explaining five things about himself to a business and technical audience, he mentioned both his high school seminary class and his mission to France. He wasn’t preachy; he simply mentioned elements of his beliefs and practices that were a part of his life. This sort of transparency and openness helps build bridges and dispel myths about the Church.

You might also share applications of Gospel teachings. In fact, Elder Ballard recently spoke about “taking part in everyday conversations in an unforced way, where your values and your religious beliefs will arise naturally.” He listed several questions you might answer online:

• How do your beliefs lift and shape your life for the better?
• How does the gospel help you as a parent engage with your teens?
• How do your values encourage you to participate in civic affairs?
• How has your experience as a home or visiting teacher enlarged your compassion or care for the sick and needy?
• How has your Church life helped you to avoid such things as pornography and immorality?
• How have family councils or home evenings helped you resolve differences of opinion with members of your family?
• How has your experience in speaking in church helped you address large public groups?
• Where did you learn to respect and not to criticize other faiths?

Source: Elder Ballard’s speech given at BYU Management Society

We’ve preloaded these and other questions into MormonTestimonies.org. Each time you visit the site (or refresh your browser) a new question will be loaded. Feel free to answer these questions, or write something else entirely. If you think of other questions we might ask, please leave them in the comments below.

(If you had a user account on the old MormonTestimonies.org site, please contact us to get a new username and password.)

Saturday Elder Ballard spoke at a meeting of the BYU Management Society in Washington, D.C., and again encouraged members to share their beliefs on the Internet. Counting his previous speeches at BYU-Hawaii and BYU-Idaho, this is the third time he’s spoken on the topic.

Here are excerpts:

Many want answers, and the places they are most likely to seek those answers are either on the Internet or from their Mormon acquaintances.

I probably don’t need to tell you that there is much questionable information and even outright falsehoods about the Church on the Internet and in the media-much bad mixed with the good.

Gradually, accurate and positive information is rising to the top of lists generated by various search engines. Those seeking information are more likely to encounter accurate information today than at any time since the Internet began, even though we still have a long way to go.

So let me pose a question. What are you prepared to do about it? If you are a member of the Church, what is your responsibility during this period of unusual attention and debate? Interest has continued at a high level and probably will for some time. If a national conversation is going on about the Church, are you going to be an active participant or a silent observer?

…Church leaders can’t do it all, especially at the grass-roots, community level. While we do speak authoritatively for the Church, we look to our responsible and faithful members to engage personally with blogs, to write thoughtful, online letters to news organizations, and to act in other ways to correct the record with their own opinions.

However, I emphasize that it is not always about correcting misinformation. Sometimes it is about getting solid information and ideas out there in the first place. Share your experiences – those from your own life – that show how your values and your faith intersect. It doesn’t matter whether that’s face to face with another person, or whether you do it by participating from your own blog or contributing to someone else’s blog. The most important thing is that you let people know that you are a Latter-day Saint, and that your behavior and attitude always reflect the high standards of the Church and what is expected as a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ. Of course, you will be speaking as an individual member and not as an official representative of the Church.

I am talking about taking part in everyday conversations in an unforced way, where your values and your religious beliefs will arise naturally….

Read the full text: Elder M. Russell Ballard’s speech given at Brigham Young University Management Society

At an advertising conference last year, Robert Stephens said, “Advertising is a tax you pay for unremarkable thinking.” (Source: Business Week)

The implication was that if your product is good enough, people will talk about it and spread the word, and you won’t need traditional advertising. Seth Godin calls this being “remarkable” or “worth remarking about.”

What if the Church didn’t need to spend any money on traditional advertising because Church members were that vocal about the Gospel? What if full-time missionaries didn’t have to do any finding? (Some might argue that advertising is as much about energizing the base as reaching out to new people.)

For Mormons who have felt the joy that comes through the Savior Jesus Christ, the Gospel is remarkable — worth remarking about — and they talk about it. After all, this is Good News.

When Latter-day Saint Brooke White auditioned for American Idol, Simon Cowell said, “Tell me something interesting about you.” Of all the things she could say, she said, “I’ve never seen a rated R movie.” (I love Randy’s interjection — “Why!?”) Brooke went on to explain the standards her parents gave her and that she doesn’t drink or smoke.

I recently watched an interview with Harvard Business Professor Clay Christensen, in which he mentioned his Mormon faith in passing. This is a regular pattern for him:

I have learned to use terms that associate me with Mormonism in my conversations—comments about my mission to Korea, my children’s missions, my assignments in the Church, my having attended Brigham Young University, and so on. These comments open the door for a conversation about the Church. Most who notice that I have opened this door choose not to walk through it. A few do, however, usually saying, “So you’re a Mormon?” I then ask if they’d like to learn more about us. (Clay Christensen)

This missionary spirit seems to be part of their natures.

