Introduction and Episode Overview

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It's June 8, 2026. Today we're going to be answering the question, what happens when a Texas mega pastor's son, or a pastor from a megachurch, when his son decides to join the Mormon Church? Because in part he's seeing his evangelical church and the evangelical church movement sort of water itself down into kind of non denominational Christianity. So eventually he joins the Mormon church, a great sacrifice to him, ends up marrying the church, raising kids in the church. He's still active in the church today.

John Dehlin [00:00:37] But what happens when he starts noticing the modern Mormon Church or LDS church following the same playbook that evangelical Christianity has and begins to water itself down as well and start to de emphasize its own distinctive doctrine and theology and history and in many ways try to refashion itself more as a non denominational Christian sect.

John Dehlin [00:01:04] That's gonna be a big part of what we talk about today in an epic Mormon story. I'm super excited about it. And there are a couple other surprises at the end. We're gonna be sharing at some point an analysis of, with data, the Mormon Church's pivot from distinctive Mormon doctrine, theology and history towards more mainstream, vanilla, non denominational evangelical Christianity.

John Dehlin [00:01:31] And we're gonna be talking about identification of sources for some of Joseph Smith's theology and temple verbiage that maybe is yet undiscovered and undiscussed. A lot to cover today, either in this episode or in a multi part episode. But without any further ado, I want to introduce you all to Lance Kennedy from Texas. Hey, Lance.

Lance Kennedy [00:02:02] Hey, John. Great to be here.

John Dehlin [00:02:03] I can't believe you've been listening to Mormon stories so long and you don't know that I'm a Texan.

Lance Kennedy [00:02:08] I didn't know or it slipped past me, but that is an important fact.

John Dehlin [00:02:13] So Texas forever to start with.

Lance Kennedy [00:02:14] There you go, man.

John Dehlin [00:02:16] But anyway, I don't really write out my introductions, so please amend, correct, edit my introduction to whatever you would want me too upset?

Lance Kennedy [00:02:29] No, I think it was spot on. And you know, I told you, John, when I came in here, I've listened to you. I mean really the whole duration of my faith journey in, you know, Mormonism. Been a great asset to me. I've never been confused about you being a private podcaster. Just to throw that out there. I think it was pretty. That's a lawsuit reference, maybe, but beyond that. Yeah, no, I'm just grateful to be here. And now we have to deliver an Epic podcast for you.

John Dehlin [00:02:56] Yeah. So just to reiterate, you are an active attending member of the LDS Church as of today, is that right?

Lance Kennedy [00:03:06] That is correct.

John Dehlin [00:03:07] And yeah, you're still raising your family in the church and you're an attorney in Texas and you're a former branch president, which is kind of the equivalent to a Mormon bishop. It's just you were in a branch instead of a ward, which means it was a slightly smaller congregation.

Lance Kennedy [00:03:26] Yeah, those are all correct facts. And, you know, the branch presidency experience, of course, was very interesting and probably can discuss that a little bit more in detail, too.

Growing Up as a Megachurch Pastor's Son

John Dehlin [00:03:37] All right. All right, well, let's begin. Normally, I start by saying, how does your Mormon story begin? But your story doesn't begin as a Mormon story. You began as the son of a mega church pastor. So tell us about your parents and even your grandpa. I think maybe. And then. Yeah, what it was like growing up as the son of a mega church pastor.

Lance Kennedy [00:03:59] Yeah, no, totally. So really it begins with. With my father, Lawrence Kennedy. And, you know, I think it's worth kind of going back to some of the. The religious background of the. My family. I'm Southern through and through both sides of my family.

Lance Kennedy [00:04:16] And the reason I bring that up is, you know, there was no Mormon connection. There's no Roman Catholic connection. It was dyed in the wool wasp, Protestantism, mostly from the Wesleyan tradition, so came out of Methodism. And then at some point, probably in the late 19th century, early 20th century, like many Methodists, they went through the transition to the holiness movement, which was a revival movement within Methodism. So if you remember what Methodism was, and of course, Methodism was close to Joseph Smith's and his preference, I think he mentions it in his own history, it was a revival movement, John Wesley and so forth. So there was a real fundamental mental core component of.

Lance Kennedy [00:04:56] Of historic Methodism, Holiness about really personal transformation. And then sometime, probably I would say in the mid 20th century, my grandparents grandmother made the transition to Pentecostalism, the Assembly of God Church. And so that's where my dad was raised in. In East Texas.

Lance Kennedy [00:05:13] And then. Do you want me to go in more detail? But yeah, sure. So, you know, my dad. And I'll kind of summarize this because I think it's important, but it's not really the heart of what we're talking about. You know, he grew up in poverty.

Lance Kennedy [00:05:25] Many members of his generation became a hippie in the 1960s. You know, some interesting stories from him about, you know, doing acid for three days at festivals and listening to Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and so forth and the Beatles.

Lance Kennedy [00:05:42] I don't think he saw the Beatles, but he did see, he did see all the kind of the big, big, you know, late 1960s bands and acts and. But he fell into the drug culture and had a really profound conversion experience where he was at a park in Dallas, has been renamed. It was Robert E. Lee Park. And he says he was smoking dope and drinking Ripple Wine is the way he describes it. But a guy handed him a tract like a pamphlet on the Romans Road to Salvation. And my dad cussed him out, put it in his pocket, and then went back to wherever he was hanging out.

Lance Kennedy [00:06:17] But I think he was dealing with a lot of existential questions. Pulls out that tract connected to his religious upbringing and called his brother my uncle, who is a pastor in the Four Square Church, which is Amy.

John Dehlin [00:06:30] Oh, I've heard about that.

Lance Kennedy [00:06:31] Yeah. So Four Square is a, a Pentecostal denomination. Came out of Amy Simple McPherson, who. She was really one of the pioneers, if you call it of mega church Christianity in the early 20th century with Angelus Temple in LA. But my uncle was a member of a pastor of that denomination. And he flew my dad up to California from Dallas and then drove him to northern Canada, to Saskatchewan, Eston, Saskatchewan, and dropped them off at a Bible school where my dad was a missionary for seven years to the Cree Indians before returning back to Texas to start his congregation.

John Dehlin [00:07:10] So he converts and at some point decides to start his own church.

Lance Kennedy [00:07:15] Yeah, and this is important for, I think, megachurch, non denominational Christianity. Kind of what you would, if you go to like your, you know, box church, let's say Life Creek Church, or just create some generic name of a church. All of those churches have a genealogy and that goes back really to the 1960s. Because like my father, you know, who is a hippie part of this countercultural movement. Once that ebbed, let's say 1969, 1970, a lot of the members of that countercultural movement went back to their Christian roots. And that was what my father, father did. But they brought a lot of their sensibilities, their, their countercultural sensibilities back with them to their, their churches.

Lance Kennedy [00:07:58] So for instance, this is where you get the kind of come as you are mentality, casual dress, rock bands, very practical, you know, down to earth type services. But it came out of the hippie movement and, and the way that I think a lot of religious scholars frame this is as the, the Jesus people or the Jesus freaks. You know, the Doobie Brothers made the Song, you know, Jesus is still all out of this same movement. So my dad, of course, is in Canada. He comes back to Texarkana, which is, you know, Deep south as. As it gets. And he did what he thought Jesus started, you know, told him to do, which was baptize people, and he did it in a pond in the local. The local park. So that would have been probably like 1976 or so. And that's how he started his church

John Dehlin [00:08:46] in Texarkana and grew into a mega church.

Lance Kennedy [00:08:51] Yeah, so the church started, it was. It was on Martin Lut King Boulevard. And this was, you know, 1970s, right. Post Jim Crow. And Texarkana still has a lot of, you know, religious tensions. It's still a community with that involved, but racial.

John Dehlin [00:09:08] Racial tensions.

Lance Kennedy [00:09:09] Right, and that's what I'm referring to. Yeah, the racial tensions. But at this point, late 1970s, I mean, you know, you had black churches and you had white churches. So having a white preacher go start a church on Martin Luther King Boulevard, and he would knock on doors of like, the projects and they'd be like, why is this crazy white preacher coming to my door? But it worked. And he, he founded the. The first integrated church in Texarkana, Pentecostal, which is an African American spiritual tradition that, you know. So I, I grew up in a. What I consider a black derived spiritual religious tradition. But yeah, I grew really fast in Texarkana. And interestingly enough, BY like the 1980s, my dad's church was competing in size with my Huckabee's church. He was actually the pastor of Beach Street Baptist Ch in Texarkana at that time.

John Dehlin [00:09:58] So is. I'm rusty on my Texas geography, but is Texarkana close to the Arkansas border?

Lance Kennedy [00:10:04] It's on the Arkansas border, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:10:06] So half the time Huckabee's from Arkansas, right?

Lance Kennedy [00:10:08] He is. And he pastored this Baptist church there in Texarkana for a number of years. So they were like the competing, dueling churches for a while. But it really was the early 1980s, which set my dad on the true mega church kind of course, because that's where he met Larry Lee. And Larry Lee is a really key kind of figure in, you know, my dad's, I guess you could say his, his own success and his career and then also my own religious upbringing.

Lance Kennedy [00:10:38] And so, you know, Larry, you can find him online. You know, natural national religious broadcasters claimed he was going to be the next Billy Graham. He had a 12,000 member church in Rockwall, Texas, which is outside of Dallas, near Richardson, which I Think John, you're familiar with and you, you lived there for a time. And so he had met my dad in the early 1980s because both of them had to East Texas. Larry was from Kilgore, and when he had started his church actually in the back of a roller skating rink, you know, he had called my dad and asked for advice because my dad had this church in, in Texarkana.

Lance Kennedy [00:11:13] Larry, though, came out of the, the, the Southern Baptist Convention. And so he had a different background than my dad did. But where Larry kind of, I think, you know, his distinctive was, is that he had accepted the gifts of the spirit. And so he was a Baptist who had experienced, you know, speaking in tongues, laying on of hands, prophecy, all these kind of Pentecostal gifts that you see and that got him and his congregation actually kicked out of the Southern Baptist convention.

Lance Kennedy [00:11:44] So 1986, Larry brings my dad to Rockwall to be his executive pastor. And at this point, Larry's church is just exploding in size. He has a prayer ministry, it's all over tv. My dad and him had traveled to Seoul, Korea to learn from Paul Yonggi Cho, who had a million member church in Seoul, Korea. It was the largest church in the world at the time. But this is where you get like small group ministry, their distinctive prayer ministry that they brought over. They got it from Korea. And so 1986, my family relocates to Rockwall to help Larry. And then Larry sends my dad to North Dallas to plant a church there, which was kind of a, I guess you could call like an early satellite church because this is before you could broadcast in, you know, one preacher into multiple sites.

Lance Kennedy [00:12:41] So he literally sent my dad out to the north part of, of Dallas to fulfill what they called their Isaiah 43 message, which was we're going to call out to the north, south, east and west to give up. It's a prophecy. So Larry's church in Rockwall was east. He started one in Fort Worth, one in Duncanville South. And then my dad was to kind of geographically map. And this goes back to what's called spiritual mapping and, and, and spiritual warfare. So they were literally geographically claiming territory for, for Christ.

John Dehlin [00:13:12] This reminds me of Joseph trying to fulfill prophecy that he finds in the scriptures. That's awesome.

Lance Kennedy [00:13:17] Yeah, I mean, you know, whether they were trying to fulfill prophecy or they saw it as a, a model for them, but they definitely were deriving because with, with, with Kingdom now philosophy, Dominionism, some of these kind of variants of Pentecostalism, you get into territorial spirits and literally there's geographic Like Satan has an army and he's divided up his demons to rule over certain areas of the world. So that's why they felt like they needed to do that. But yeah, my dad gets sent to North Dallas first day 1989. His church opens to 1200 members first Sunday. And I was there for it. It, I was a little kid, of course, but just remembered all the excitement and church just grew really, really fast starting at that point.

John Dehlin [00:14:04] Okay, so at this point you're the son of a pastor of what's becoming a megachurch. So what was your religious upbringing like? What was your spiritual life like as the kid of a megachurch pastor, et cetera?

Lance Kennedy [00:14:20] Yeah, so that's a complicated question. I think, think, you know, it is. I'll go, I'll give you kind of one more historic kind of detail because I brought up Larry Lee and his relationship with my dad. So 1991, Larry's running his global prayer ministry. And again, as I mentioned, Christian national religious broadcasters, NRB claimed him to be, you know, next Billy Graham. He had this massive church. And, and really, if you, you know, in the 1980s there were roughly about 100 megachurches in the country, very few non denominational Christians. If it was like less than 10%, it would be accurate. So these were kind of like a very unique type of Church.

Lance Kennedy [00:15:00] Well, 1991, Larry gets invited on Diane Sawyer's show. I think it was Nightline or Dateline, but it was one of those, the big shows, cbs, to do ostensibly a, you know, a cover story on his ministry, but it ended up being a hit piece. And so she, in this interview, you can find it on YouTube. YouTube did an expose on Larry Lee, who was my godfather.

John Dehlin [00:15:24] And that's spelled L, E A, correct?

Lance Kennedy [00:15:27] Yeah, Larry, Larry, L E A. And she did a hit piece on him, Bob Tilton and W.V. grant, who are three prominent televangelists in Dallas, which is the buckle of the Bible belt. Well, Larry ends up having some type of, you know, I want to call it a nervous breakdown, but just basically couldn't handle the, the, you know, the, the pressure that was on him. And so his ministry implodes. Well, my dad was perfectly set up to inherit his mantle and, you know, he's the heir apparent. He's running the, the big new church on the Rock Church, which was the name of the, the denomination.

Lance Kennedy [00:16:02] And that really catalyzed the growth. Well, the other interesting thing was Bob Tilton, who was, you know, the real famous televangelist. He was about a mile down the road from my dad's church, and he happened to be on that same expose as Larry Lee, so his ministry collapsed.

Lance Kennedy [00:16:18] So you had about a thousand people plus come over to my dad's church almost immediately. And so by the mid-90s, based on kind of these two collapses of these ministries and others, my dad inherits thousands and thousands of people, so that by the late 90s, you know, he was having between 6 to 8,000 attending people at his church in Carrollton.

John Dehlin [00:16:39] So, like my. As I'm growing up, I remember Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim and Tammy Faye Baker. So I remember those scandals and implosions. These sounds like the ones that your circle were involved with.

Lance Kennedy [00:16:55] They were slightly after. They were after that, but interestingly, interesting connection with oru. Larry Lee was appointed the head of the Dean of Theology of oru, or Roberts University, and his home that he alleged had been burned down and he was left destitute was in Tulsa, which is where ORU was. And that was the heart of the Diane Sawyer expose, was that he actually did have a house.

John Dehlin [00:17:16] Got it.

Lance Kennedy [00:17:17] So, yeah, this was after. This was 1991. And so, you know, I was growing up to kind of circle back to your question about spiritual upbringing. You know, for me, church was business. It was spiritual, too, don't get me wrong. But it was all tied together because this was my dad's. You know, it's his business, it's our livelihood, it's where stress comes from. It's our family goes there, our friends, our social life, our social activities. Sounds very Mormon, you know, in terms of how integrated it was with my life.

John Dehlin [00:17:49] Also your family's reputation?

Lance Kennedy [00:17:51] Thousand percent, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:17:52] Because.

Lance Kennedy [00:17:52] Because they're, you know, my dad was on tv, so he had two TV shows, TBN and daystar, both based in Dallas as well. Kind of. You can see the commonality with Dallas as kind of the hub of all of this going on.

Lance Kennedy [00:18:05] So, yeah, he was very, very prominent, very public, but the. The kind of recurrent thing. And I say this because I love my dad and he knows I'm here, and they were telling me they're praying for me and being on here, by the way. So, you know, and so my dad always, I think, struggled with his upbringing in poverty. And so the more successful he got, the more stressed out he got because it was almost like he was going to lose something he had gained. So I think, though, that that kind of also kind of fed into the way I viewed church and religion and organization and how it should be run and shouldn't be run and all of those things.

John Dehlin [00:18:41] Yeah. You tell a story about you being brought up on stage. Do you want to talk about that? And kind of what that meant and, you know, means to you as you reflect back.

Lance Kennedy [00:18:52] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:18:52] Your spiritual experiences.

Lance Kennedy [00:18:53] Well, I mean, the spiritual, kind of like the church was, you know, again, it was a Pentecostal distinctive. So what I mean by that is we would, you know, if you ask people what were we. We would you get a variety of answers. Non denominational, charismatic, Pentecostal. You know, there's a variety of terms, but what it really amounted to is fluidity because there's no history. There's no grounding in any church history. There's nothing that exists. It's in a vacuum.

John Dehlin [00:19:19] It's not a franchise, basically.

Lance Kennedy [00:19:20] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:19:21] Formal franchise of a formal denomination. Denomination. Right.

Lance Kennedy [00:19:25] I mean, it was part of the church on the rock denomination, which wasn't in terms of. You're talking about more mainline type denominations. No, it wasn't. It was a new denomination. I mean, Larry Lee founded it. It was called D Magazine, a virtual denomination. But it didn't have the institutions, it didn't have the timeline to know what you need to teach and not. And plus, people are trying. These guys are growing their ministries. They're doing what works, they're looking at.

John Dehlin [00:19:53] I have to draw this analogy, but one of my favorite movies of the past 10 or 20 years, I think it's called the Founder, but it's about the creation of McDonald's.

Lance Kennedy [00:20:02] I love it.

