After an exciting offseason for BYU athletics, it is finally time to start playing some games. The NCAA football season officially kicks off tonight and BYU’s first game is this Saturday vs. The University of Washington Huskies, coached by former BYU All-America QB Steve Sarkesian.

Here are some of the strengths and weaknesses of the 2010 version of BYU football:

Strengths:
- A tremendous offensive line led by All-America candidate left tackle Matt Reynolds. The line is experienced, huge, and deep.
- A solid and experienced defensive backfield. BYU lost their free safety but the other three starters and most back-ups are back with more experience.
- Perhaps the deepest receiving corps in BYU history. Lots of talent and depth at BYU receiver right now.
- Speed on defense. While much of the defense is short on experience these guys are faster than your typical BYU defense.

Weaknesses:
- Inexperience at QB. Bronco will be using both true freshman Jake Heaps and Junior Riley Nelson this season. All eyes will be on these two newcomers. Heaps has the big arm and big pedigree but Nelson has more experience, is a scrambler, and is known as a fiery competitor.
- No Harvey Unga. BYU has some young talent at RB but it hurt to lose our all time leading rusher.
- Inexperience at tight end. With Pitta and George gone, five guys are vying for playing time at TE still.
- Unsettled middle linebackers. Looks like five guys will be shuttling through the two MLB spots as well.

So with that here are my season predictions:
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If you click on the picture, that’s my profile.

Well, it’s got some formatting issues, but I just cut and pasted some posts from the blog, and while it took a few weeks for it to get approved, no one asked for edits.

If it disappears, it is because I am trying to fix the formatting issues.

It’s on folks.

SLTrib
San Jose Mercury
ESPN

Official statements:
BYU
MWC
WCC

Continuing my series of church history questions

Question #4- So I read somewhere that during the Korean War(1951), there was a shortage of Young Men to go on missions, so the seventies were asked to fill the gap, and married men were then called to serve full-time missions. How did that work out? For How long did this go on? How long were these missions? How does this correlate with around the same time the first missionary lessons/discussions were published for standard use throughout the church (1952)?

Seth Godin, in his somewhat disappointing book tribes, (disappointing in that it hammers the one note of the wonders of the internet and social media, which everyone already knows, and in that it reads like a bunch of blog posts thrown together into a book.) brings up an interesting conversation about faith, that I’ve been thinking about for about 6 months now. We often seen setups where faith and science are made to be contra one another, but I found his setup very interesting, faith vs. religion.

‘Faith goes back a long way. Faith leads to hope, and it overcomes fear. Faith gives our ancestors the resilience they needed to deal with the mysteries of the (pre-science) world.Faith is the dividing line between humans and most other species.
Religion, on the other hand, represents a strict set of rules that our fellow humans have overlaid on top of our faith. Religion supports the status quo and encourages us to fit in, not to stand out.

Religion works great when it amplifies faith.

That’s why human beings invented religion. It’s why we have spiritual religions and cultural religions and corporate religions. Religion gives our faith a little support when it needs it, and it makes it easy for your peers to encourage you to embrace your faith.
Religion at its best is a sort of mantra, a subtle but consistent reminder that belief is okay, and that faith is the way to get where you are going.

The reason we need to talk about this, though, is that often religion does just the opposite. Religion at its worst reinforces the status quo, often at the expense of our faith.’

I am pretty conflicted in terms of this statement because I totally agree with it, and also totally disagree. But rather than share my views, I want to hear from you.

What do you think?

How good is our church at boosting faith?

Continuing my series:

Question #3- How did we get to where The Aaronic Priesthood is the Young Men’s program of the church? When did 12 become the starting age for the priesthood? (For example, why not make it 11 since scouts starts at 11?) I see in the 1950′s the ages to be ordained teacher’s and priests moved from 15 and 17 to 14 and 16. Why the change?

Ever since Utah announced it was leaving the Mountain West Conference to join the Pac10 there have been rumors swirling about what BYU would do. The three main options were to sit tight in the MWC, hope for an invite to the Big12, or go independent. Well the Big12 invite has not arrived so it appears BYU has taken its fate into its own hand and decided to go independent. Here are some links:

SLTrib saying it is a done deal
Deseret News calling it a done deal too
ESPN predicting it last night
CBS Sports

It does indeed look like a done deal. BYU football will reportedly go independent and all other BYU sports joining the WAC starting in the Fall of 2011. This is very similar the the arrangement Notre Dame has with the Big East.

Should be an interesting week for BYU sports fans. Stay tuned.

So I’ve decided to continue a series of questions regarding church history that I can’t seem to get google to answer for me. I’ll be asking one a sunday until I get lazy and forget (maybe next Sunday.)

Question #2 is this- What did the church do for converts before Gospel Essentials class? I see in 1958 a “new program for convert integration was adopted” (per the church almanac), but have no idea what it was or how it fits in with our current convert integration efforts.

