Preparing for Cross-Tradition Conversations
- "I'm meeting with someone from a [Mormon/Jehovah's Witness/Muslim/etc.] background this week. Help me understand where our beliefs actually overlap and where they genuinely diverge, so I don't misrepresent their view."
- "Give me a respectful way to open a conversation about [topic] with someone from a different faith background, without sounding like I'm just waiting for my turn to talk."
Explaining the Gospel Simply
- "Give me a short, honest way to explain [doctrine/topic] to someone with zero church background — no jargon."
Talking to Skeptics
- "Someone raised [common objection — suffering, hypocrisy in the church, etc.]. Give me a thoughtful response that doesn't dismiss the real weight of their question. Show me how to recognize if it's a real objection or simply a ruse to get me to back off. Give me a loving way to open their eyes to the true issue."
Framing Outreach for the Church
- "Help me explain to our congregation why we're doing [outreach initiative] — something that motivates without guilt-tripping. First show me the Biblical reasons why this is a valid use of church resources when reaching the community."
Debriefing After a Trip
- "Our team just got back from a short-term trip to [location]. Give me a few good debrief questions to help them process what they saw and felt, not just report on it."
- "Someone on the trip is struggling to readjust to normal life back home. Give me a few honest, grounded things I could say to help them process that."
Actual Answers Provided By Selah
"I'm meeting with someone from a Mormon background this week. Help me understand where our beliefs actually overlap and where they genuinely diverge, so I don't misrepresent their view."
Good instinct — the vocabulary problem is the biggest trap in this conversation, and wanting to avoid misrepresentation before the meeting is exactly the right starting posture.
Here's the most important thing to hold before anything else: you will often be using identical words to mean genuinely different things, and neither of you will immediately notice. "God," "Jesus," "salvation," "grace," "eternal life," "Scripture" — all shared vocabulary, substantially different referents. The conversation can feel like agreement when it's actually talking past each other.
So rather than starting with where you overlap (which can get slippery fast given the vocabulary issue), let me give you one divergence that's foundational, because it shapes almost everything else:
The Nature of God — and What Kind of Thing God Is
In historic Christian theology (what you'd find in the Nicene Creed, in Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and the broad Protestant mainstream), God is:
- Eternal — not just very old, but outside time; without beginning
- Immutable — not changing or progressing
- Incorporeal — without a physical body; spirit
- Self-existent — not dependent on anything outside himself for his being (aseity)
- One being in three persons — a Trinity in which the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit share one divine nature
In LDS theology, God the Father (Heavenly Father, "Elohim") is:
- Embodied — possessing a physical body of "flesh and bones as tangible as man's" (Doctrine and Covenants 130:22)
- Once human — having progressed from mortality to exalted godhood (the Lorenzo Snow couplet: "As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become")
- One of three distinct beings — Father, Son (Jehovah/Jesus), and Holy Ghost are three separate divine persons who are unified in purpose but not in being; this is closer to tritheism than to Nicene Trinitarianism
This difference isn't peripheral. If God is the kind of being LDS theology describes — embodied, once-mortal, progressing — then the Trinitarian grammar of classical Christianity doesn't apply, the aseity language doesn't apply, and the Creator/creature distinction functions very differently. The LDS God is an exalted being within the cosmos, not the ground of being outside it.
That's one divergence — but a load-bearing one.
Here's a question before we go further: are you looking to understand their view for the sake of the conversation itself (so you can listen well and represent them accurately), or are you also preparing to explain your own view clearly? Those aren't the same task, and the emphasis shifts depending on which you're more uncertain about.
"Give me a short, honest way to explain the trinity to someone with zero church background — no jargon."
Here's one way that doesn't cheat on the difficulty:
Christians believe there is one God — not three gods, not God wearing three different hats at different times, but genuinely one. And yet the New Testament keeps running into a problem: it talks about Jesus as if he is God, not just someone God sent. And it talks about the Spirit the same way. Not as lesser divine beings, not as metaphors, but as fully God.
So the doctrine of the Trinity is basically the church's honest attempt to say: we can't flatten this. We can't pick one and throw out the others. The Father is God. The Son is God. The Spirit is God. And there's still only one God. That's the claim — and it's genuinely strange, which is why Christians have always admitted it strains normal categories.
The honest thing to tell your friend: this isn't a puzzle with a satisfying solution at the end. It's more like a boundary — here's what we know we can't say (three gods, one God in disguise), even if we can't fully picture what's left.
What draws you to want to explain it? Is this someone who's skeptical, genuinely curious, or something else — that might shape which angle is most useful.