John Dehlin [00:20:03] And Ray Kroc. Yeah, what's the movie called?

Lance Kennedy [00:20:05] With Michael Keaton, the founder.

John Dehlin [00:20:07] And basically, obviously he doesn't start the first McDonald's like these McDonald brothers or whatever create it, but then he, I guess he buys it and he creates a few franchises early on. And like there's some franchises making chicken strips. You know what I mean?

Lance Kennedy [00:20:24] Yeah. Standardized.

John Dehlin [00:20:25] And. And after a while he realized if we didn't standardize the product, there wouldn't be consistency across franchises.

Lance Kennedy [00:20:33] Sounds like correlation.

John Dehlin [00:20:35] Yeah, but I mean, you're kind of. Your dad's church was in that middle zone where you weren't the first church, but the church system hadn't been fully franchised and. Or correlated.

Lance Kennedy [00:20:46] It was monarchical. I mean, it's all my dad. Right. Because this is, you know, it's a strong pastor master model.

John Dehlin [00:20:51] There weren't.

Lance Kennedy [00:20:51] There weren't elders or deacons. So he was the driving force. But that means that, you know, any limitation is going to be boxed in by his own limitations. And I think this is a commonality with a Lot of these churches. But yeah, spiritually I would say it was. It was somewhat chaotic because again, there's no history, there's no interpretive framework other than kind of a fundamentalist way to read the Bible very literally.

Lance Kennedy [00:21:15] And I started, you know, drifting. I always, I think, had a temperament towards more traditional worship styles. So for instance, we went to Israel in 96 is where I was baptized the first time. And so I wanted to do like the, the Catholic things like in Bethlehem, kiss where Jesus was born. I, I liked the ritual. I liked the ceremony because it was something we lacked. We just didn't have it. And so we would create stuff like we weren't messianic Christians, but we had a lot of like Jewish things we would, we would try to glom onto. Why? Because it gave us some of cultural background.

Lance Kennedy [00:21:51] Like we had a mezuzah, for instance, on our house door and we did passover seders and, you know, but that's what I'm saying. It was kind of like very hodgepodge constructed. And I never really could get a definite answer out of anyone about like, you know, where does this come from? Or church history, because no one really knew or cared, you know, so I'd just say, yeah, my spiritual upbringing was somewhat chaotic and it left me one being very precocious because I was, you know, inundated with religion and spirituality. I mean, like, it's hard, it's hard for people to understand unless they grow up in that level of environment just how much religion played a role.

Lance Kennedy [00:22:29] And not just like in like we prayed, but like business and marketing and how we're going to do the next sermon series and, you know, how do you do your transitions and services to, you know, I mean, there's. It's so con. I don't say contrived, but it's very, very thought through. And I don't know, it just left me though, kind of wanting something, I think, a little bit more.

Life Inside a Megachurch Empire

John Dehlin [00:22:50] So it, it says in your outline that eventually this is 120,000 square foot facility with 8,000 members and a weekly television broadcast. Yeah, I mean, that's huge. I'm thinking of Joel Osteen, Lakewood.

Lance Kennedy [00:23:06] Smaller than that, but.

John Dehlin [00:23:07] Right, but I mean, like the similar. Yeah, yeah.

Lance Kennedy [00:23:09] Production quality. I mean, you know, we're in a studio here. I grew up in TV studios. Right. Production. And this was analog and digital. We use beta tapes, the big ones on the tv. So. Yeah, I mean, there was just. There's a lot, there was a lot there that went into it. But I Think what? Always there were questions, again, that couldn't be answered. And that's.

John Dehlin [00:23:32] But you mentioned that, like, a Walker Texas Ranger episode was recorded in your dad's church.

Lance Kennedy [00:23:37] Well, he performed. My dad performed Chuck Norris's wedding, so.

John Dehlin [00:23:41] What the.

Lance Kennedy [00:23:42] Yeah. So if you, if you look in Chuck Norris's autobiography, my dad's picture is in the middle of it.

John Dehlin [00:23:46] That's awesome.

Lance Kennedy [00:23:47] Yeah. So, I mean, it was.

John Dehlin [00:23:48] It was cool.

Lance Kennedy [00:23:49] Like, so. Yeah, I mean, it was. It was. Again, it was the buckle of the Bible belt. Two TV shows, big church. Chuck Norris is kind of, you know, a peripheral figure attended. And my dad did his marital counseling. And then, you know, the. The church choir was performing with, like, Reba McIntyre at the Thanksgiving Cowboys games.

John Dehlin [00:24:09] Literally.

Lance Kennedy [00:24:09] Yeah, literally. So, like, you know, there was. It was. It was a lot going on. It was a lot of fun and a lot of very exciting, and I, I, I think I truly enjoyed, though, that part of it. But again, like, when you looked at the spiritual side, it was very emotive.

John Dehlin [00:24:28] So let's talk about the time they brought you on stage.

Lance Kennedy [00:24:30] Yeah, please, go ahead, tell the story,

John Dehlin [00:24:33] because that was the beginning of maybe some of your doubts or questions.

Lance Kennedy [00:24:36] It was. Yeah, I think so. You know, if we went back to, like, my upbringing and when things started, I think, shifting in my mind, there were a couple catalytic events. Okay. The first, if I wanted to pinpoint it, it's now funny to me. It's kind of a funny story, but it's also somewhat tragic in its own way. So Benny Hinn is a very famous prominent televangelist. Right. A miracle worker. He did Kathryn Kuhlman, these big rallies, and, you know, you can look up, you know, memes about him with, like, you know, slaying in the spirit, where he hits people with jackets. And so Benny had.

Lance Kennedy [00:25:13] He had come to my dad's church in the late 80s. He had come again in the 90s. We weren't friends with him, but, you know, we knew him. We. When he would come and visit, we spent time with him and so forth. He's a. He's a Palestinian Christian, came from Israel at one point and then started this massive of, you know, Christian televangelistic movement.

John Dehlin [00:25:32] So he was Robbie Zacharias before Robbie Zacharias, it sounds like, and both had scandals.

Lance Kennedy [00:25:36] So it's interesting. His with Paul or with Benny's. It was with Paula White of now Donald Trump fame, who also spoke at our church. But wait, Paula or Donald? Paula. Paula White did. Yeah. In 1999, I think so. But Benny, you know, by the point in like, late 90s, 97, 98, he no longer could speak at churches because his crowds he was drawing were tens of thousands. So he had set up a. A crusade, as they call him, at the American Airlines center, which is where the Mavericks play. And so my family was in his entourage. We. We stayed at the hotel. He was at the Mansion at Turtle Creek, you know, one of the nicest hotels in Dallas, and got into limousines to go on his. On, you know, his entourage. Going to the American Airlines Center. I thought that was kind of cool.

John Dehlin [00:26:25] So it's righteous gemstones territory. Now.

Lance Kennedy [00:26:28] That is a very. That's a. That's a show that's a little too close to home for me in many ways, but. But accurate in many ways, too. Yeah, but Benny had, you know, like. Like I said, the 2020,000 plus people, this big rally, but he couldn't speak at my dad's church. So he has a brother, which is Henry Hen. And Henry is kind of like the sidekick and the cleanup crew. So Henry would come in and speak at the churches based on the excitement that his brother, you know, had generated. And he spoke of my dad's church and Henry, you know, it's a faith healing type service.

Lance Kennedy [00:27:01] You know, it's. It's all build and anticipation and kind of at the crescendo when, you know, he's praying over people and everyone's kind of in this exotic frenzy. Think Kirtland, Ohio, you know, he. He calls me out and I'm 10 years old and goes, lance, come up to the stage. And so I. I hop up there and he goes, lance, start praying over people. And so I had never done this before, right? I've seen my dad do it, you know, and touching people's heads and they're all falling out, you know, under the spirit. I thought it was super cool because it's like my Sunday school teachers, my friend's parents, you know, these, like, authority figures. Like, I'm touching their heads and they're just passing out and shaking convulsively, right? And I'm like, man, I got superpowers.

John Dehlin [00:27:44] Is there a clip on the Internet of you doing this?

Lance Kennedy [00:27:46] I have tried to find it so much. There. There is a clip of me hawking mugs for the Millennium Y2K on TBN. So we can get you that one. I've looked for that clip, though, man. I. I really want it.

John Dehlin [00:28:01] But.

Lance Kennedy [00:28:01] But he. But he. He had me come up two or three times, you know, the. To kind of Reinvigorate the excitement. And then he, you know, he sits me on a chair in the middle of the stage. And, you know, my dad's church probably sat like three to 4,000 people. They would run multiple services on Sundays. This was overflow. And then he says some of the effect of, you know, it's time to bless the Lord's instrument or something, you know, like that. And people would come up to the stage and started throwing money at my feet. I was so excited because, you know, I'm a little kid, I'm 10, and there's hundreds of dollars, you know, thousands just piling around my feet.

Lance Kennedy [00:28:36] I'm like, I'm gonna keep all this. I wanted a dog. This is when Wishbone was really popular. And so I wanted a Jack Russell. And so I thought, man, I'm going to get this money. I'm going to go buy myself a dog. Well, sorry, Lance. Henry pocketed the cash. And as a reprieve, my dad did buy me that dog, which I had to law school.

John Dehlin [00:28:59] And you left that experience thinking and feeling what?

Lance Kennedy [00:29:04] I think I left the experience initially feeling very. I was positive about it. I mean, it was like, if you grow up in a Pentecostal world, right, and you see these pastors doing that, you know, that's like something. God's working through them. You know, you're seeing. Because, like, this is the thing with Pentecostalism, probably, like, what Kirtland did, which was give people some type of real time proof of spirituality, like, speaking in tongues is like, it's in front of you. You can see it, you're doing it, right? So I grew up seeing that happen. So that to be able to do that myself, you know, is huge. And I was definitely upset that he kept the money. But it wasn't really till later, as I got into adolescence and older, that I started getting a little bit. Think you could say, upset about the. The event.

The Commercialization of Evangelical Christianity

John Dehlin [00:29:51] But. But the broader theme was kind of the commercialization of Jesus. No.

Lance Kennedy [00:29:56] Yeah, I mean, it was that. I think that that was kind of, I mean, the whole framework and partially why I was so drawn, I think, to more liturgical forms of Christianity was because it wasn't focused on people's desires. Because, like, in. I mean, that's kind of like in my mind was religion is from God. He's not taking a survey and a poll about what people want. And so if you're totally trying to, like, you know, go towards market forces and whatnot and commercialize, you lose the spiritual core. And so, yeah, I mean, Seeing like again, the, the profit motive, the money, you know, and I never, I always was very. I'll say this, I never. And I still don't feel money and religion is bad.

John Dehlin [00:30:38] Right.

Lance Kennedy [00:30:38] Which we could talk about more. But like, I do feel though that that being the motive is the problem. And you see that too much in televangelism, of course. So I don't know if that answers your question, John, but yeah, absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:30:52] Okay, Lance, so this is great. So the next part of your outline I find really interesting because number one, you talk about ways that your dad's church incorporated what I might say are good or best practices regarding the safety of the membership and that sort of thing. So ways they evolved that were good. But then you also talk about how maybe evangelical or non denominational Christianity maybe started moving away from its foundations in a way that also proves challenging for your interest or your appeal in adolescence.

Lance Kennedy [00:31:34] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:31:34] Start with the good things and then go to the bad things.

Lance Kennedy [00:31:37] Yeah, I mean, good things, you know, they ran it like a business and that meant they were worried about liability. Like it's not, it's a no brainer. Like, and, and I say that kind of frustrated because I don't want to reveal too much, but like, you know, they did background checks on every person that worked with kids to prevent abuse. 100%.

John Dehlin [00:31:56] Yeah.

Lance Kennedy [00:31:56] Why would I want my kids being watched by someone I don't know that doesn't. I mean, no, but duh. Yeah, duh, right. We had, they, they had barcodes, for instance. So when you're like a hospital, you get a wristband. Kids would come, they get wristband, they get scanned in. Only the parents could scan them out because you don't want people stealing kids. They had, you know, multiple armed security guards that they would have off duty police officers. We had security systems, you know, I mean there were. My dad never met with women by himself. Male pastors were not allowed to, let

John Dehlin [00:32:26] alone 12 year old girls. No, behind, closed, behind closed doors.

Lance Kennedy [00:32:30] That wouldn't be even a, that wouldn't be constrable. Yeah, yeah. Because it would, it would raise questions of impropriety. And when you're a public figure. Right. A pastor, big pastor, you know, you have Robert Morris. Right. Gateway Church just finished his prison stint and Gateway was one of the big competitor churches of my dad's. What was his crime? You know, underage girls.

John Dehlin [00:32:51] Right.

Lance Kennedy [00:32:51] In relationships. So yeah, I mean they put a lot of safety protocols in place. We had waivers for everything. They had training, you know, and I really think that looking back on it now that I'm an attorney and I dealt with a lot of, you know, the legal stuff dealing with my dad's church, you know, whether it was EPA or contracts or, you know, even more mundane details, I'm very grateful that, you know, in a church that was around for 20 plus years, that there was never any allegations. But I do think it was the safety protocols that really prevented that from ever even being raised.

John Dehlin [00:33:28] It's wild that in 2026, especially after all the bad press, that the church still hasn't implemented things like no one on one interviews and no background checks

Lance Kennedy [00:33:37] for leaders or at least putting in windows in the bishop's office door. I think that, I'm not saying I disagree with you. I think they should do background checks on anyone that's been dealing with primary or nursery, at the very least in you.

John Dehlin [00:33:50] That.

Lance Kennedy [00:33:50] And that's cheap. We have the money. You can do that through a portal. You know, I mean, I do it for my employees, so that shouldn't be an issue whatsoever. But then again, you know, you know, if you're not going to redo the whole framework of how they're doing things, I mean, I think a simple fix to retrofit buildings is just have it where people can look in because then that again, you know, it doesn't necessarily address what's being discussed, but at least does change the optics of what's happening.

John Dehlin [00:34:15] Yeah. Okay, so you got an exposure to what churches can do. Right. But also as Saddleback and other types of churches came on the scene, maybe the church started changing in ways that made you start to lose interest. Do you want to talk about that?

The Seeker-Sensitive Church Growth Movement

Lance Kennedy [00:34:34] Yeah, no, I think it's critical for our interview, man. So we'll take a step back and what I'm going to phrase is called the seeker sensitive or church growth movements. And these were popular phrases that were very prominent in like the late 90s, early 2000s and evangelicalism.

Lance Kennedy [00:34:56] Really, it dates back to the 1970s. Bill Hybel, his church, Willow Creek Church. And what Bill Hybels did that was really revolutionary was he did do market research on congregates. So he went in and did a market survey. What type of church do people want, what messaging, what programs? You know, kind of like what we're talking about, rather than it being a revelatory model of this is how you're supposed to worship. Right.

Lance Kennedy [00:35:21] This is rather the opposite. We're going to go and see what consumers want and then build our church around it. So that was in the 1970s. It wasn't really, though, until the mid-1990s when Rick Warren Saddleback Church, and I think he had created his own market driven project. It was either Saddleback Sam or Steve. But what Rick Warren did was he constructed kind of his ideal target audience, you know, which you'd hear in business. He said, I want a man and a his 30s who's middle class, college educated, with a family. Why? Because all of the studies show that men are the primary drivers of religiosity with kids.

Lance Kennedy [00:36:00] And so if you can get the man to come to church, he's going to bring his wife and his family. So they targeted that type of man in Orange County. Well, in the mid-1990s, Rick Warren wrote a book called the Purpose Driven Church. And this was basically kind of the. The, I guess you could say the genesis of this broader seeker sensitive kind of movement. It also coincided with the rise of the Internet. And so you had kind of this culmination of forces in the late 1990s again in Dallas, where you had a number of these churches kind of pop up. Fellowship Church is a great example.

Lance Kennedy [00:36:35] Ed Young Jr. His father's Ed Young, senior pastor of Second Baptist Church in Houston that really adopted this model model. And the way that they did it was, again, it was a very consumer driven model of church, which was very different than what my dad's type of church had done.

John Dehlin [00:36:52] I remember roller skating at Second Baptist Church in Houston growing up.

Lance Kennedy [00:36:56] Oh, there you go, man. Yeah, I mean, and Second Baptist, a

John Dehlin [00:37:00] church with a roller skating rink.

Lance Kennedy [00:37:01] So I don't know. I don't know if you ever went into one of their services, but it was.

John Dehlin [00:37:04] No, I didn't because I was Mormon, but I didn't mind roller skating.

Lance Kennedy [00:37:08] No, no. I mean, there's always a benefit. Yeah. The services at Second Baptist were a very traditional Baptist church. If you go now, it's like a mega church. They flipped their worship. And what I'm saying is this all happened in the late 90s.

Lance Kennedy [00:37:21] Where I started seeing this as a problem, though, was actually the competition it gave my dad's church because we had congregates leave. And always they would say things like, well, you know, the Lord is leading me to serve elsewhere. It's like, no, dude, you like their coffee bar that better, you like their, their playground better. Let's just be honest. You like their programs, but it was an economy of scale issue. And also they were, you know, again, appealing to what you would consider kind of bourgeois boomer sensibilities. Sensibilities. And that's really what Drove that seeker sensitive explosion, like I said, in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Lance Kennedy [00:37:57] It had its own backlash too, later in evangelicalism. But yeah, but yeah, that started me kind of feeling like, you know, there's a problem here.

John Dehlin [00:38:06] And again, the problem in your mind in your adolescence was what?

