A Disciple’s Plea for Openness and Inclusion

From "A Disciple’s Plea for Openness and Inclusion | An Interview With Elder Marlin K. Jensen" by Terryl Givens.
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During his 24 years as a beloved LDS General Authority and Official Church Historian, Elder Marlin K. Jensen presided over an historic shift toward greater openness in the LDS church’s approach to its history. In this Conversation with Terryl Givens, we get an intimate glimpse into Elder Jensen’s personal life and thoughts, including: 

- How loving and serving his older brother instilled a determination to include “those who are different”
- The spiritual experiences that led him to consecrate his life to serving in the church
His wish for more “overtly spiritual” church experience
- How our spiritual lives can be enriched by people, practices and writings from other religious traditions
- The challenges and the fruits of complete openness and transparency in telling the history of the church
- The urgent need to embrace those who are different or “don’t meet the norm” in the church
- His stirring witness of Christ 

An attorney by profession who is more at home on the ranch, Elder Jensen became one of the public faces of Mormonism during what came to be called the “Mormon Moment.” He was featured prominently on the 2007 PBS series The Mormons. 

Under his direction as church historian, dramatic advances were made in church history, including creation of the Joseph Smith Papers project, construction of the new Church History Museum next to Temple Square, and greater access to scholars on a number of fronts. Terryl Givens once wrote of Elder Jensen: "Marlin Jensen has done more to further the cause of Mormon history than any person of the current generation."

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I love this story from Elder Jensen

a year ago in our stake conference, a young, bright mother stood and talked about having done her daily scripture read, after which she was sitting quietly thinking about what she had read and then began to reflect on the entire restoration and Joseph Smith. Then there came into her mind the question, “What if all of this isn’t real? What if it isn’t real?” Then she progressed from there to thought about our Savior and the Fall and all of these beliefs that we have as Latter-day Saints, and began again to question. 

Up until that point, she’d had a life much like most Latter-day Saints: a series of progressive experiences confirming what she believed, then had the lived experience of “By this you can tell if it’s God’s doctrine or if I speak of myself.” That’s the experiential part of this: “Any man who will do the will of the Father, he shall know of the doctrine: whether it be of God or whether I speak of myself.” 

She, at that point, got into what I would call a spiritual free fall, which I think is happening to many good Latter-day Saints today. I think the way I reason through that in my humble way gets to what you’re talking about, and that is that ultimately it all centers on Christ. What we sincerely in our hearts think about Him, believe about Him, hope about Him, is going to determine the kind of person that we’ll be, I think, and what our actions are going to be. 

So when I look at this world, and I ask the question, “Where is Christ? Who has Him? Who is living like Him? Who is being taught His teachings? Where is it facilitated to do what He did?,” I’m led to our Church. That’s where I come: to this Church. 

That fact, however it got there, to me, is that if someone looks at the New Testament and is trying to find the Christianity that was practiced there, taught there, and written about there in the book of Acts, he will eventually in a thoughtful way come to Mormonism. He will embrace the Christ of the Restoration and with that, takes those historical facts that brought that all to pass. That’s where I come out in my thinking on this.

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When asked about "moments of time in our past are transformative, shaping moments that determine who we become spiritually and intellectually.", Elder Jensen said this first.

I think the first would have been the fact that two years before I was born, my mother gave birth to my older brother, Gary, who is now 77 years old and who, because of oxygen deprivation at birth, has only attained the mental age of about a 5 or 6-year-old. 

He and I were raised sort of in tandem. After my birth, there was a hiatus of about 10 years before my parents ventured to have another child, which may say something about me, but it was significant being raised with that special brother at a time when there was very little provision in the Church, in public education, and society generally for what we now call special needs children. Observing his treatment at the hands of other young people trying to come to his aid; watching my parents devote their life, their resources to his enlargement as a person — I think at a very young age, that became one of the most defining parts of my development. 

I’ve always been a softy when it comes to those who are different and I think it began with my brother — and it remains. We share, within our family, giving him care now that my parents are gone. I’ve been blessed, I think, to have just a little look into the eternities about the person he will one day be. It makes me very grateful that I’ve been nice to him. I’m always desirous of being that way throughout his life because I think he was given to us that we might learn things that we would have otherwise never learned.

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