New LDS-friendly foundation wants church members to reach out online

Cody Clark

For better or for worse, people trust the Internet. When it comes to finding information about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, often it's for worse -- especially if you're someone who has an interest in helping the church to spread its doctrines. Jim Engebretsen remembers getting a taste of what the Internet has to say about Mormonism while serving as president of an LDS proselytizing mission in Oklahoma.

(For Latter-day Saints, a mission is a geographic region where church members on special assignment discuss the faith and its tenets with local residents. "Mission" can also refer to an individual church member's specific assignment to serve in a mission, typically for 18 months or two years.)

Sites purporting to inform about LDS beliefs, Engebretsen said, "would say we aren't Christian, that we're a cult, that we worship the devil. Pretty horrendous bigotry."

The More Good Foundation, which derives its name from a written statement by LDS Church founder Joseph Smith that the literal interpretation of the name Mormon is "more good," wants to change what pops up when people open a Web browser, call up their favorite search engine and type in LDS Church-related search terms.

Set up by Engebretsen, an assistant dean in Brigham Young University's Marriott School of Business, and JetBlue founder David Neeleman, the fledgling non-profit group hopes to aggressively populate the Internet with sites and blogs, streams and feeds, that provide fair and balanced information about LDS beliefs and practices.

Some of the work is being done by people either directly or casually affiliated with the More Good Foundation, which has a handful of full-time employees (sequestered in a basement on the former WordPerfect campus in Orem) and a small army of volunteers and paid contractors. The foundation has about 80 Web sites either deployed or in various stages of development.

There's all of cyberspace to infiltrate, however, and the foundation is hopeful that individual church members will follow its lead and use its tools to answer the recent plea made by LDS apostle Elder M. Russell Ballard to graduating seniors at Brigham Young University-Hawaii.

After remarking on the explosive growth of "new media" and its potential to spread information about the church, Ballard told his listeners that, "We cannot stand on the sidelines while others, including our critics, attempt to define what the church teaches."

The kicker, addressed by Ballard to "all faithful members of the church," was this: "May I ask that you join the conversation by participating on the Internet."

'I love The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints'

This is where the More Good Foundation -- which has no formal affiliation with the LDS Church -- steps in. Are you an LDS Church member with a blog, live journal, or Facebook page? If so, then More Good wants to encourage you to be a little bit more open about your faith.

"Someone types 'Mormon beliefs' every five minutes, all day long, every day," said Richard Miller, the 28-year-old executive vice president of More Good. (That statistic, Miller said, is based on data aggregated by analytic software available from companies like Google and Omniture.)

Miller described a Latter-day Saint friend in Las Vegas who has a blog, an online space where individuals can share information about themselves, their likes and dislikes, and so forth. Public interest in blogs boomed in the early 2000s, and there are now multiple companies that offer blog software and hosting free of charge.

Miller's friend, he said, "doesn't always blog about the church. Sometimes he blogs about the Red Sox, or his family, or whatever." The friend happened to write on his blog about the LDS belief in tithing, which requires faithful Latter-day Saints to donate 10 percent of their income to the church. A visitor to the blog who lives in San Francisco read the tithing post, contacted the blogger, and eventually arranged a meeting with LDS missionaries.

"He doesn't have a huge readership, but he was able to affect one person," Miller said.

As Miller sees it, the more content there is on the Web that provides accurate information about LDS beliefs and practices, the more likely it is that seekers will find something that affirms their interest.

Accurate, of course, is at least a somewhat subjective term when used to characterize information about matters of religious faith. Given that the "critics" of Mormonism that Ballard referred to are already having their say, however, the foundation and its backers see no reason to hesitate over balancing out the discussion.

After meeting his missionaries, Engebretsen said, curious Oklahomans would search for information about Mormon missionaries. "They'd find pages that say things like, 'I hated my mission,'" Engebretsen said. "I've known hundreds of missionaries, but very few who hated their missions.

"I love The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It's blessed my life in many different ways. We thought we could do a better job of helping people to set up Web sites and tell their story of the church."

Tell me, don't sell me

The LDS Church has its own array of official Web sites, of course -- a brand new site dedicated to LDS teachings about Jesus Christ, jesuschrist.lds.org, went up earlier this year. Church leaders have acknowledged, however, the importance of readily accessible input from people who Miller described as being "non-authorities."

"People are more willing to listen to someone who doesn't have a vested interest," Miller said.

More Good publicist Karen Merkley compared it to buying a car. People may inquire at a dealership about the reliability and performance of a certain make or model, but they often put more stock in information provided by someone who drives that make or model, but isn't trying to sell it.

As Ballard put it in his BYU-Hawaii address, "Sometimes people just want to know what the Church is. And some who seek answers want them to come directly from a member of the church, like each one of you."

The More Good Web sites, of which some of the largest are LDS.net, MormonChurch.com, LDSBlogs.com and the in-development Christ.org, are open to participation, and offer tools like source code to help church members display their testimony of the church on a Facebook page. (A testimony is an individual member's expression, in their own words, or what they believe about LDS teachings and practices.)

Another tool lets church members display favorite scripture on their site, or display recent headlines from the LDS Church newsroom Web site (newsroom.lds.org).

More Good is also more than just an opportunity to spread the faith. Richard N. Holzapfel, a professor of church history at BYU, is a consultant on, and contributor to, Christ.org. Holzapfel said that the site has the potential to become a vast online library, a place for scholarly discussion of Jesus Christ, as well as a repository of information about him.

Holzapfel said that teachers strive to teach what they know, ideally to as many people as possible. And yet, the bulk of writing by LDS scholars about religious topics, he said, is mostly "consumed by Mormons, in English, by and large in North America, in Canada and the United States."

Not anymore. "People can get the Internet In Tokyo or Buenos Aires," Holzapfel said. "It allows us to move far beyond what we could have ever imagined."

More Good thinks that kind of global reach can only help its objectives. The foundation's motto references a commandment of Christ to his followers, but adds one word. "Let your light so shine," it reads, "online." You never know who may be looking.

• Cody Clark can be reached at 344-2542 or cclark@heraldextra.com.