Lance Kennedy [00:38:10] Well, the problem was one that the church was just, it was getting, it was, it was getting watered down. I couldn't get actual detailed answers from anyone. Everyone wanted to focus on the basics and it was pablum because they would act like, okay, this is all that matters. And it's like, no, you're just intellectually lazy and you don't want to ask questions.

Lance Kennedy [00:38:30] And also, in addition to that, and this is more. I think it's important for me to say this too, because it has a theological component. In 1999, my dad had a massive stroke and he lost a quarter of his brain, his right frontal lobe. And because of the theological DNA of his church, you had word of faith kind of as a part of it. Well, this raises questions of my dad's own righteousness because he's getting afflicted by a stroke now, notwithstanding the fact that all the apostles were martyred and Jesus himself was killed. Bad things happen to good people. This caused a lot of, of questions for my dad's congregation, and that really started the slow slide and decline of his own church, while these other churches were kind of on the ascendancy.

John Dehlin [00:39:12] Yeah. So that's interesting. You starting to feel like it was getting, you know, watered down. Pablum. That's a great word you write in your outline. Squishy and emotive. No theological formation. And it's funny because as I've analyzed over the past 20 years, people losing their faith in Mormonism. I had a friend named Dr. Dave Christian describe two types of faith crises. One that's more. One that's more validity based and one that's more utility based. The validity based is like, is it true or not? And the type of person that leaves over whether it's true or not cares about doctrine, cares about theology, cares about scripture and even the history. And those are the things that end up being problems for them. The utility based are the people that are like, hey, does it work for me or not? And so you were a validity evangelical Christian.

Lance Kennedy [00:40:17] Yeah, I think it was because I felt like I had moved past it spiritually in terms of what I needed at the time, and I didn't. You know, I, I think it was part partially because if I went to my dad's church, everyone worked for him. I couldn't talk to a youth pastor about my dad, you know, if problems as a teenager would have because he worked for my dad. And I also, you know, I love my parents. I didn't want to hurt their reputation, you know, so I almost was like imprisoned because no matter where I went, even if it was a school counselor or anyone, you know, they knew who my parents were.

Lance Kennedy [00:40:52] And so I, I felt like I was imprisoned by belief. I was imprisoned by the reputation side of things. You know, my parents weren't very dogmatic. They weren't, they weren't like you need to, you know, you can't think, you can't believe. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:41:07] You mentioned actually like having to hide practices that your family would engage in because they weren't acceptable by the broader church. Talk about that really quick. Sure.

Lance Kennedy [00:41:16] I mean like Halloween, right? Like Halloween and evangelicalism is one of these deals where I think it happened with Kingdom of the Cults and the Satanic panic and terror in the toy box, the 1980s. But Halloween, which is a Christian holiday, it's All Hallows Eve, right? It's a Christian holiday. Let's just get that. It always frustrated me. I'm sorry, but you couldn't carve pumpkins because a pumpkin's fine, but you put a face on it, it becomes a demon port.

Lance Kennedy [00:41:44] I mean, this is the logic. So people in my dad's church, they would dress up, but it was for fall harvest. It wasn't for Halloween. You couldn't trick or treat, but you could get candy. So my parents, I think they of course played along with that publicly, but privately we did jack O lanterns. Privately I trick or treated. They didn't want me to be a weird kid. I went to public school. I wasn't homeschooled. They did those things really. Right. I could read books, you know that

John Dehlin [00:42:14] you Harry Potter like that. My mom bought them for me.

Lance Kennedy [00:42:17] There was a book burning members of my dad's church went to for Harry Potter. But my mom bought me the books. So, you know, she grew up in the Bay Area. She was a little bit more, I think, free minded, open minded. And so I think there was some of that at play. But I didn't like having to hide it. I didn't like having to hide the fact my parents had a glass of wine on occasion. But because I felt like they were appealing to the stupidest, lowest common denominator of their church. And you know, John, I know this is like a digression, but man, I have like prayer warriors Binding demons in my dad's church because they had put up fake owls to scare off birds from porticoches.

Lance Kennedy [00:42:56] But that's a symbol of moloch. Yeah, like, like, but this is the way everything is like super spooky story, spiritualized. And so I, yeah, I think it was just spiritually shallow and didn't left me that way.

John Dehlin [00:43:09] So I'm hearing two things. One is the changes that the church was making becoming more loosey goosey, emotion based, less doctrinal, less theological. And I'm hearing sort of a dual relationship sort of problem where because your parents were kind of leaders, you just couldn't rely on the church for your own personal needs just because of the, the duality, the conflict of interest.

Lance Kennedy [00:43:34] Well, it kind of goes back to pastors. I think I mentioned this to you. As far as I know, there's two different professions that have support groups for their kids, pastors and porn stars. Right. And that tells you.

John Dehlin [00:43:47] And they're not children of podcasters and

Lance Kennedy [00:43:50] children of Mormon stories. Yeah, no, I think that that's telling because of what it does to the individual because you're in like, you know, for people to go to church and this goes for more Mormons. You know, it's, it's holy, it's sacred, it makes you feel good, you feel the spirit and then you leave and you go to your normal life. You're an accountant or whatever. Not for me. Yeah, you know, we brought in all the baggage. So yeah, I think that there was a combination of things going on. Theolog, theological preferences, personal, seeing my dad's own decline physically and, and health wise and then also seeing the competitive side of things with, you know, the consumer side with friends and stuff, going to the other churches that I thought were just, just again very shallow.

How a Pastor's Son Discovered Mormonism

John Dehlin [00:44:34] So now comes the most mind blowing part of your story from my perspective, which is like how could a son of an evangelical super church pastor in Texas. I mean, you probably haven't heard me talk about growing up in Katy, Texas, where the local Katy First Baptist Church would play the God Makers annually and like on their sign outside their church, Mormons and other cults come watch the God Makers. And then I'm going to church, I'm going to high school, you know, each week or whatever, having to defend my church and me from attacks of the church being occult and satanic and all that stuff.

John Dehlin [00:45:16] Like in my mind an evangelical would never, would not only never consider joining the Mormon Church. In my Texas mind, pretty much everyone besides the Mormons thought the Mormon church was a Cult. So how in the world did the son of a megachurch pastor start getting an interest in Mormonism during the era of the God Makers in Texas?

Lance Kennedy [00:45:41] Yeah, I mean, it's a surprising of a story to me because if you

John Dehlin [00:45:45] had, unless it's just rebellion, like teen

Lance Kennedy [00:45:47] rebellion, it could be that, I mean, how do you rebel against a pastor but by joining Mormonism? I mean, I think the only thing worse was been a Catholic. Maybe I, but I, I, I, it was surprising to me because if you had gone back to me in elementary school, like fourth grade, this girl I didn't like sat behind me. She was Mormon. So I made a cross out of pencils and stuck it in my desk. I thought Mormons were like, like, they were like Dracula or vampires. They couldn't look at crosses. You know, I mean, like, I really, like, that was like, that was the level of, of my understanding of Mormonism.

Lance Kennedy [00:46:19] But yeah, and it was Ed Deckers, the God Maker at church because, you know, it's really, I think, not as prominent now, but like 80s and 90s, you know, the LDS Church is coming into Atlanta and Dallas, these kind of traditional hotbeds of evangelicalism, and they're building temples. And so of course evangelicals are getting frightened by this new invasion of their home turf.

John Dehlin [00:46:42] And so we did build a Dallas temple.

Lance Kennedy [00:46:45] We did. It's, it's, it needs to be revamped church. If you're watching this, which they probably are, then it needs to be definitely revamped. It's quite dated. But, but that being said. Yeah, I mean, it was, it was, that's what set it off. And then you would have, like you said in Sunday school at Second Baptist or other places, you would have Kingdom of the Cults or you would have, you know, today we're going to learn about, you know, know this, you know, Islam and we're going to learn how to do apologetics. You know, this is kind of a standard Sunday school thing. Well, Mormonism was one of them.

Lance Kennedy [00:47:15] And we watched the God Makers and I thought it was hilarious. My friends and I just cracked up the whole time because it was like watching a Hanna Barbera cartoon. Yogi Bear for sure. But it's like, and God came down and had celestial sex with Mary. And we just, you know, eighth graders, we just thought this is like awesome and hilarious. Well, that I think is really what started Elise least like piquing some interest of being like, hey, like, this is kind of interesting. I never heard this stuff. I need to know more.

John Dehlin [00:47:40] That's so funny. We Need a thumbnail. That the God Makers made me join Mormonism.

Lance Kennedy [00:47:45] It did.

John Dehlin [00:47:45] Did you know I interviewed Ed Decker on Mormon Stories?

Lance Kennedy [00:47:48] I think I've watched it.

John Dehlin [00:47:49] Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, okay, keep going.

Lance Kennedy [00:47:50] This is, yeah, I mean, but it's, it's like, it's a true documentary and it's also ridiculous.

John Dehlin [00:47:55] Like, true in what way?

Lance Kennedy [00:47:57] Like, I mean, it's like, it's, it's,

John Dehlin [00:47:58] it's pretty accurate, right?

Lance Kennedy [00:47:59] It's accurate in that sense. Like it's accurate, but, but it's. Of course, you know, you could, you can do that to communion. It's, it's cannibalism. Right. Like blood and, you know, breath a body and blood. You can, what I'm saying is you can always editorialize something.

John Dehlin [00:48:12] It's slanted, but it's fact based. Yes, I think.

Lance Kennedy [00:48:14] Correct. I don't disagree. I don't disagree. And as I've learned more about Mormonism, it's, it's actually more accurate. But yeah, that started it. And then, you know, really, I think the culmination was two other things. I went over to a friend's house who was LDS us, and they had their quads on their coffee tables or milk table or whatever you want to call it. Like, you know, I don't have no coffee, but they had their, you know, their standard works. And I was like, there's more to this in the Book of Mormon. You know, like there's other scriptures. And so what did I do? I went and bought my own set at 16 of, you know, the Mormon scriptures and I started reading it and yeah, that's kind of where, where it kind of kicked off for me.

John Dehlin [00:48:57] Okay. So, yeah, how do you get to the point where you're asking your parents if you can join the Mormon Church?

Lance Kennedy [00:49:04] Yeah, so. So I had tried to go to a lot of different churches. I would, I would actually sneak out of my dad's church to go to other churches. And we're not talking about, you know, Mormon, we're talking about like Bible churches and stuff. Because I was so craving something that was, you know, again, spiritual and, and, you know, not, not, not tied to my dad's income, let's put it that way, and where we were worried. So, you know, I was already really looking and when I got my driver's license, I'm driving around Dallas, all over, you know, the city, going to, and this is before, of course, Google Maps, you know, I'd have printed maps, I'd print out and go to all these different religious sites.

Lance Kennedy [00:49:43] Well, of course, you Know, you have the temple in Dallas. And it just so happened that I got my first job at a restaurant right at Preston and Forest, down by the temple. And Reed Moon, who owns Moon's Rare Books, that's where he actually had his original bookstore, was in Dallas. And so I became good friends with Reed at that time in the early 2000s. And, you know, after work, I'd go by the temple and sit in the parking lot and, you know, listen to whatever I could find and read whatever I could find, and kind of started fantasizing and, you know, about joining the church and what that meant for me.

John Dehlin [00:50:21] And how excited were your parents about that?

Lance Kennedy [00:50:24] Well, I didn't really tell them, like, straight up, like, I'm joining. What happened was it was a kind of a slow process. I. The same friends that I saw the quad at their house invited me to church. My mom made the deal that my friend Clint had to come to my dad's, you know, our church, too. So I couldn't just go to theirs.

Lance Kennedy [00:50:43] But, man, when I went to that first sacrament meeting, I was hooked. I was like, this is what I want. Because it was very, like, structured, you know, and I was, you know, I was a high school boy.

Lance Kennedy [00:50:55] And I'm seeing these kids, you know, they're doing stuff with communion and they're priesthood holders and they have titles and offices and they're Boy Scouts, which I always wanted to be and never could be. And I was just really hooked. And so I started trying to figure a way to get baptized, but the missionaries told me I couldn't get baptized without my parents permission. And so I kind of broached the topic and was promptly kicked out of my house.

Kicked Out of Home for Pursuing Conversion

John Dehlin [00:51:20] So you were kicked out of your house for simply asking your parents if you could convert? And what age was this?

Lance Kennedy [00:51:26] I was probably like, 17 or 18. And, you know, I mean, I don't want to say, like, because again, my mom's probably watching this and she's like, no, I never did that. Yeah, you did, Mom. But because I. Because what happened was it was kind of a culmination of things, but I came home and my stuff was on my front porch, you know, like a bag packed for me. So I went and stayed with my aunt and my parents, of course, next day, invited me back in. Yeah, they weren't really. They were trying to do it to pressure me. It did the job, though. It kept me away from, you know, at least formally joining the church or trying to again until I had the opportunity.

John Dehlin [00:52:01] And so what happened in between you backing off and then actually joining.

Lance Kennedy [00:52:07] It was only really a couple years. I went to college. I went to UT Austin. Austin and Longhorns.

John Dehlin [00:52:11] Go Longhorns.

Lance Kennedy [00:52:11] Hook them.

John Dehlin [00:52:12] Hook them.

Lance Kennedy [00:52:12] Yep.

John Dehlin [00:52:13] And my friend Jason's an Aggie and he's going to be so mad I just said hook him.

Lance Kennedy [00:52:17] I, you're, yeah, I'm sorry, man.

John Dehlin [00:52:19] He would say gigam.

Lance Kennedy [00:52:20] Well, well, John is wise. He's a very wise guy. He's not within arm's reach, but he's close. Yeah. You know, it was, it was really interesting. I, I, I finally had the opportunity. I, I was at UT Austin, didn't feel actually safe enough, even though I was in the same state but different city of getting baptized. So I was working on Capitol Hill as an intern for a senator. And that's where I met the missionaries and elders, Trup and Waldrop, still friends with them, but it was funny because they tried to give me the lessons, but I knew more than they did. So we got permission and I got baptized in Chevy Chase, Maryland. And Harry Reid was there.

John Dehlin [00:53:04] Yeah. So my wife Margi, her family converted in the Potomac area, so very close to Chevy Chase. But that's a great. If you're going to join the Mormon Church, kind of that Maryland, Virginia Beltway kind of area. These are intellectual Harvard Sunstone type Mormons that would be very intellectual, but also very devout and even very strong supportive.

Lance Kennedy [00:53:30] I, that's, yeah, I, I didn't, I was in a YSA ward and I was there briefly.

John Dehlin [00:53:34] Okay.

Lance Kennedy [00:53:34] But, but like I said, Harry Reid, like, so I say Harry Reid was there. He, he happened to be attending a ward and was at my baptism. I always thought that was pretty cool.

John Dehlin [00:53:42] Those who don't know, he was U.S. senate Majority Leader.

Lance Kennedy [00:53:45] Yeah. Senator from Nevada.

John Dehlin [00:53:46] Yeah.

Lance Kennedy [00:53:47] Portrayed in casino, by the way.

John Dehlin [00:53:49] Yeah.

Lance Kennedy [00:53:50] With Al Pacino or no, no, Robert Dairo.

John Dehlin [00:53:52] Sorry.

Lance Kennedy [00:53:53] But yeah, so I, I got baptized. It was a great ward, like you mention, though.

What Drew Lance to Mormon Doctrine and Practice

John Dehlin [00:53:57] And let me ask, what were some of the most distinctive doctrinal or theological or practice elements of Mormonism that were really compelling to you?

Lance Kennedy [00:54:08] You know, it's really in preparation for coming on here because I was really kind of wrestling with some of these questions, like what was the driving force? And of course, you know, I had mentioned it was highly stable, highly organized and not chaotic and those.

John Dehlin [00:54:23] So the structure.

Lance Kennedy [00:54:24] The structure was very appealing to me because I didn't have that at my dad's church. The fact that it was like very uniform. Like the correlation was a correlation as

John Dehlin [00:54:33] a feature, not a bug as a

Lance Kennedy [00:54:35] As a feature, not a bug. And it is a bug in many ways. And it's also a feature which is, you know, you know what you're getting. And I liked that. I liked how systematized it was. I liked how everything was very clear and delineated.

Lance Kennedy [00:54:47] The boys had a role. You know, I mean this was like, like this spoke to me and granted like some of this is personality driven, you know, military and so forth, but like at the same time I liked it and it was the opposite of what I experienced with my, my dad's church. But it's, you know, what I've kind of figured theologically was I had a very 19th century Mormon conversion because the same questions that Protestants were asking themselves in the burned over district that would have been appealing to them were appealing to me me, which was things like infant baptism and predestination and free will and church governance and what are the role of apostles today?

Lance Kennedy [00:55:25] Because my, like my dad was considered an apostle. Right. And a prophet. But like that's a Pentecostal definition. Like what does that even mean? So you know, I, I, I think for your purposes though, it's interesting, like what drew me to the church were the same questions that the original members of the church were asking and.

John Dehlin [00:55:42] Right. Himself.

Lance Kennedy [00:55:43] Well, because those were. Yeah, clearly. Because these are the questions Protestants ask themselves.

John Dehlin [00:55:46] Infant baptism, authority, who has authority?

Lance Kennedy [00:55:50] Because Protestantism there is no authority. I, I think and I, you know, again, the way I kind of can, you know, at least can view some of the, the things that the restoration did was actually dialed back the Reformation, it reinstituted sacraments, it reinstituted a sacerdotal priesthood. Right. I mean it did a lot of the things that Protestants got rid of it re added them back into it. But it also answered those questions as you were saying that, that Protestants still ask themselves because they're not clear in Scripture. And this is why the Book of Mormon conveniently or not, answers those questions.