We are called to open our mouths:

8 Open your mouths and they shall be filled, and you shall become even as Nephi of old, who journeyed from Jerusalem in the wilderness.
9 Yea, open your mouths and spare not, and you shall be laden with sheaves upon your backs, for lo, I am with you.
10 Yea, open your mouths and they shall be filled, saying: Repent, repent, and prepare ye the way of the Lord, and make his paths straight; for the kingdom of heaven is at hand;
Source: D&C 33:8-10

There are many ways to “open your mouth,” including on the Internet. You could start a blog. (Click here to learn what a blog is or explain it to someone else.) You could leave comments on a news story about the Church. You could post your testimony or story on YouTube.com.

“Open your mouths and they shall be filled…”

We intended for LDS.net to be like a fishbowl, allowing persons of other faiths to “peer in” and passively observe what Mormons think, believe, and say. But the result has been even better: several non-Mormons have signed up and are actively participating in conversations about the Church. LDS.net currently has 9,907 users.

LDS.net isn’t intended to compete with top social networks like Facebook and MySpace. They’re far more established and powerful. But if you want a place to share the Gospel online, alongside other Church members, LDS.net is a safe place.

You can also share the Gospel on Facebook. Most Church members on Facebook have both Mormon and non-Mormon friends. By simply being yourself online, non-Mormons will get a feel for what you do on Sundays, where you were for 18-24 months, where you were married, and other aspects of your faith.

In a BYU devotional, Gerrit Gong asked, “Would you feel comfortable showing your profile in Sunday School-or on the big screen at this devotional?” We believe many Church members would. Today we’re launching a new version of our Facebook Application — The LDS App. Our Facebook application allows Facebook users to share their testimony, favorite scriptures, and news from the Church directly on their profile page. Over 20,000 Facebook users have added the LDS App and hundreds are using it to share their testimonies of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

• 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.

These are a few new ones that you may like:

Susan Easton Black (link to the site)

Valerie Finnegan, a convert from Scotland (link to the site)

Ott Dameron, a convert from the US (link to the site)

Giuseppe.. I know this guy very well. (link to the site)

Francesco Lepore (another convert from Italy) (link to the site)

We read in Matthews 9: 10-13:

“And it came to pass, as Jesus sat at meat in the house, behold, many publicans and sinners came and sat down with him and his disciples. And when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto his disciples, Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners? But when Jesus heard that, he said unto them, They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick. But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”

Where are the sinners and publicans of our generation? First of all, we are all, at least in part, sinners and publicans, but where are those who are lost in the world and don’t really know where to go or what to do to improve their lives? Probably at least some of them spend some of their time on YouTube watching videos, even those that may not be appropriate. Also, many very good people who are not members of the Mormon Church are constantly on the Internet looking for something.

I had an interesting experience with a very, very good man. I talked with him recently about our site MormonTestimonies and he was impressed and said that he would take a look and perhaps help with something.

However, the next day I received a call from him. He was very alarmed, “You have a major problem with your site” – he said. I got really concerned. He continued, “When a video testimony ends, there are links to several inappropriate videos, even against the Church.”

“This is not good, for sure”, I thought. I knew a little bit about this problem and we were already thinking of fixing it someway, but I didn’t think someone could be so concerned about it. I never watched those bad videos, but apparently my friend watched at least part of them. So, similarly to my friend, other people may think that we sponsor those bad videos. We don’t want to give that impression.

To fix it, we decided to “embed” videos from Google Videos instead than from YouTube, since we don’t have yet our own system for videos. When someone watches a video testimony from our site that is embedded from Google videos, there aren’t links at the bottom, so that there is no way to find negative content from our site, only the good testimony.

I am grateful to my friend for his suggestion.

However, I thought, what about YouTube in general, should we remove all of our videos from there because they can be listed close to a bad video?

Are we afraid of being seen with sinners and publicans?

So, should we avoid posting good content on YouTube or Google videos because we don’t want our name or face to be “seen” close to less positive material? Even more, are we afraid of doing anything on the Internet because – obviously – in some Google search our site can come up close to a bad site? If we go this route we are in serious troubles, since even Church websites show up in Google close to bad ones.

I believe that in order to do missionary work we need to lose some concern with ourselves and we need to be willing to be seen “eating with publicans and sinners” sometimes, because we want to help them find the truth. And the Internet is a very safe place to do it, after all, since we don’t even have to sit close to them physically, we are only sending a short video of ourselves and I don’t think we have anything to be afraid of.

Ed J. Pinegar’s testimony