So I’ve decided to start a series of questions regarding church history that I can’t seem to get google to answer for me. I’ll be asking one a sunday until I get lazy and forget (maybe next Sunday.)

So Question #1- Per the 2010 Church Almanac, the church started home teaching in 1964, replacing ward teaching. What was the difference between home teaching and ward teaching. And since we (the church) always site the story of Joseph Smith’s home teacher being nervous, and Joseph coaching him, how does that all work out, since home teaching didn’t start until over 100 years later?

Bonus- When did visiting teaching start?

From the fake scripture file:

1 Among “active” Mormons there are three levels or degrees of Eagerness;
2 And in order to obtain the highest and most time consuming jobs in the church, an active Mormon must enter into this degree of activity [meaning fully "Eager" and not "Less Eager" or "InEager"];
3 And if he does not, he cannot obtain it.
4 He may enter into the other less demanding callings, but that is the end of his institutional progress; he cannot have a promotion.

I feel a new cross-stitched wall hanging coming on…

In the spirit of the 13th Article of Faith, I would like to spend some time looking at retention strategies in the Evangelical church, and especially those of Nelson Searcy as outlined in “Fusion: Turning First-Time Gests into Fully-Engaged Members of Your Church”
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Two years ago, we were told our ward was the top baptizing ward in the top baptizing stake in Texas. “Good Job!” we were told. “It’s because you are such a loving and welcoming ward.” We were told. We had 20+ baptisms. We retained 1 person.

As a very dedicated convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, one of my main concerns is seeing those who come into the church, like I did, not make it. We have lived in the ward we are in currently for 6 years, and have seen 60+ baptisms in that time, but only 4 (1 family, 1 lone man) that I know of are still regularly active. My wife and I sometimes refer to this situation as the “catch and release” program of the church.

Now there are, upon reflection, many different reasons for this abysmal statistic, but none of this is because of baseball baptisms or faking records. In other words, missionaries are not breaking the rules.
In order to capture some of the issues I’ve seen, I’m going to break our wards missionary work out into the 4 typical areas of missionary work. All these issues are anecdotal, but that is all that’s available to me at the time.

1. Finding- A lot of the people who are found by the missionaries in our area are either transient people or disabled. A large percent of them don’t have cars. These people are typically not member referrals.

2. Teaching- Many people who are taught do not completely understand the expectations the church has for its members (callings, service, visiting other members, etc.) Few members are available to take time off to meet investigators.

3. Baptizing- In conjunction with #2, Many people who are baptized, have had trouble fulfilling their commitments prior to baptism, especially the commitment to attend church regularly.

4. Retaining- People have complained about not feeling welcome at our church. Converts typically do not last long enough that being endowed ever becomes a concern. Most new members are brought in solely on the missionaries’ efforts, not through member referral. Home Teaching is poor.

Above, I have tried to assemble a quick sketch of the symptoms of the problem we are having.

And so I ask you, are you having the same problems in your area? And if so, what do you think is the root cause? Ie- What are we doing wrong and how do we repent of it?

In part two, I will talk about ways I think missionary/retention efforts are being done in other churches, and ask if we should borrow any of their ideas. First I just wanted to see how typical my anecdotal concerns are.

On the one hand, it seems like Mormons are uniquely primed to accept the Documentary Hypothesis (DH) given that:

1. The Book of Mormon was compiled by a late redactor (Mormon) in a way that is at least superficially similar to what R is proported to have done in the DH.
2. There is a long tradition in Mormonism of suspecting that there were problems in the transmission of the Bible. Not just the problem of translation noted in the eighth article of faith, but the outright tampering alleged in 1 Ne 13.

On the other hand, the JST and the Pearl of Great Price make the DH threatening in ways that are uniquely Mormon, for example:

1. Moses 3:5 seems to support the theory that the two creation accounts of Genesis 1/2 are spiritual/physical respectively. This theory, of course, is contradicted by the DH and raises questions about the nature of the JST.
2. Abraham 4-5 crosses a P-J seem which is an odd thing for it to do if it was written by Abraham.

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The subject of loyalty came up over at a recent Bloggernacle Times thread. Jacob J stirred the pot a little by saying the following:

I think loyalty is vastly overrated. In all the cases when loyalty is cited as the motivation for virtuous behavior that same behavior could/should have been motivated by a less problematic virtue like fairmindedness or kindness. In plenty of cases, loyalty is a name for going against your better judgment to do something wrong, covering something up, or sticking up for a person who is in the wrong.

This comment was met with resistance but Jacob is entirely correct. Loyalty is a useful motivational tool to be sure but is hardly a virtue itself.
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Well, I had a few more things I could have done with the data, but time got the best of me. Rather than leave this undone though, here is the data.

Survey Data

Please feel free to use the data,do some analysis and post a link here to your findings.