John Dehlin [00:56:22] Yeah. But then also in addition to the questions that answered and the structure provided, you knew a lot of the historical, theological, doctrinal baggage or challenges with the church more than the missionaries or even members, you know, into, into which you joined the church. Correct.

Lance Kennedy [00:56:45] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:56:46] I mean those things weren't obstacles to you?

Lance Kennedy [00:56:48] Well, this is right. At the same time Mormon Stories was coming online and so there was 2005.

John Dehlin [00:56:52] Ish.

Lance Kennedy [00:56:53] Yeah, it was seven when I was baptized, but five when I was really actively. And I told you, I think I started listening to y' all when you started.

John Dehlin [00:56:59] So before you joined the church, you were listening to Mormon stories?

Lance Kennedy [00:57:03] I believe so, yeah. Because I had your podcast downloaded on my ipod. Yeah, yeah, but it was. It was great because. Because I, like, you know, when I got baptized, they put me in gospel principles when they actually had that. And I was like, guys, like, I don't really want to hear this. I want to know about, like, the

John Dehlin [00:57:17] Jews, because that's Pablo. Talk about Pablo.

Lance Kennedy [00:57:20] Yeah, but it's meant for, like, a really basic level person. And I'm not. Look, I'm not patting myself on the back for good or bad. I just obsessed about this stuff because I was kind of crazy. I mean, like, you know, religion was everything to me. It was just. It permeated again, everything, Every possible dynamic of my life. So I spent a lot of time with it. And so, you know, when I got into the church, I'm like, I want to hear about the gods. I want to hear about infinite regress of gods. Is there a ground of being? Like, is there some source that God comes from? Or does God have a father or Adam God? Or let's talk about all this stuff and never.

John Dehlin [00:57:53] Or theosis can we become gods.

Lance Kennedy [00:57:55] Yeah, but that soft, soft Theosis is orthodox, which is kind of where we're headed now. But yeah, all the hot button topics you're not supposed to talk about on sacrament meeting, and I got in trouble for talking about before. But the point is those are the questions I wanted answered. And, yeah, I just wasn't able to really talk about them much.

John Dehlin [00:58:16] Okay, we'll get to that. But really quickly, did you ever stop to think about Book of Mormon historicity, Golden Plates, Native Americans, that type of stuff?

Lance Kennedy [00:58:26] I did. Did, yeah. Later.

John Dehlin [00:58:28] Not before baptism.

Lance Kennedy [00:58:29] No. Because when I first got baptized, I had bought a book on the Mesoamerican theory of where the Book of Mormon and I had already been primed somewhat for this because when we went on mission trips to Mexico, and not Mormon missionary, but talking about my dad's church, we would get pointed out, see, there's a cross on there. There must have been a missionary. Like, there was already kind of like, it wasn't a Mormon story, but it was kind of like not Mormon story in your podcast, but like a tale.

Lance Kennedy [00:58:55] Evangelicals were kind of telling themselves fables of pre Columbian, you know, missionizing. So I kind of had already got in my head. Maybe that's true. What I would say, though, was, and this may be important because, like, I know, like, we could talk about every historicity issue about Book of Abraham or whatever. It doesn't Matter. We can talk about it. And. And I probably agree with you on a lot of them because of the way I'd been raised in religion, though I have a very naturalistic view of religion and pastors and who they are. So, like, the idea that, like, people needed to be perfect or events had to be perfect for me, I give a lot more grace to it.

Lance Kennedy [00:59:34] And also, you know, because like, I saw my dad. He's. He's a human, you know, like Larry Lee, right. Got taken out public. National TV is my godfather is a name in my family. My other godfather, John Jacobs, the power team, they were based out of my dad's church.

Lance Kennedy [00:59:50] They were these kind of feats of strength kind of guys. He had a falling out Charisma Magazine 2000 too. So, like, I was just surrounded by this stuff and scandal and problems. And so for me it was like, this is just part of church.

John Dehlin [01:00:03] So did you know about Joseph's polygamy and polyandry before he got baptized?

Lance Kennedy [01:00:06] I knew about the polygamy, yeah. I didn't know.

John Dehlin [01:00:09] Did you think of that as inspired by God or just an example of Joseph's.

Lance Kennedy [01:00:13] I don't really care.

John Dehlin [01:00:13] Feet of clay.

Lance Kennedy [01:00:14] I mean, like, I could argue it both ways. Was this a cover up for Fanny Alger or was it inspired? It doesn't bother me because again, I was reading the same Bible where patriarchs were. Were polygamous. The only difference was it's Victorian America and it seems weird.

John Dehlin [01:00:28] And then the Masonic stuff with the temple ceremony and did you know about that and did that bug you?

Lance Kennedy [01:00:35] It didn't bug me, incidentally. I actually was in doubt after I became a Mason. So that's another aside. Yeah, yeah, I saw that, but I did know. But that didn't bug me either because again, the way I viewed it was probably a little bit more of the catalyst theory. I was already kind of thinking this way, like, it doesn't have to be an ancient ritual. It could be something else. I'm not saying that's what I believe now. It probably is how reason can be used. Instrumental reason can be used to justify things. But I did know about it. It didn't bother me.

John Dehlin [01:01:07] No, it makes total sense that seeing a church formed and grown from close up as a kid, you're going to know that. You're going to know what it's like to start a church and to build a church and to grow a church, and you're going to have a more realistic view of what happens.

Lance Kennedy [01:01:25] Yeah, and that partially helps me, but that's what gets me in trouble because, like, things that I just make total sense to me where things came from or what went down to cause certain things. You know, you talk to a rank and file member and they just can't see it again because they just don't have the context. It's out of their. They can't fathom that this could be the case, in other words.

John Dehlin [01:01:44] So initially you joined the church and kept it secret from your parents, is that right? Right. It.

Lance Kennedy [01:01:49] It lasted for a couple months, and then there was a member of their church who happened to be my Sunday school teacher, who showed me the God Makers, who saw something on a Facebook page post and he reported it. And so I was on a date. I was very happy. It was a YSA date, you know, and like, you know, and I get a call from my dad, basically tell me he's going to cut me off. And that soured the date a little bit. He didn't cut me off, but it did. This was right after baptism. It caused me to go. Go inactive, at least for a while.

John Dehlin [01:02:23] So that was 2007 when you joined?

Lance Kennedy [01:02:25] Yeah, yeah. Ish.

Early Church Experiences and Going Inactive

John Dehlin [01:02:26] And you said within a short amount of time, you went inactive for about a year.

Lance Kennedy [01:02:30] A year later.

John Dehlin [01:02:31] Yeah, for about 10 years.

Lance Kennedy [01:02:33] Not 10. It was about five years.

John Dehlin [01:02:36] And were there other elements that contributed to you going inactive?

Lance Kennedy [01:02:40] Culture 100.

John Dehlin [01:02:41] What do you mean?

Lance Kennedy [01:02:43] Oh, man. This is kind of where like, like, you know, you grew up in Texas and you live in Utah. They're very different places.

John Dehlin [01:02:49] Yeah, but, but like, I agree from what you wrote in your outline that my Katie Ward was sort of a Utah microcosm.

Lance Kennedy [01:02:56] It is.

John Dehlin [01:02:56] It's an upstairs in Katy, Texas.

Lance Kennedy [01:02:58] Yeah, you go to, you go to,

John Dehlin [01:02:59] like, I don't have an accent. Right. I grew up in Texas, but that's because I was in a Mormon bubble where everyone around me was from Utah. Yeah.

Lance Kennedy [01:03:05] And this cuts both ways, too. It's one of the reasons why there's so much cohesion in the church.

John Dehlin [01:03:09] Yeah.

Lance Kennedy [01:03:10] But it's also like that new study Jeff Strong's book talks about. Torn 40% the culture. It's like, yeah, it sucks. Like there's no other way for me to say it.

John Dehlin [01:03:20] Why does Mormon culture, Utah, Mormon culture suck from someone who grew up in Texas?

Lance Kennedy [01:03:25] I mean, this is probably its own podcast. I would say it's. I'm gonna get like, without, you know, ticking off all your listeners or people that are from Utah. Like, I'm, I'm. I'm a licensed attorney in Utah. I'm inactive. So no one can get mad at me for that right now.

John Dehlin [01:03:38] Inactive as an attorney in Utah.

Lance Kennedy [01:03:40] In Utah, yeah. Inactive attorney, by the way.

John Dehlin [01:03:42] You don't have to. To diss anything now. I mean, back then, what were the elements of Mormon Utah. Mormon culture in Texas?

Lance Kennedy [01:03:48] They were just childish, man. Like, I'm. I'm 19, you know, I had joined a college fraternity. You know, I'd grown up in public school. You know, I'm pretty worldly. And then like, we're going to the YSA ward and they're wanting me to do pillow fights, and I'm just like, dude, like, what did I sign up for? I didn't go back to fourth grade, but that's the way they all were. They were like these super nice, earnest guys that you couldn't say anything bad about, but they were like, you know, in terms of.

Lance Kennedy [01:04:13] And this is kind of a broader cultural critique. It's like in certain spheres, they're. They were badasses. You know what I mean? Like, they could be in law school, top of the class, editor of the law review. And then.

Lance Kennedy [01:04:25] But in terms of, like, social maturity and like, what, like a normal 19, 20, 25 year old would do. They're like a 10 year old.

John Dehlin [01:04:33] No. I remember working for Bain in Dallas after, you know, graduating, I didn't know how to go to a bar. Like, I'd never tried alcohol, but I didn't even know what to do at a bar. Like, there's an infantilization 100 until you're married.

Lance Kennedy [01:04:48] Until you're married.

John Dehlin [01:04:48] Even after.

Lance Kennedy [01:04:49] Well, even after married. But I'm saying, particularly with YSAs.

John Dehlin [01:04:52] Yeah.

Lance Kennedy [01:04:53] Now that YSA award, Capital Ward in Austin's a great YSA award. And this goes in a broader critique of YSAs, and like, they were kind of in certain cases and others they don't. But yeah, I would say the culture was just.

John Dehlin [01:05:03] It was.

Lance Kennedy [01:05:04] That was part of it.

John Dehlin [01:05:05] Cultured and fantasized. It was.

Lance Kennedy [01:05:07] You couldn't talk about, again, anything. I.

John Dehlin [01:05:09] Shallow.

Lance Kennedy [01:05:10] Correct. Anything interesting, because the literal. The canned answer was that's deep doctrine. And they would kind of laugh and, like, not want to talk about it.

John Dehlin [01:05:17] Milk before meat, but never the meat.

Lance Kennedy [01:05:19] Never meat. Just always the talk about that. And then I think there was also. I don't know. I mean, it was. Again, I think those were the primary

John Dehlin [01:05:29] ones you mentioned a friend getting disciplined.

Lance Kennedy [01:05:31] Yeah, my buddy, a groomsman in my wedding.

John Dehlin [01:05:35] So my.

Lance Kennedy [01:05:36] My buddy Eric, he grew up in a very traumatic household in Nacogdoches. His parents were polygamous but they weren't Mormon. It was like a weird hippie kind of commune. Drug dealers finds the church, joins, goes on a mission to Brazil. The church is his bedrock. Comes back home, home. Sleeps with his girlfriend one time, confesses it, gets excommunicated. And our bishop strung him along, he says, seven years. That's what my buddy told me. And I believe it because he wasn't allowed to get a calling. I mean, he was drugged through the ringer. And I know him well enough, like he's one of my close personal friends to know that he wasn't embellishing about, like, the.

Lance Kennedy [01:06:14] The extent of his misdeed. And he confessed it, but I just. Yeah, I just saw that it was, like a little aggressive, man, for, you know, also, that was another thing, like sexual sin being the worst thing after murder. Yeah. I'm pretty sure I can come up with some other. Other sins that are probably worse. Child abuse, I mean, just for one.

John Dehlin [01:06:35] Torture. Yeah. Massive fraud.

Lance Kennedy [01:06:38] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:06:40] Okay. So did you consider a mission?

Lance Kennedy [01:06:44] No.

John Dehlin [01:06:46] And this.

Lance Kennedy [01:06:46] So. So this was a point of. Of contention, too. So I didn't. I was mission age. And you. I just couldn't because it was. It would have scandalized my dad and I. And I really didn't want to hurt his congregation any more than it had been hurt.

Lance Kennedy [01:07:06] But this was a consistent frustration I had with the church, and I want to say the church with priesthood leaders, because you would go to them and want to talk to them about a problem or some issue or want to talk about anything. And primarily it was because. Because I was looking to talk to him about my dad and his church and just upbringing, because I had never talked about this stuff with anyone. The immediate response was always, well, have you considered a mission? Because it was like, that was the panacea.

Lance Kennedy [01:07:34] All your problems, all your frustrations, everything. Just go on a mission. Everything will be okay. That's what your patriarchal blessing says. You're going to be okay. I'm like, no, y' all don't understand. My dad was scandalized because he had a stroke, which he couldn't control.

Lance Kennedy [01:07:47] The Bible says if a pastor's son brings him into disrepute, he no longer can hold his office. And me joining what amounts to a heretical cult would constitute that. Don't you get that? And it would go one ear and not the other.

John Dehlin [01:08:01] So the pastoral care wasn't great for you?

Lance Kennedy [01:08:05] It's never been great. I would say, within the LDS Church, fantastic administrators. Right? I mean, like, they're just as truthful, like these Guys like, they are going to pick that, you know, Ernst and Young accountant or the dentist, you know, or the, these are the holy professions, right? Lawyer, dentist, accountant, maybe doctor. But you know, those guys, they're gonna, you know, you get your, your IP attorney, he's going to be an incredible. And granted, I have a great bishop right now who is pastoral and he is an IP attorney.

John Dehlin [01:08:35] But by the way, I have an IP attorney right now.

Lance Kennedy [01:08:38] I bet you do. And my wife, wife is an IP attorney. So. Yeah, like, like I would just say though that they were great administrators. They could, you know, they could, they could report tithing. You know, they could check the boxes, they could do the metrics, they could run those, the. But, but when it came down to actual pastoral care, you know, I, I don't really think of accountants as having great bedside manner. But you know, that's what most bishops kind of fall into is, you know, more of an administrative function. And, and this is primarily one of the reasons why I think there was that push for a time for LDS counselors because they really were seeing like we, we're, we have a massive deficit in pastoral care.

Lance Kennedy [01:09:16] It's kind of what ministering or home teaching was supposed to be for. It doesn't really work because people don't want some rando coming by their house. They want to talk to their, their leader and a lot of times they're just not equipped or trained to do that.

John Dehlin [01:09:27] So you didn't feel great things during your first year or two of membership?

Lance Kennedy [01:09:34] It was mixed. Yeah, it was mixed. It was, it was good in the sense. I felt a lot of community. I felt, you know, there was people, they cared about me. I mean, like, you know, I'll give Mormons this, like they're truly nice people. Like, there's not, it's not a. Now, I think some of it's a facade. Right. And a defense mechanism.

John Dehlin [01:09:51] Right.

Lance Kennedy [01:09:51] Psychological defense mechanism. But they're truly nice people. Come change your tire at 2 in the morning. I mean, like, this is, these are Mormons.

John Dehlin [01:09:56] Help you move, help you move.

Lance Kennedy [01:09:58] I mean, that's the only thing Elders corps do do, is move people.

John Dehlin [01:10:00] But, but casseroles, you know.

Lance Kennedy [01:10:02] Yeah, yeah, exactly. Funeral potatoes and jello. All these foods I never had before. Yeah. But I think the pastoral care was lacking and you know, you just, you couldn't again have any real dialogue with anyone about anything meaningful. It was really, it just had to be nice. It had to be real, you know, earnest and kind and touchy feely. And if you stayed in that that bandwidth, that frequency, you're golden. But you go into any type of negativity or darkness or depth. Or depth.

John Dehlin [01:10:33] Yeah.

Lance Kennedy [01:10:33] Which is dark sometimes. Yeah. You get shut down. And that includes, again, current people I deal with.

John Dehlin [01:10:41] Yeah. You knew more about Mormon doctrine and theology and history before you joined than most 40, 56 year old Mormons know today.

Lance Kennedy [01:10:52] Yeah, yeah, 100%. I mean, again, and John, I say this because like, your listeners are probably like this guy's Pat himself. I really don't mean that, but it's true. Like, I didn't want to join the church and not know what I was getting into.

John Dehlin [01:11:04] Yeah, no, don't apologize. Like, I was just realizing I grew up hearing about the God Makers in my hometown in Texas in the 80s. I did not watch the God Makers until the late 2000, 2000 teens myself.

Lance Kennedy [01:11:18] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:11:19] Because I, I had no way to watch it and I was probably at some level afraid. So even I, John de Lynn, years after starting Mormon Stories, hadn't watched the God Makers yet. Well, I mean, you watched it before you got baptized.

Lance Kennedy [01:11:32] I did. And that, but that, again, that, that, that really started an investigative process. But there weren't a lot of resources. Why I was really grateful. I found Mormon Stories and there was Mormon Matters, I think at the time too. There were other podcasts. There was, you know, these were in Reid Moon's bookstore. Reid, he's still a close friend of mine. He moved to Provo. He's TikTok famous now, but, you know, he would give me books like Quest for Empire. I was really curious about Joseph's machinations for a kingdom. Which Texas was the original location.

John Dehlin [01:12:01] That's right before Utah.

Lance Kennedy [01:12:02] Yeah, sorry, Utahns. Zion is Texas. We knew that. Texans know it's the promised land. But yeah, no, I, I was just fascinated by it. And so I, I, I had to though, find these alternative places because I just couldn't, I couldn't find them in my ward.

John Dehlin [01:12:15] Yeah. So you, you leave the church in what, 2008 is you stop attending?

Lance Kennedy [01:12:21] Yeah, basically.

John Dehlin [01:12:22] And then how many years were you inactive?

Lance Kennedy [01:12:24] Five years. Got into law school. I was in towards the end of law school.

John Dehlin [01:12:28] Where?

Lance Kennedy [01:12:29] Smu.

John Dehlin [01:12:30] So Mustangs.

Lance Kennedy [01:12:31] Mustangs.

John Dehlin [01:12:31] Pony. You went from Longhorn to Mustang?

Lance Kennedy [01:12:34] Yep.

John Dehlin [01:12:34] And then where did you stop?

Lance Kennedy [01:12:35] Into Boston.

John Dehlin [01:12:35] What? Yeah.

Lance Kennedy [01:12:36] And then to Boston.

John Dehlin [01:12:37] Okay.

Lance Kennedy [01:12:37] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:12:38] Okay. And so that takes you to 2012 or 13. What were those years like of having no church and being east coast?

Lance Kennedy [01:12:52] Well, I wasn't, I was east.

John Dehlin [01:12:54] I went to or Baptist. SMU's Methodist, I guess. Methodist.

Lance Kennedy [01:12:57] Methodist Methodist, incidentally. I mean, SMU is a great school, but, like, you know, the fact it's Methodist is, like, incidental to the school. It's nominally. It's not like the connection with byu.

John Dehlin [01:13:10] It's pretty secular.

Lance Kennedy [01:13:11] It is very secular, yeah. Like, the bishops have very little control over smu. Yeah. The interim years, though, were. I think it was somewhat of my own pilgrimage and journeying. Dark night of the soul. Soul seeking. Some of that kept going after I re. But this is kind of where I became a Mason. This is where I.

John Dehlin [01:13:33] Seeking community and structure.

Lance Kennedy [01:13:35] Yeah, I did. It was one of the very first things I did when I went to UT was I joined University Lodge, founded 1922 on campus. And I've stayed involved. I've, you know, I'm still involved to this day in Freemasonry and some at the Grand Lodge level and, you know, did that. I. I, you know, really deeply investigated the Western esoteric tradition and other world religions because I was trying to satisfy that same urge that I was finding.

John Dehlin [01:14:04] You became a seeker.

Lance Kennedy [01:14:06] I did, yeah. I became a seeker. I'd already been a seeker, but I think it was abortive because I. I just, you know, there were so many. I would say this. The. The priesthood leaders made it very easy for me to go inactive.

John Dehlin [01:14:18] Mormon priesthood.

Lance Kennedy [01:14:19] Yeah. Because I. Again, what was going on with my parents was gonna happen no matter what in terms of their frustration at me being Mormon. But had the priesthood leaders been a little bit more, again, pastoral. We use that word. But also just, I think, empathetic and not, you know, I would have probably stayed active. But that really started me, like, you know, dark night of the soul. Like, where am I going? What do I do? But it wasn't really until 2013, I just had a moment. I woke up and I just really wanted to go back. And I think it had crystallized in my mind, you know, more of the utilitarian side of things, but also that Mormonism was the best fit model for me in many ways. I'm an American. I'm as ancestors on the Mayflower. Right. Like, you know, I don't get any more American than that. What's more American than Mormonism?

John Dehlin [01:15:08] Few things. Few things.

Lance Kennedy [01:15:09] Right.

John Dehlin [01:15:09] I mean, like, churches.

Lance Kennedy [01:15:10] Well, Pentecostalism.

John Dehlin [01:15:11] Right.

Lance Kennedy [01:15:12] I mean, Nation of Islam, like, you know, I couldn't join one, I already joined the other. So therefore Mormonism was it. Yeah. But it gave me an identity. I was a Mormon. Right. That word meant a lot to me because it's an. It's an ethnic term. Right. You're joining a quasi ethnic group. You know, Mormons like to think of themselves as distinctive or generic white people, but they're, they're definitely not. They're kind of their own cast. And so it just, and it also had. Based on my own propensity and desires for ritual and masonic ritual and things like that ceremony, it gave me that high church aspect as well as the low church. So I felt like Mormonism was the best of all worlds.

Reactivation, Marriage, and Settling in Texas

John Dehlin [01:15:53] So where were you when you reactivated?

Lance Kennedy [01:15:55] In Dallas, in Frisco.

John Dehlin [01:15:56] Okay.

Lance Kennedy [01:15:57] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:15:57] So you singles ward or.

Lance Kennedy [01:15:59] I started as singles ward and quickly was like, nah, I'm just going to go to a family ward. I couldn't, couldn't handle it.

John Dehlin [01:16:04] Okay.

Lance Kennedy [01:16:05] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:16:06] And how'd you meet your wife? If that's the next step.

Lance Kennedy [01:16:08] Yeah, it was. And I'll say this about the YSA thing because I think it's, it's interesting.

John Dehlin [01:16:13] Yeah.

Lance Kennedy [01:16:13] I think, you know, again, church leaders may be watching this. Probably are spying on you, John. YSA words, they serve a purpose, but probably not the purpose that we're told it's. The purpose is you're going to meet your spouse. Now people do do that. My sister in law met hers there. I mean it happens. The primary purpose in my opinion is to give leadership opportunities to people who never would get one. Like no 20 year old's going to be a clerk or an elders quorum president. Right. So you can give people these opportunities, but they're the, they're, they're terrible. Where you don't have enough concentration of singles.

Lance Kennedy [01:16:44] So like in Austin there was enough because the YSA award at UT was UT students and tech bros and everyone, you know, so it's a big couple hundred member YSA award. You have critical mass, but when you're in Dallas you're dealing with townies. You're dealing with people who never left town. You're dealing with, you know, just, and I'm not trying to, you know, talk down about them, but my point was, is like that wasn't your, your Beltway war.

John Dehlin [01:17:12] No. Let's face it, you want enough women to date, to choose from.

Lance Kennedy [01:17:16] Well, but Bishops would tell you, well, we got girls like what's the problem?

John Dehlin [01:17:19] And you're like, bro, it was like five.

Lance Kennedy [01:17:21] Yeah. And they weren't, they weren't ones I wanted to date.

John Dehlin [01:17:24] Yeah, yeah.

Lance Kennedy [01:17:25] I'm in Dallas. Right. Like Emmett sm, you. There's, there is not a shortage of attractive people. Let's just be honest, just attractive Mormons. Just no attractive Mormons. Yeah. So, so I went to a, a family ward, had a much better experience. It was in Frisco where I'd moved to just start part of my career. And that was like a beltway ward. It was, you know, everyone was a McKinsey consultant or vice president of FC

John Dehlin [01:17:50] Dallas or there had to be Bane people there. I was in the band office.

Lance Kennedy [01:17:54] They're probably there were Bane and you know, BCG or whatever, they're guaranteed were. But I always just use McKenzie as like the, the generic, the consultancy consultant bros. I do have my on cloud shoes on, so I kind of fit in. No Patagonia.

John Dehlin [01:18:09] Nice.

Lance Kennedy [01:18:10] But yeah, I, I, I did that and decided, you know, I really wanted to marry in the church. I, I, you know, had dated different religious backgrounds and I wanted someone who wanted a family, wanted kids, also had similar values to me. And again from a utilitarian perspective. Mormonism checked all the boxes and it just so happened by this point, this was 2018, Mutual came online Mormon tender. And within a week I had matched with my wife who is an attorney in LA working in entertainment in Beverly Hills. And we met like a month later and we're married the next year.

John Dehlin [01:18:51] This is eight years ago.

Lance Kennedy [01:18:53] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:18:53] That's crazy. Yeah, Fascinating. Okay, so temple married by 2018. 2019.

Lance Kennedy [01:19:01] 2019. August 20th.

John Dehlin [01:19:03] Which temple?

Lance Kennedy [01:19:04] San Anton.

John Dehlin [01:19:05] What date?

Lance Kennedy [01:19:07] What date? August 19th. I should know this. My wife will get mad. August 19th of 2019.

John Dehlin [01:19:12] I stopped you because my birthday is the 20th. August 20th. So. Okay, okay. And you said the LA.

Lance Kennedy [01:19:17] No, Salt Lake or not Salt Lake City. San Antonio Temple.

John Dehlin [01:19:20] San Antonio Temple.

Lance Kennedy [01:19:21] Yeah. And that had had a, you know, the reason we chose San Antonio is one between it and Dallas is the aesthetic one. Like Dallas, like it's gray clad marble. They need to update. Was. It was also I went to the open house with my grandparents when it was an open house before I was a member. So that was in 2003 or 4. Went to that, we drove down there for, for my cousin's graduation and went to the open house. I did, you know, baptism for the dead for the first time at that temple. Elder Holland put his hand on my head at that temple and so it meant a lot to me. And so we, we went and had our ceiling there and it was, it was a great experience.

John Dehlin [01:19:59] Plus wemby.

Lance Kennedy [01:20:00] Wemby.

John Dehlin [01:20:01] Yeah. Although it was pre Wemby.

Lance Kennedy [01:20:02] Pre wimby.

John Dehlin [01:20:04] That was just an NBA reference I had to make.

Lance Kennedy [01:20:06] Yeah, that's true.

John Dehlin [01:20:07] Yeah. Go Spurs, Go Knicks. Are you rooting for the spurs or the Knicks?

Lance Kennedy [01:20:11] Are You, I'll go for the spurs, but I'm not a basketball fan, man.

John Dehlin [01:20:13] Okay, okay.

Lance Kennedy [01:20:13] What is it with Utah and basketball

John Dehlin [01:20:15] is like, it's just my son, my son got into it, so Margi and I. Well, you're tall.

Lance Kennedy [01:20:18] You're tall.

John Dehlin [01:20:19] But like, I played high school.

Lance Kennedy [01:20:20] But what I'm saying is, like, Utahns are like, it's like the only white guys I know that are obsessed with basketball. It's like in the least jazzy state has the jazz, you know.

John Dehlin [01:20:30] Sorry. I digressed. Okay. It's okay. Okay. So temple marriage and your. So, yeah. So you jump on the Mormon train really quickly. You talk about eventually some of your frustrations are going to be the watering down of the temple ceremony.

Lance Kennedy [01:20:52] Yeah, 100.

John Dehlin [01:20:53] But you attended post watering down of the temple ceremony. Because when I attended post 19. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I, I attended in 1988. Yeah. And I got to see the real Masonic rituals Incorporated, which would have, I don't know if that would have bothered you or it would have been a bug or a feature for you.

Lance Kennedy [01:21:11] It would have been amazing.

John Dehlin [01:21:11] So the slitting of the throat and the disemboweling.

Lance Kennedy [01:21:14] What's the, I mean, it's, it's supposed to be edgy. Like, I, I didn't, I didn't want to go to.

John Dehlin [01:21:18] You wanted that?

Lance Kennedy [01:21:18] Well, like, I, my point is, like, if I wanted to, I didn't join Mormonism to join authoritarian methodism. Right. Like, like that's like, if that's what it is.

John Dehlin [01:21:27] What do you mean by that?

Lance Kennedy [01:21:28] Just like some generic Protestantism where people tell you what to do like that, insist they're leaders. Like, that's, that's not what Mormonism is. If it's going to be Mormonism, to use a British phrase, I want full fat Mormonism. And like, you know, there's enough in it that's controversial, like cutting that stuff out. You know, I get why it was done and I understand people are uncomfortable with it. Me personally, I'm a Mason, so I've done those same ritual things a thousand times.

John Dehlin [01:21:52] Yeah. And also there is good sociological data to say that, that the more unique and distinct and even demanding a faith is, the more committed the members are 100%.

Lance Kennedy [01:22:03] And that's my big concern is actually the adhesion side of things. Whereas I think maybe we're jumping ahead, but I think the focus is all on growth. Some magical number to show we're growing. But the real number is the adhesion and the way things play out over time. When you keep lowering Things that root identity.

John Dehlin [01:22:25] Yeah. So talk about once you're married and you start serving, eventually leading to being a branch president, what your experience was with the corporate Mormon Church and with even leading a Mormon branch, how that started influencing you.

Doubts Begin Under President Nelson

Lance Kennedy [01:22:42] Yeah. So we'll start in. So 2018. This is when I, after President Nelson became prophetic. Profit is really when I immediately started seeing things that. Well, it was deja vu, things I had seen before. And I told you, John, we spoke in 2018. It was a, a couple days ago. Right. So we forgot about it. But it's okay. But the point was, is like I had, I had started really noticing early on, call it my spidey sense. I just like, man, like there's a concerted effort here to go in a specific direction.

John Dehlin [01:23:14] And that direction was what?

Lance Kennedy [01:23:16] The same seeker sensitive Protestantization, if we want to call it Protestantization. It's a tongue twister, but basically secret sensitivity. Evangelicalizing the church, water watering it down

John Dehlin [01:23:26] and making it more vanilla. You know, mainstream, mainstream, non denomination.

Lance Kennedy [01:23:31] Yeah, exactly. And, and this of course was the name change and things of that nature. But you know, I, I was justifying a lot of it in my own mind at the time. I didn't like it at all. I'll be honest with you.

John Dehlin [01:23:45] Did you know at the time that it was because the Mormon brand had been so damaged they were doing customer research and even like non Mormon research, just finding out that Mormons as a reputation ranked almost as bad or worse than like Muslims or atheists and that the church's brand was just so terribly damaged.

Lance Kennedy [01:24:07] Well, I knew this was why.

John Dehlin [01:24:08] Okay, you knew that.

Lance Kennedy [01:24:09] I mean, I knew because that's why the, that's why evangelicals, that's why Catholics did it with Vatican too.

John Dehlin [01:24:14] Yeah.

Lance Kennedy [01:24:14] These are, these are very specific changes that are being made that are coordinated towards a specific end.

John Dehlin [01:24:20] Yeah.

Lance Kennedy [01:24:21] And so I did know, I did see, you know, the, the surveys. I have a copy of the 1990 survey that they use for the temple. Right. The questionnaire.

John Dehlin [01:24:29] Tell, tell people. What you're basically implying is that the temple ceremony changes of 1990 were in response to a survey that was released.

Lance Kennedy [01:24:37] Yeah. It happened in part because of Ed Decker. It happened in part because the God Makers. The God makers. Because they showed some things in it that were, you know, the, the penalties and so forth. And they used a survey to kind of ground the justification to make the changes to the temple. Yeah. Is it DNC20? It talks about the process of revelation. You study it out in your mind so you could find a Justification for doing it. But it was a survey. It wasn't like, like I think Mormons think God speaks to the prophet and then he makes the change. It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. These are well massaged, thought out, studied changes they're making that are not involving prayer and fasting. These are involving consultants McKinsey and Bain.

John Dehlin [01:25:21] Yeah, I was working for Bain Dallas. Bain Dallas. The Mormon Church was a client of Bain Dallas. Yeah.

Lance Kennedy [01:25:27] And you could, I mean, you have a $300 billion market cap company company. Right. Which is what the church is. They're going to involve professionals. Like I don't, like, I want to make sure. I don't think it's bad.

John Dehlin [01:25:36] Yeah.

Lance Kennedy [01:25:36] But what I do think it's problematic to use a buzzword is that that's not how spirituality and spiritual things should at least ideally operate.

John Dehlin [01:25:46] It's also not how the members think decisions.

Lance Kennedy [01:25:48] No, not at all.

John Dehlin [01:25:49] Not at all.

Lance Kennedy [01:25:49] Clearly. Yeah, it's it. Yeah. So they were, you know, they, they did a process driven. So I just, I said to myself, I go, okay, all of these, starting these changes, whether I saw the data or not, I knew based on my own previous experience of like, okay, well clearly they're trying to do this for missionizing evangelization. And that's clearly about growth metrics.

John Dehlin [01:26:13] And what's weird is even though you join Mormonism for the opposite set of reasons, almost you would have had to think, huh, well, they're just trying to get more people to join.

Lance Kennedy [01:26:26] Yeah, you know, that's true. But the. Okay, yeah, you want people to join. However, again with the secret sensitivity. And this is again, there was a blowback. It appealed to baby boomers who wanted a very consumer slap happy type of Christianity. That's why they went to, to Saddleback. Well, what happened with Gen Xers? Gen Xers came around and rejected that. And that's where you got the young, restless and reformed crowd. People like Matt Chandler, Mark Driscoll, Gospel Coalition, Acts 29 Network. Like, that was the reaction, which was the evangelical kids that were growing up in secret sensitive churches saying, no, I don't want this. I want to drink beer, I want to go study the Bible, I want to talk about history and theology.

Lance Kennedy [01:27:10] I want to be hard edged and the same trends playing out in Catholicism. If you go to a normal Novus Ordo mass, a bunch of old people, but you go to a Tridentine Latin mass, it's all people in their 30s. So anyway, I saw it playing out and I just knew it wasn't Going to work out well.

John Dehlin [01:27:27] Okay. So as you're seeing Nelson pivot the church towards mainstream Christianity, you're also starting to serve in leadership positions, right?

Lance Kennedy [01:27:36] Correct. Yeah. So 2020. Well, it was beginning of 2020. 2021, right after kind of height of COVID my wife and I moved out to Alpine, Texas, which is in Brewster County, Texas. You may have, you know about Marfa, some people it's an adjacent town, 30 miles away. It's the nearest town, but it is when I say the middle of nowhere, that is about as close as you get in the lower 48.

Lance Kennedy [01:28:01] Three hours to an airport, 70 miles to a Walmart. You know, the reason we moved there is because I was working for the Department of Justice and, and that's where a lot of the border enforcement personnel for that sector of the border live. And so as a prosecutor, that's where my hub was. And so we moved out there and I was called to the branch presidency within a couple months. And then a couple months after that I was called to the B branch

John Dehlin [01:28:26] president, which is like being a bishop, basically more difficult. Harder than being a bishop?

Lance Kennedy [01:28:31] Yeah, because your counselors can't do worthiness interviews. So you do everything and you don't

John Dehlin [01:28:37] have the priesthood leadership to really staff award adequately. Is that right?

Lance Kennedy [01:28:41] Yeah. And that, that's another numeric thing I did because like I'm in this. So. So the Alpine branch was a larger branch. It was, you know, smaller than what you would consider a ward. So we had between, let's say on a Good Sunday, like 50 to 60 people at the. But it was about 300. So on people on the books and you know, know roughly 20, 30% were active, which I think is the norm church wide. But it was a more mature branch. That's my point. We had our, we had our own building. We, you know, people had lived there for a long time.

Lance Kennedy [01:29:14] But yes, you, you just don't have the, the priesthood depth. And so this is where I started really looking at some of the subsequent changes with like for instance, abolition of young men's presidencies, high high priest groups, other changes they made to callings. It really made sense to me because you need a critical mass of worthy Melchizedek priesthood holders in order to fill those positions.

John Dehlin [01:29:36] They got rid of high priest group meetings, they got rid of the young men's president, and they got rid of home teaching.

Lance Kennedy [01:29:43] Correct? Yeah. I mean you have ministering now, but it's a little less involved. You can make phone calls.

John Dehlin [01:29:48] So it scales better.

Lance Kennedy [01:29:50] It does scale better. It's less involved. It's a higher and holier way, as they would call it.

John Dehlin [01:29:55] But you said these are changes that gave hints of evangelical changes.

Lance Kennedy [01:30:01] Well, the name change, the logo change. Yeah. When President Nelson said this was what really clued me in at the Rome Temple dedication, he said this is going to be remembered basically as a hinge point in church history. Well, that's the Fulcrum. When all these other revisions, the 2019 and subscribers, subsequent changes to the endowment, the dropping the name Mormon. Right. Reaffirming the true name of the church. You know, we can go through the whole list and you know, more than that in terms of verbiage and come follow me and you know, dropping to two hour church, which I'm not upset about per se, I'm just saying, like these are all kind of focused on one point in time, which is all these similar revisions all pointing to, again, a move to mainstream yourself and camouflage yourself as Protestant.

John Dehlin [01:30:55] Also trying to elevate the status of women a little bit.

Lance Kennedy [01:30:57] Correct? Yeah. I mean, there was that quasi 70 role that they rolled out in Europe. Of course, women now can be Sunday school presidents.

John Dehlin [01:31:05] I think also women in missions could have more leadership roles.

Lance Kennedy [01:31:09] I think so the, you have, you know, younger age for missionaries, female missionaries and the like. You've had the, the new verbiage kind of in social media about stay at home dads. So, you know, I mean, these are all things progressive Mormons would be probably happy with.

John Dehlin [01:31:23] Also, women participate in the priesthood, you know.

Lance Kennedy [01:31:25] Oh, you mean the power, the priesthood power thing. That's, that is, that is a, a new doctrinal change.

John Dehlin [01:31:30] Yeah.

Lance Kennedy [01:31:31] Or enhancement. Because you go back, there's a talk that says women don't have priesthood power unless it's changed by the church. It actually says that in the talk. But yeah, I mean, clearly, clearly all these moves are meant to reaffirm normative Christian status and appeal to again, you know, you would call more moderate or left wing church members.

John Dehlin [01:31:49] And it's interesting because if they're pivoting towards mainstream Christianity, you would think that someone who came out of mainstream Christianity would welcome those pivots. But that's why you left mainstream Christianity and joined Mormonism for the distinctiveness. So that's ironic that those things were maybe bugging you a little bit.

Lance Kennedy [01:32:07] Well, they bugged me because again, the way I saw it was this was a business motivation. This is a corporate decision that these churches made. Like I said, Bill Hybels and Rick Warren and Ed Young and these guys made these lifechurch TV and Oklahoma City, Craig Groeschel.

Lance Kennedy [01:32:26] These churches made a very, very clear business decision to not talk about hell or damnation, to not talk about homosexuality or sin in those terms. Why? Because these are things that turn people off. So let's talk about things that are happy. Let's talk about God loving you and you're a child of God and feeling the spirit and all these nice things that just make you the warm and fuzzies.

Lance Kennedy [01:32:49] So I'm not a reactionary. I don't mind changes if they, you know, the church has changed. Like, that's okay. That's. That's not what I'm getting at. All of the changes, however that are being made, are all pointing in one specific direction. And that direction is one that I don't particularly like because. Because it, it lowers adherence. And it will. I think it lowers identity. I mean, you know, now you have young, you know, teenage members of the church that wear crosses all the time. And if you talk to them, it's just like, well, don't Mormons always wear crosses? And now it's going to be a gaslit thing where you're now going to be, you know, told that this was always a thing. So part of it is again, but

John Dehlin [01:33:28] the biggest thing is you have young people hemorrhaging out of the church.

Lance Kennedy [01:33:31] It is, yeah, 100%. And I, I don't think. I don't think by doubling down on traditional things, you're going to stop the hemorrhaging. I think it would slow. That's basically what my contention is, is that you're not gaining anything by avoiding the problems you have. I mean, D. Michael Quinn was 100% right. You needed to inoculate people early on. And partially, that's what happened with me is like, you told me this stuff up front. There was no bait and switch. I knew about it. The bait and switch was now, oh,

John Dehlin [01:33:59] Ed Decker told you this stuff.

Lance Kennedy [01:34:01] He did. He did.

John Dehlin [01:34:01] It wasn't the missionaries.

Lance Kennedy [01:34:03] No, it wasn't. It was you, John.

John Dehlin [01:34:04] No, it was me.

Lance Kennedy [01:34:05] It was you and Ed Decker. Yeah. No, but my point is that, see,

John Dehlin [01:34:09] lawyers of the Mormon Church. I helped this guy join the church. Mormon stories helps people join andor stables.

Lance Kennedy [01:34:14] And I wasn't confused.

John Dehlin [01:34:16] Okay.

Lance Kennedy [01:34:18] You know, I don't know if that'll help you or not, but I'll throw it out there. Yeah. You know, that's just my take. But. But yeah, I just think it lowered adherence. It's clearly, if you ask the McKinsey consultant, how should we package the church they're going to say is the most generic, vanilla bland, because guess what, that's the most productizable. It's the thing you can sell the easiest to the biggest consumer base.

John Dehlin [01:34:42] It's like a McDonald's cheeseburger.

Lance Kennedy [01:34:43] Correct. But the base you're appealing to isn't the average American anymore, it's specific Americans. If you're trying to recruit Americans, I don't know, maybe they are giving up on the American church and they're really just trying to go elsewhere.

John Dehlin [01:34:56] Clearly. They have to be.

Lance Kennedy [01:34:58] They would have to be. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:34:59] The growth is in Africa.

Lance Kennedy [01:35:00] It's in Africa. The money is not in Africa.

John Dehlin [01:35:02] Right, but they've got so much money now they don't need tithing anymore.

Lance Kennedy [01:35:06] Yeah, but they have no power in Africa. I'm agreeing with you. I'm saying that, that the, the political power, the corporate power, the influence is all in the U.S. yeah. So you would think like we need to keep this thing coherent and cohesive.

John Dehlin [01:35:19] Yeah, but how?

Lance Kennedy [01:35:20] That's a good question. I mean, I don't know. I, I again that, that goes back to, if you asked me, I would say the church would be doing things a little, the changes they would be making would be different than the ones they're currently making.

John Dehlin [01:35:30] I, I, now that I'm thinking about it, I don't want to get derailed from your story, but I think they realize they've lost the US and Western membership, so they're just going to improve the church's image to the world so that we just don't look as culty and as weird and as problematic and then just offset the hemorrhaging in terms of US and developed world membership with sort of inflating the statistics in Africa so the church doesn't look like a dying church. And then because of 7% growth a year, 300 billion becomes a trillion within 20 to 30 years. Without member tithing. They don't even need the members or their tithing.

Lance Kennedy [01:36:11] They get paid to go to church. Yeah, I agree, but this is kind of, I think, a problem that the church got itself into with how they rely on numbers in terms of shoring up. Because I think personally there's two other models you can look at. You can look at the Jehovah's Witnesses and the seven Day Advantage. Both have far more accurate numbers. Joe's Witnesses actually probably under report their membership because they're elitist, you know, the 144,000. So they don't care about mass and

John Dehlin [01:36:39] they make you wait a year to get Baptized.

Lance Kennedy [01:36:40] They do. But what's also interesting about them is that their official numbers are probably higher than the active number of Mormons.

John Dehlin [01:36:47] Oh, yeah, yeah.

Lance Kennedy [01:36:49] 70 Adventists. Their numbers are perfect because they cleaned up their books.

John Dehlin [01:36:53] They're accurate. They're accurate and they're way bigger.

Lance Kennedy [01:36:55] They are about 17 million members. Members. But they, but both those churches don't have the same influence and capital that our church because of culture and how we're organized. We're the beehive. Right. So they can't. They can't generate the same level of, I think, power, even though they're bigger.

John Dehlin [01:37:07] And our members are going to say, wait, they're not bigger. We have 17 or 18 million. We have probably 4 million active members.

Lance Kennedy [01:37:15] Yeah, I say 4 to 6 because. Because of percentages can vary. But yeah, I think that's probably accurate. And if you ask me, you know, you could easily. And granted, you can disagree. But like, if you're trying to fix the optics, you could literally say, you know, the Lord has oppressed upon me that we need to know who is truly in the church and we're going to set it and you know, and make it some. You know, you could color it in a way to get the numbers back accurate, but then you don't have the clout that a 17 million-member church has. And that's the. And then you've also told people that this, this as the sign and seal of our success, that we're, you know, the restoration is proceeding at an unprecedented pace.

John Dehlin [01:37:55] The stone is cut out of the mountain without hands and will roll forth and consume all nations.

Lance Kennedy [01:38:00] Yeah, but. But then again, you have verses that worth 11. You don't eat a lot.

John Dehlin [01:38:03] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lance Kennedy [01:38:04] So you could rely on those verses and go to a more. Again, I use the term elitist, but not in a negative sense.

John Dehlin [01:38:09] But Georgia should hire you as their consultant. Not.

Lance Kennedy [01:38:11] They should. I mean, if they had asked me, I think they would have probably never done the baptismal policy, because I would have said that looks really bad, bros.

John Dehlin [01:38:18] Come on, which one?

Serving as a Branch President in Isolation

Lance Kennedy [01:38:20] The gay children. Parents.

John Dehlin [01:38:23] Oh, the. November 2015.

Lance Kennedy [01:38:25] Yeah, exactly. I would have said, this is not optically good. You're not getting what you think you're getting here.

John Dehlin [01:38:30] No, that was probably the single most damaging thing the church has done.

Lance Kennedy [01:38:34] And it was President Nelson.

John Dehlin [01:38:36] Nelson and Oaks.

Lance Kennedy [01:38:37] I mean, well, it was, but Nelson was president. He was kind of running the show.

John Dehlin [01:38:40] Well, no, he was running the show.

Lance Kennedy [01:38:42] Monson was there. But Monson was incapacitated.

John Dehlin [01:38:45] Yeah, Nelson and Oakes did it behind the Scenes.

Lance Kennedy [01:38:46] That's what I'm saying.

John Dehlin [01:38:47] Yeah. It was sneaky. All right, well, so one of the things I thought was really interesting is as you were branch president, you were monitoring how much monetary outflow from your branch versus how much the church gave back and how you processed that. Do you wanna talk about that?

Lance Kennedy [01:39:08] Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, like I said, our branch was very isolated. We were in a district which is unique. There's only probably half a dozen districts in the country, the US Right now, because you have to have a low enough density of Mormons to justify a district rather than a stake. So we were in a district. The district's the size of West Virginia. And my branch covered the area size of Maryland, including roughly a quarter of the U.S. border.

Lance Kennedy [01:39:37] So I had a really interesting time there because my first counselor in my branch presidency was the border patrol chief, chief of the whole Big Ben sector. And so when we had members of our branch who were illegal, we had to tread lightly because we had mostly law enforcement in the leadership.

Lance Kennedy [01:39:54] But what I saw, though, with our remoteness of the branch was in particular, we were very resource deprived because you have very few kids. The ones we have there, they don't have any community or very little of it. The nearest branch was 70 miles away in Fort Stockton, Texas. Texas.

Lance Kennedy [01:40:14] And our mission leader, who's the, you know, direct priesthood chain, was in Lubbock, which is eight hours away. You know, Texas is massive. So we were kind of this island outpost never got visited by church officials. Now, granted, it would be a real big detour for them to do it, but what I did notice was that things that I wish we had bigger budgets for, we just couldn't functionally have because, you know, the vast majority of our funds got taken out of our local unit and were sent to church headquarters.

Lance Kennedy [01:40:44] I'll say conservatively, 80%. And our building was paid off. We had virtually no utilities, you know, so there was. There was no overhead. And. Yeah, I mean, I think we could have dealt with a little bit more resources, particularly for our kids, because as much, you know, lip service is given that these are the future of the church, there was very little besides like, EFY and the chance to go to an EFY that they ever had, you know, they had to drive three hours to go to Patriarchal Blessings. For instance, our temple was in Lubbock. So, you know, I think that was something I definitely noticed was how resource deprived we were.

John Dehlin [01:41:21] Yeah, and there's probably some type of business analysis that can be done about franchises and. And investment in the franchises versus pulling corporate taking profit. Right.

Lance Kennedy [01:41:30] Yeah, I. I don't. I don't know. I mean, like, the fact that, like, money was being pulled to Central Church headquarters, that was okay because they handled, you know, they handled like building maintenance and upkeep and things like that. We had people that needed, for instance, you know, food offerings. We didn't have a. A bishop storehouse. So I actually had to buy, like, commercially available food for people, you know, so we, we did stuff like that. The church did provide resources for. What surprised me though, is the amount, the percentage. And just really, again, like, you know, you get like 50 bucks a year or something per kid and you're like, we're hours away from anything. Like, it's going to cost hundreds of dollars for them to do anything worthwhile. But you had to pull the money from elsewhere.

John Dehlin [01:42:08] You mentioned measured like a business, but funded like an afterthought.

Lance Kennedy [01:42:13] I think. So, yeah, I was. I mean, you know, from a business metrics perspective, we had. My branch had very good metrics. I got us up to 75% of our endowed members had recommends. We reactivated people who got married in the temple. You know, there were baptisms. So, like, I thought from, like, doing our job from like that corporate, you know, we were hitting our metrics. But yeah, I mean, in terms of resourcing, you know, you're. You're not resourced like a church that has 100 members versus, you know, a church with hundreds of billions of dollars. Like, you just. You just don't have the resources. So I, I definitely think that was something I went away from with tell

John Dehlin [01:42:51] the story about your staker, district patriarch and.

Lance Kennedy [01:42:55] Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, like. And this is kind of part of it too, which again, was factoring into my analysis and me watching all this and the business decisions. You know, for instance, like, we didn't have our own patriarch. Our patriarch was in Midland or Odessa. And I had arranged for the patriarch to come in to do a. Basically a slate of patriarchal blessings because again, one of the first things I did. My predecessor had had a nervous breakdown from being branch president because the amount of pressure on him.

Lance Kennedy [01:43:28] Part of that was because our district leadership was in. Our district leadership was in Fort Stockton and Pecos, which were hours away. So you would have to drive 70 miles, 100 miles to go to your priesthood leader meeting. You know, each direction. So he just kind of. He couldn't take it, the amount of pressure, resigned from being branch president.

Lance Kennedy [01:43:50] So I had kind of come in, though. I want to clean up my books. I want to get everything, you know, all these metrics. And so I said, I'm going to get five patriarchal blessings. Because if you've been in priesthood leadership, there's a dashboard that actually has all your metrics. And it's, it's, it's a pretty cool like way to like visualize like, okay, I got. This is my percentage of people. These are how many people are inactive on our books that we can send back, you know, so it gives you a lot of things, things to go with. And I'm like, I'm going to hit these metric numbers.

Lance Kennedy [01:44:15] I'm going to get. Everyone needs a priesthood patriarchal blessing to get one. Had the patriarch lined up, he was going to come and do it. Probably more convenient for him, honestly. And district killed it. We don't want to inconvenience the patriarch.

John Dehlin [01:44:27] He was going to come to your area and give like five people a blessing in the same day. Which is easier than having five people show up at five different times. Correct.

Lance Kennedy [01:44:38] Because, because for the patriarchal blessing to occur, we had to have a mission member of the mission presidency do the interview. So they had to drive in from either Monahan's, which was again three hours or so away, or even further from Lubbock. So I just wanted to get everything consolidated, make it efficient, very correlated. Right. And didn't turn out that way.

John Dehlin [01:44:58] Was it a stake or district president that killed the idea?

Lance Kennedy [01:45:00] It was the district president. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which was a challenge because like, you know, it was kind of a dynastic rule of this district. You know, father to son in law and the, the mission presidency, you know, they were, they were focused so much on the mission, which was huge. Right. The mission is like all of West Texas and most of New Mexico. So, you know, the branch in the district that the mission president was over was kind of an afterthought because his focus was on his missionaries. So the district, district, you know, many hours away, kind of got to do what they wanted and yeah, sometimes they were a little heavy handed.

John Dehlin [01:45:37] Yeah. And then you started noticing, we talked about safeguarding, you know, advancements in evangelical Christianity. You started noticing some safeguarding failures in the modern Mormon church.

Lance Kennedy [01:45:54] Well, yeah, there were things that I had to improve upon because, you know, I had worked as a prosecutor around law enforcement for a decade and so I was very cognizant of the way allegations are made. And now I'm a defense attorney and, you know, I'm even more cognizant about that. But at the time, you Know, I was having to do my youth interviews and we had a, a number of girls and so I had to do my youth interviews and the branch president's office doesn't have a window in it, which you know, for me was like, I'm not going to be in some locker room as some 12 year old girl, girl asking her about chastity.

Lance Kennedy [01:46:27] Like this is kind of inappropriate. I mean I'm a father, I have two daughters and I wouldn't want, you know, my wife and I have this dilemma like do we want them to feel comfortable talking to some grown man by themselves?

John Dehlin [01:46:37] Yeah, it's grooming. It's grooming. It could be. Yeah, yeah, it could be.

Lance Kennedy [01:46:41] They may, the bishop might not be the one doing it, but it clearly puts in their mind, yeah, that could be something later that, that's okay.

John Dehlin [01:46:47] Yeah.

Lance Kennedy [01:46:48] In those circums asking you these private, sensitive questions and authority. So I, I definitely agree with that. But so I just, you know, in this branch president I had to take additional protocols that you know, weren't I think typical, like leave the door cracked or have my wife sit outside with the door cracked or go into a classroom that had a window, which to me was like, you know, if you're not going to do background checks, you're not going to put cameras up in the church, you know, at least give again some deniability to the bishop that an accusation. At least say, hey, people could look inside of this room. It's transparent. So I had to take those measures to kind of protect myself.

John Dehlin [01:47:30] Yeah. And then also you're probably wondering why the church corporate wide isn't implementing these safeguards. But then also you had interactions with the hotline, with the abuse hotline. Right. Do you want to talk about the, that.

Lance Kennedy [01:47:46] Yeah, it was, it wasn't, it wasn't an abuse. It was. Well, I'll take it back. It was a, a brother, a member of the church who had some violent tendencies, some mental health issues and violent tendencies. He also had some real strange, I mean this is subjectively strange to me. Proclivities and, and behaviors and you know, and I would have to talk to him virtually every Sunday about, you know, his sexual hang ups and things, you know, and you know, he's a suicidal masturbator. Right. Which was strange to me because I'm like, I'm like, why are you literally thinking of killing yourself over this? Like, you know, growing up evangelical, to me this was like, this was really weird.

Lance Kennedy [01:48:26] However, he started going into either threats or things he was attracted to that were very disturbing to me. And. And so I called the hotline and, you know, I wasn't reporting abuse or something like that directly, but really they gave me. Just said, monitor it, in essence. And so basically just like, monitor the situation. Like, you know, kind of. There wasn't really more resources provided than that alone. And so we actually had to take our own, you know, because I was piped into the law enforcement community. I had had some officers go talk to him, make sure he knew, you know, even though the church handbook says you can't have firearms, we were all packing in church, you know, and so, you know, we were. We were prepared for anything. But as far as church headquarters, there wasn't really much resources provided to us.

John Dehlin [01:49:21] Yeah, okay. So. So you were starting to notice problems with resources, with interviews, with the way the church dealt with sexual stuff. And then you also talk about no mechanism for dissent.

Lance Kennedy [01:49:42] Yeah, 100%. Yeah. So when I started my practice, this was several years after we had. I'd been called to be branch president. We moved across the state. And John, you're familiar with how big? Texas. 400 miles. And that only got me to the middle of the state. State, so. But still six hours away. I wasn't released as branch president.

Lance Kennedy [01:50:05] And I kept being like, I can't do this anymore. I can't be there. I'm 400 plus miles away. Oh, no. You know, just do your best. We're trying to find the right person. And so I was doing, you know, fast offering meetings with people. I was doing over zoom. Yeah. Worthiness interviews, meeting with people, doing, you know, just the normal, trying to keep the thing active. And. And it was really about a quarter of a year, 90 days or so before they called someone. And so I was kind of this remote branch president having to preside from across the state. But, you know, part of that was because they.

Lance Kennedy [01:50:44] They had already called, I think, like most of the people prior to that. And there was a high level of burnout in our ward or branch because if you're, you know, you're stuck in that community, you're. Okay, you're branch president. Well, now you're a counselor. Now you're elders quorum president. Now you're Sunday school president. Now you're on the district, you know, council. And so they were waiting for someone that could, basically fresh meat to come and replace me.

John Dehlin [01:51:08] Okay, so all of that. So by the time you are no longer branch president, what year are we in?

Lance Kennedy [01:51:14] This is probably 20, 22, 23.

John Dehlin [01:51:18] So three to four years ago.

Lance Kennedy [01:51:19] Correct.

John Dehlin [01:51:20] Okay. And so it seems like all of this starts to come together as almost a faith crisis sort of situation for you or.

Lance Kennedy [01:51:30] Yeah, I mean, it's not about, like, it's not Joseph Smith and the faith Christ in that way. It was more of. How should I define it? Like, frustration, alarm. Almost like, this is not what I signed up for, you know, like, I escaped, you know, to use that term. You know, I know you deal with people who are really escaping cults, but I escaped, you know, Charismania. Right. Like, which means what? You know, charismatic chaos. That's John MacArthur. He wrote a book called Charismania, you know, a charismatic mania chaos. It was just, you know, very emotive. People barking like dogs and speaking in tongues and, you know, running around church waving flags. So. So it was very chaotic. And so, yeah, I don't think it was a faith crisis in the sense of that way. It was more of a crisis of trust in the wisdom of the direction of things.

John Dehlin [01:52:25] Yeah. And so the church's direction, the direction Nelson, President Nelson was taking, the church was also probably starting to weigh on you more and more that you weren't finding the depth and the spiritual nourishment maybe that you were originally seeking when you joined.

Lance Kennedy [01:52:44] Well, it's in part, yeah. The way I would say it is that what I found in 2007 when I went inactive and then later was I really did fall in love with 19th century Mormonism. Now, I'm not fundamentalism, but what I mean is the Mormonism that was at odds with mainstream American culture, the Mormonism that didn't care about wanting to be at UNICEF meetings and patting the backs of the Archbishop of Canterbury, you know, and, you know, being World Council of Churches and being just, you know, a normal Christian, you know, how dare the Department of Defense not say that we're Christian? Like, they wouldn't have cared about that.

Lance Kennedy [01:53:20] They would have said, yeah, we don't want to be with those apostate, you know, Christians. The Mormonism where you could drink beer, you know, like, like, you know, like. And I mean that literally because I, you know, people drink a cup of coffee, they can't go to the temple. They're £800 with an air tank, but, you know, no feet because they're diabetic, but they can go in the temple. They're worthy. Come on, guys, you've lost the script here. Like, this doesn't. It's not that it makes sense or religious commandments need to, but it just is illogical.

John Dehlin [01:53:48] Soda and Diet Coke and sugar is okay, Dirty sodas.

Lance Kennedy [01:53:51] That was something I learned about in Utah. I mean, if I want to, if you want to go find a variety of energy drinks, just go to Provo, man. Like it is wall to wall connoisseurs, you know.

John Dehlin [01:54:01] But you're saying that the church keeping someone out of the temple for a beer or a cup of coffee, stupid, but allowing them in when they're totally abusing their bodies with sugar or like Red Bulls or whatever. Yeah.

Lance Kennedy [01:54:16] What I'm saying is that if you were, if you had asked me like, Lance, what is that? That's the Mormonism, the one that, that was leaning into its distinctives, that was proud of the fact that they had denied the Trinity. But what do we see now? We see social trinitarianism basically being taught. You know, and we go through my analysis. But the point is, is like I, I, I saw this instinctually and then I started seeing it practically and personally. And then you combine that with again, the institutional direction and, and things I've noticed myself. It really coalesced in my mind. And you know, again, in preparation for this interview, I asked myself, like, Lance, why are you on coming on here? And I have four kids, right, and they have pioneer ancestry. They're being, that, that's being jettisoned. They're literally losing identity as a Mormon

John Dehlin [01:55:03] because your wife's heritage is territorial.

Lance Kennedy [01:55:07] They were like, you know, 1860s.

John Dehlin [01:55:09] That's pretty good.

Lance Kennedy [01:55:10] It's good. They weren't, it's great. They didn't do hand carts, but they were endowed in the endowment house. So there you go.

John Dehlin [01:55:17] Still pretty good.

Lance Kennedy [01:55:18] It's pretty good. My point is, it was, it was, it was Adam God era polygamy or

John Dehlin [01:55:22] like at least fifth generation or 12

Lance Kennedy [01:55:24] because they're all like 18 when they have kids. So, you know, but, but yeah, I mean, I have four kids. That's their heritage. And I'm a Texan. You, you know, Texans, you know, we're very proud of our identity as Texans. Like, you know, I'm, I'm a seventh generation Texan. We count coup on each other with how Texan we are. And so the idea of like some random guy coming along like the governor and saying, by the way, Texan is offensive. Now we're no longer going to call ourselves that. We're just going to be Americans like everyone else. I would give him the bird because like, you know, and so the fact that Mormons were just like, okay, so

John Dehlin [01:56:00] this is Nelson saying you can't call

Lance Kennedy [01:56:02] yourself Mormons 100 and which is his hobby. Horse from the 1980s. Like the fact that this was like something he woke up and decided is ridiculous. He, you know, and this goes in again, I think, you know, John, some Utah psychology, persecution complex, wanting to be normal Americans. But all of that stuff didn't sit well with me. And I just said to myself, you know, coming on here, I just said, you know, know, I am going to plant a flag because I know the way Mormons are in 20 years they will gaslight me and tell me we always taught the Trinity. We always wore crosses. What are you talking about? The endowment was always about Jesus, brother.

John Dehlin [01:56:38] The garments were always the short.

Lance Kennedy [01:56:39] They were always tanked. No, we never wore garments except in the temple. When they make that change, you know, like that's the way Mormons are. They legitimately have and I say said no history. I mean the God makers Mormons don't know about Adam God. They know nothing about polyandry. They know nothing about adoption or the kingdom of Heaven or Theo democracy. So it's very easy for them. But I did find maybe I'm revealing my own frustration just at the willingness of Mormons to just go along with it. And I think that speaks to potential directions the church could go and the way the congregation writ large will go with.

Noticing the Church's Shifting Identity

John Dehlin [01:57:15] You mentioned earlier joining the Masonic Lodge in your outline you mentioned the 2019 changes in the Temple ceremony and I want you to talk about that. But something I wasn't sure you knew when I was reading your outline and I texted you about this is my understanding is the Genesis for the 2019 temple ceremony changes was that the guy who was the film, cinematic director, director of the renovation of the Temple Ceremony movies was found out to be a child abuser and was, was in prison for child abuse. Yeah. So they had to get rid of his product. His product. Because the, in effect the, the Revised Mormon Temple Ceremony movies were created by a child abuser. And so they had to hurry and come up with these PowerPoint presentations because they didn't, didn't have a backup set of movies available. You, I don't think you totally knew that at the time.

Lance Kennedy [01:58:12] I knew that he. I knew that he. I knew, I knew about it. But the way, like, so, so John, like my, the way I actually view the PowerPoint is actually in line with the changes they've been making in that it's much easier to switch out a slide on a presentation than it is to re edit and rework a whole, you know, drama. So if you're anticipating making continual changes to a ritual ritual which has been done. I mean Nelson, you know, President Nelson added whole sections to the endowment at this point. Right. The, the war in heaven and so forth. It just becomes much more easy and malleable. So I, I'm not denying that maybe that was the case. I think though it probably helps them if they are going to continue to make revisions to do so.

John Dehlin [01:58:54] Really everything has multiple applications, real reasons and motivations. I just want to refer people, people to the Sterling Van Wagenen, who is a co founder of Sundance, to his incarceration and conviction. If you want to learn more about one of the main reasons the temple ceremony got changed in 2019, it's because the director of the newly created previous versions of the Mormon temple ceremony movies were created by child abuser. Anyway, so those changes, especially as a Mason.

Lance Kennedy [01:59:29] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:59:30] They made it even less Masonic.

Lance Kennedy [01:59:32] Well, I mean that, I mean 1990 is really when they, they gutted most of the Masonic content. The, the penalties and the five points of fellowship. Right.

John Dehlin [01:59:40] But they also made it more feminist friendly.

Lance Kennedy [01:59:42] They did, but they didn't change the actual doctrinal component.

John Dehlin [01:59:45] Right.

Lance Kennedy [01:59:46] So if you look, if you listen to the verbiage of the covenants that women and men make to be, you know, made kings and queens to the most high God, the verbiage is slightly different. So it does still maintain the theology, but soften the language.

John Dehlin [02:00:03] And the church is in such a bind because if they become more fundamentalist, they anger the progressives. If they try to become more progressive or mainstream, they anger the fundamentalists and, or the people like you that wanted something more straight edge. So it's like almost the church can't win. It's more put in the position of how do we lose the least amount of people and make ourselves the least unappealing to the most amount of people.

Lance Kennedy [02:00:36] And that's exactly what I've been saying is like, you know, there is a move towards secularization in our society in the West. Like this is a broad trend. However, there are churches that are weathering it better than others. And I don't know what logic went into the calculus because it's pretty easy to go. These churches have declined since they made these changes. These churches haven't. So let's be like these churches instead. We're just doing the community of Christ playbook. They actually changed their name too. And it's like that church has legitimately imploded. Like they had to sell their most precious objects to stay afloat. Like, you know, so why, why, why go down that path? I think it's Empirically wrong.

John Dehlin [02:01:16] I mean, the problem is, I mean people like me have been calling on the Mormon Church to be less culty for a long time. It's clearly the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Seventh Day Adventists who have figured out the optimum playbook for managing modernity. But would any good consultant advise the church to be more like the Jehovah's Witnesses in the Seventh Day Adventists?

Lance Kennedy [02:01:39] Not, not in that sense. Look like the Jehovah's Witnesses are on another level of cult than Mormons. I always say that Mormons are the, the church is as close as you can get to a cult without being one. Like it's right up on the edge. But, and I don't consider Seven Day Advance. I know you had someone on recently, but you know, the, the point is, is that you, the, the model though they're trying for, I think is the Seventh Day Adventist model. Let's have enough distinctives to be somewhat unique. Unique. With the Seven day event you have like investigative judgment and vegetarianism and Sabbath day observance. But Saturday. Yeah, Saturday, Sabbath. There are, there are Sunday Adventists as well, but First Day Adventist.

John Dehlin [02:02:19] I, it was so crazy because I got, I've gotten so many emails after interviewing an ex Seventh Day Adventists and they were all telling me how liberal and progressive they are.

Lance Kennedy [02:02:29] They are pretty progressive.

John Dehlin [02:02:30] It's like, oh, we do sports now and oh, we can do Seventh Day Adventist.

Lance Kennedy [02:02:33] My great aunt was a Seven Day Adventist. I, she was, she would give me lentil recipes for lentil soup. She was a vegetarian, but.

John Dehlin [02:02:39] Or like we eat meat or whatever.

Lance Kennedy [02:02:41] Yeah, exactly.

John Dehlin [02:02:42] And I'm like, huh, is that a feature or a bug? Like you're basically telling me how on Seventh Day Adventists your practices have become.

Lance Kennedy [02:02:50] No, go to a Seventh Day Adventist Church, you'll feel like you're in a Baptist church. It's not, it's a, it's a, it's a Protestant church with some distinctives. And that's where I think, I think the LDS Church, if they were trying to do. That's the model they're trying to go after.

John Dehlin [02:03:01] Somehow the Seventh Day Adventists have remained stronger, I think.

Lance Kennedy [02:03:05] Well, they, they don't have many of the historicity issues and other issues.

John Dehlin [02:03:08] They don't have quite the Joseph Smith.

Lance Kennedy [02:03:10] Well, they don't place their baggage.

John Dehlin [02:03:11] And that's part, they were anti sex instead of Joseph Smith being super pro sex.

Lance Kennedy [02:03:16] I mean, possibly. Oh yeah, that is, that is true. Yeah. I, I, I think that that's part of way I would probably lean on is those are some specific issues that they have that we don't. And you know, we can take that for what it's worth.

John Dehlin [02:03:31] Interesting. Okay. All right. And then you. There is a little paragraph on the church stopping its reporting of its statistics publicly. I think that's an important point to make.

Lance Kennedy [02:03:44] Well, I mean, another really interesting kind of thing I noticed, and a lot, I mean, others have noticed as well, is the church stopped announcing the statistical numbers at general conference. And I don't know if this was merely trying to reduce the amount of components, but I think it's probably more of a way to put the numbers less front and center to the membership.

John Dehlin [02:04:10] No, they didn't like the trends, so they stopped publishing the numbers.

Lance Kennedy [02:04:14] Well, you can always keep people on the books to their 170 versus 110 mean, you know. But again, again, I. I think I've given the solution the church could do tomorrow and just fix the issue.

John Dehlin [02:04:26] Come clean.

Lance Kennedy [02:04:27] Come clean. But also you could. But I'm saying you could still phrase it in a way that's faith affirming. It's not like, hey, we screwed up and we didn't. We've been lying to you. You could do it in a way that says, hey, here we've changed how we're going to report it and the Lord wants us to. I don't know. I'm just saying you could do that and come clean. And we're the le. The Levin. We're the Levin and the loaf, which is actually more scriptural, if you really want to go at it.

John Dehlin [02:04:49] But we were all raised in scripture mastery with that Daniel, verse 2, that the church would grow and dot temples would dot the globe. You know what I mean?

Lance Kennedy [02:04:58] And there was prophecy about that. But also I think that was probably coinciding with the highest growth of the church when they were hitting 8%. Right. When you were learning that. So the proof was there. You're seeing it in front of your eyes.

John Dehlin [02:05:11] And you don't have a problem with the church moving towards the eventual ordination of women. You just want what?

Lance Kennedy [02:05:18] Well, here's what I would say. I grew up with women. Ordained. Right, Ordained women. My mom was a co pastor of my dad's church. And that's actually very common within Pentecostalism because of the Pneumatology, the theology of the Spirit that women, you know, you had. Is it Ananias and Sapphira, there's priestesses in the, you know, know, in the Bible and so forth. So I don't. It doesn't bother me, like, on a personal level, I think I would have a hard time squaring it theologically. That's what I would say. So, like, if you ask me, it's like, I'm not going to get mad about it, but I think it would be a sign that the church is admitting full well that they don't have enough men to run their wards. And I think that that would precipitate it.

John Dehlin [02:05:59] But it seems like you're also saying the church needs to just be honest and if you're going to move towards female ordination to change the doctrine, well,

Lance Kennedy [02:06:07] do it, do it. Just do it one way or the other. Like, stop. Like, President Oaks loves balancing tests. He's a judge. Truth and tolerance.

John Dehlin [02:06:14] Love.

Lance Kennedy [02:06:15] And you know, whatever liberty or whatever is, you know, he has all these like, balancing acts. He does the Utah plan of, you know, church religious freedom and LGBT rights. You know, like, Oaks loves this middle ground that he does. So that's clearly what they're trying to chart. And you just, you're to. Going, going to, sorry, piss off everyone by doing that. You're making no one happy. You know, you're, you're going to. And there's a lot of frustration in the church. People just aren't going to say it because, you know, the, the, the true believing rank and file member who, you know, is really raising, you know, their kids in the church and they're going on missions and they're serving.

Lance Kennedy [02:06:49] They're not going to complain because they're going to, they're going to take that as some of their faith is, I think, less intact that it's been harmed and they don't want to admit that. So. But yeah, I think the route that they're going right now is just frustrating everyone.

John Dehlin [02:07:05] Are you happy with the church's progress in coming clean with its history?

Lance Kennedy [02:07:09] Yeah, 100%. I think that's what they should have done. I mean, you know, for me, like, again, like the magic side of things and Joseph Smith's involvement and folk magic. I thought that was interesting. I didn't. It never was. Like a minute I talked to people, I'm like, okay, it's Mormons that have issues with this and they're interlocutors. So if you're trying to appeal, even

John Dehlin [02:07:28] because all that was hid from us,

Lance Kennedy [02:07:30] but also the appearance, like, you watch Prophet of the Restoration. Joseph is this earnest farm boy from American Fork. He never hurt a fly.

John Dehlin [02:07:40] He was a feminist and anti racist.

Lance Kennedy [02:07:43] But the real Joseph Smith was a warlord. And that's What I liked. I'm just being honest. He had an army. He was my age. He was 38 when he died. He had an army. He was, you know, he was. He had a city. He was, you know, he's not this touchy. He was smoking cigars, Right. And drinking beer. He. He liked lager. He writes about in his. His journal. He was fist fighting people as prophet of the church with throw down. Right. That's not your touchy feely Provo guy. Right. You know the guy crying in your ward about mowing the yard.

John Dehlin [02:08:09] Warlord Joseph.

Lance Kennedy [02:08:11] He was. If you go to Reed Moon's Rare Bookstore, it's a plug for Reed. In his private collections area, he has a unfinished Arnold Freeberg painting of Joseph as Lieutenant General of the Nauvoo Legion. It's one of the best paintings, has never been finished. I'd love to see it finished. But my point is, even if you don't like Joseph as Warlord Joseph, Right. What I'm saying is that's a very different type of guy than the nice feet, compassionate, nice boy who just always does the right thing. Is Earnest. That was him.

John Dehlin [02:08:44] No. Yeah. He had over 30 women.

Lance Kennedy [02:08:46] He did, Yeah. I mean, he did. He was married to a lot and, you know, maybe did some stuff they shouldn't have and, you know, I mean, but. But again, the, the, the guy fit in much more with Porter Rockwell and Brigham Young rather than Russell Nelson today.

John Dehlin [02:08:59] He was also, like, likely commanding the assassination of a governor. He was also, like, seeking to potentially become a king. A state and become a king. Yeah, he was ordained a king.

Lance Kennedy [02:09:11] I thought that was cool, man.

John Dehlin [02:09:12] Like, like, like again.

Lance Kennedy [02:09:14] But you can't. Here's my point is you can say that this is all bad and we shouldn't do it, and that's fine, but you can't avoid the fact it happened. And also, you're going to undermine your own theology. You have to embrace it at some level and own it.

John Dehlin [02:09:30] It's just getting diluted. The church is just getting diluted.

Lance Kennedy [02:09:32] I think so. Or they're trying to put a front on.

John Dehlin [02:09:39] And do you think that Nelson made a mistake by denouncing the term Mormon?

Lance Kennedy [02:09:44] Yeah, I don't know anything. I really liked Nelson.

John Dehlin [02:09:49] Did.

Lance Kennedy [02:09:50] I mean, I really have tried really racking my brain to be positive. If anything, he really emphasized personal religious experience. Okay, great. I mean, that's what I'd give him. But all these adjustments now, do I think President Nelson unilaterally did it? Probably. For some of these issues, I think there had to be. There's a consensus and this is the direction the church is going to go in. And look who are the majority of the age group of the quorum now? Boomers. Who are the ones that sensibilities with secret sensitivity was baby boomers. So I think you still are going to have 30 more years of this.

John Dehlin [02:10:24] Why was it a mistake to jettison the identity of Mormon?

Lance Kennedy [02:10:29] Well, I mean, well, let me steel man, the argument about why we should jettison it. Right? It's a nickname. It's bad. It's. It's not the name Christ. It's the name of a prophet. It's, you know, been maligned and you know, and you could get into the branding side of things.

John Dehlin [02:10:44] And you want to emphasize Jesus.

Lance Kennedy [02:10:46] Yeah, you want to emphasize Jesus. You want to emphasize your, you know, alleged Christianity, which I think is problematic. That's another side of things.

John Dehlin [02:10:53] Wait, you don't think Mormons are Christian?

Lance Kennedy [02:10:54] No.

John Dehlin [02:10:55] What?

Lance Kennedy [02:10:56] Not in the way that Christians call themselves Christian. 100%.

John Dehlin [02:10:59] So you and Hegseth and whoever.

Lance Kennedy [02:11:02] I think it's hilarious that Mormons are all twisted. This has been a pet peeve of mine. Like why don't they call, why don't they call us Christian? You know, really, really serious. And you're like, you understand that Protestants and Catholics killed each other to the amount of 30 million people in Germany, right? But they would agree that they're Christian and you aren't. Okay, so like the reason they deny you're a Christian is because you deny the fundamental doctrine of Christianity, which is the Trinity. Right. Like you deny like you're. It's the same reason they don't consider Christadelphians or Jehovah's Witnesses to be Christians. Christian. Right?

Lance Kennedy [02:11:36] So yeah, we're Christian in the sense we believe in Jesus who walked in Palestine 2000 years ago and we're Christian and we believe that he died on a cross and somehow that's salvific. Has a role in soteriology. But what else is Christian? I mean, we, we have a corporeal God who evolved to that status.

John Dehlin [02:11:56] Who. I mean, you know, I mean, we believe in the Bible, we believe in the New Testament. Like we believe that Jesus died and was resurrected and died for our sins. I think from, honestly, I'm not a former evangelical, but from an ex Mormon standpoint, that's just trying to be objective. It just seems like 98% of what's important we share.

Lance Kennedy [02:12:18] That's true. But what I'm saying is from a self identification, Mormons will say, I'm Christian and they don't understand why. What I'm saying is from the 2 billion plus other Christians. Right, not your 4 million active members. They don't consider you Christian because you're

John Dehlin [02:12:31] a heretic for what's most important to them.

Lance Kennedy [02:12:34] Correct. Because it's actually you are worse than a false religion because you're taking the truth and warping it. And so again, a Catholic, an orthodox, the Archbishop, the Patriarch of Constantinople, Franklin Graham and the Pope could all get together and they would all affirm each other are Christians. Right. But they all disagree fundamentally on doctrine. Doctrine, because what the parameters that define the group. Right. Are those things that Mormons deny. So you're right, there are a lot of boxes and common ground. But we deny the things that are essential for Christians for self identification as Christian. And so that's kind of what I'm saying is not Mormons saying we don't believe in Jesus, but rather Christianity writ large, identifying Mormons as such.

John Dehlin [02:13:21] But I mean you can see why a Mormon feels like it's confusing to not be considered Christian Christian when we worship Christ and believe in Christ and believe in the Bible. You can see that, right?

Lance Kennedy [02:13:30] I do, but I also find it, I mean I don't want to say people are ignorant that think that, but what I do think is you fundamentally just don't understand other the theology and what these terms mean. It's not just like again, Jehovah's Witnesses believe in Jesus but they're not Christian according to a Catholic, a Protestant and orthodox. Right. Because they deny that Jesus was, was God in the Trinity, he's pre existent to them. But that's what I'm saying is that.

John Dehlin [02:13:57] No, I get it.

Lance Kennedy [02:13:58] Yeah, no, I know you do.

John Dehlin [02:13:59] What about the harm to Mormons to jettison to active Latter Day Saints to jettison the term Mormon and. Or the harm to the corporate church to jettison the term Mormon in terms of SEO, marketing, branding, et cetera.

Lance Kennedy [02:14:15] Well, I would say that the general reaction outside of the church is just to call us Mormon. They're just going to ignore it. Right, because member of the Church of Jesus Christ, Latter Days. I mean it's like 50 words you know, and member of the church. Which church? You know, like these are all generic terms now Mormons love generic terms.

John Dehlin [02:14:32] Well, it's the Church of Jesus Christ. Correct.

Lance Kennedy [02:14:34] Which is the new, the new one they're pushing. I would say that the, the response has been incredulous. It's incredulous like no one believes it outside.

John Dehlin [02:14:43] Nobody cares.

Lance Kennedy [02:14:44] No. Or they just don't believe it's like whatever the sobriety, branding.

John Dehlin [02:14:46] What about insight? How does it harm insiders to not have that identity?

Lance Kennedy [02:14:50] Well, I would say this, I, I think that it actually speaks to psychology members too, because, and this is what I really believe, I think if tomorrow if I talk to a rank of member and I've actually had this conversation, it's not about the name change, but it kind of coincides with this. They'll say like the family proclamation, that is the, the red line. And you know, if they ever, you know, have blessings of homosexual unions, I'm out of the church. Right. I believe those people. People, the day they announced that they're going to seal homosexuals in the temple would say at sacrament meeting, I had to pull over and the Lord spoke to me.

Lance Kennedy [02:15:24] They'll just, you know, they're gonna, they're gonna accept anything. I really believe that as far as the name change, same thing you have the name your, your ancestors lived by for hundreds of years were probably killed for which were persecuted. You know, notwithstanding the, the name Christian was a pejorative. It says so that it was a, it was the, the critics of the church called him Christian. That wasn't Christians calling themselves. They adopted the name. So the fact it was a nickname to me is kind of, that's a stupid reason not to call ourselves that. As far as the harm, though, I think again, rank and file members will go along with it.

Lance Kennedy [02:15:57] They'll say, this is so inspired. It was so wonderful. I had to pull over on the side of the road because the Lord touched me so much. But what it's doing to them psychologically is it's, it's unmooring them. It's removing history, it's removing all the meaning associated with that term. Like, like think about what Mormon means. It's a cultural complex. It's a religious complex. It's a history, it's a place name. It has a lot of again, ethnic characteristics to it. Now to just replace it with member of the church, I mean, what else are you losing?

Lance Kennedy [02:16:31] And that's what I'm saying is going to be the big harm. It's going to be harm to my kids. It's going to be a harm to the children growing up in the church. They're not going to have the same cultural depth identity. I mean, you see this with the move away General Conference from talking specifically about the United States and the American ness of the Church.

Lance Kennedy [02:16:49] I think that the Mormon identity was a bulwark for the church, but it was also something That I think was problematic or troublesome for them going elsewhere because it had all these components to it. It.

John Dehlin [02:17:00] Maybe they're coming after me and Mormon Stories and the Open Stories foundation because they want to bring it back.

Lance Kennedy [02:17:05] That's possible, but why would. I mean, I don't know. I think it's. You're too effective.

John Dehlin [02:17:13] We'll see.

Lance Kennedy [02:17:14] But they didn't go after a Book of Mormon play. I mean, maybe they couldn't. I don't know.

John Dehlin [02:17:19] But they certainly can afford more lawyers and more expenses. Yeah. No, I mean, whoever owns Secret Lies of Mormon, Rose Hulu.

Lance Kennedy [02:17:29] You said naked.

John Dehlin [02:17:29] Whoever owns a Book of Mormon musical, they would be a lot more expensive to sue.

Lance Kennedy [02:17:33] You know, honestly, I couldn't tell you what the motivation is. I mean, it could be that you're an opponent and they, you know, and that could be it. But I do think there's a. It goes to the. The name change and the motivations is a deep insecurity I perceived with Mormons about being, like, weird, being outsiders, not being normal.

John Dehlin [02:17:50] Yeah.

Lance Kennedy [02:17:51] Like, we're not a member of a cult. We're Christians, just like you. It's like, no, you're not.

John Dehlin [02:17:55] The weird thing is I don't see myself as an antagonist or enemy to the church.

Lance Kennedy [02:18:00] I never have either, I think. I mean, you have differences of opinion and.

John Dehlin [02:18:04] But I'm also trying to get the church to do better. So I feel like I'm trying to help the church improve.

Lance Kennedy [02:18:07] You helped me, and I'll tell you why. Because I would have not been intellectually engaged during this is. You know, this is not. When there were a lot of resources online. There weren't Amazon. I couldn't go find books, you know, know. So, you know, I relied on Mormon stories to, I think, give me additional context and history that I otherwise wouldn't. I did a church history trip as a single guy when I. When I was. I was going to school in Boston, so I drove across the country and I listened to Mormon stories the whole time, going through Nauvoo and all these church history sites.

John Dehlin [02:18:37] Yeah. Well, it's fun. Well, we'll see how that goes. So where does that leave you? Where does this leave you today? So, as I. I mentioned at the beginning, you're still active in the church.

Lance Kennedy [02:18:50] I am.

John Dehlin [02:18:51] You're still married, and you and your wife, I assume, are still raising your kids largely in the church. What do you want to say about where you stand? Do you want to talk about your beliefs? Do you want to talk about the risks of coming on Mormon stories and why you came on and how you see, see your future and your family's future playing out in the church.

Lance Kennedy [02:19:19] Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there,

John Dehlin [02:19:22] a lot of questions.

Lance Kennedy [02:19:23] I mean, look, Mormonism is bigger than any one moment in time. And so the interest that I'll have is there no matter what. There's just so much research and interesting things and Joseph Smith is this incredibly fascinating guy with, you know, some really interesting things that are coming out. And I've done my own research. Hopefully we can talk about and

John Dehlin [02:19:45] you

Lance Kennedy [02:19:46] know, so we, we want, I want my kids. I don't want to rob them of their heritage, their connection with their church. I don't want to, you know, anyway malignant or anything like that. And I want it to be a successful institution. I think it does a lot of good and you know, for what it's worth, you know, it does produce really good people. Like, like there's the, the output as a product, you know, notwithstanding some of the downsides, there's also some really good that it does do. But my concern writ large is that it's going to be unrecognizable and in 10 years there's going to be crosses on top of every temple.

Lance Kennedy [02:20:22] They took down Moroni, right. So they could create space. I mean, it's a joke, but is it. I don't know. I think that the only hope that you have for abating what I consider to be the seeker sensitive trend is is they wake up and recognize that it's actually been counterproductive for them, that it's lowered, you know. Yeah, you have these upticks in missionaries, you have upticks in baptisms post Covid and stuff. But like, what is the sticking power of this? And you may have to stomach again that you're not in the growth trend you once were. You could be losing people and you need to own it.

Lance Kennedy [02:21:00] And you also, you know, you're. Your DNA is not Protestantism anymore. You left that a long time ago in Nauvoo, really, in Kirtland. And so trying to LARP as that. Right. Like LARP as a live action role play, as a Baptist. It's just not going to work out for you.

Lance Kennedy [02:21:21] I don't see. I've been to a lot of wards. I don't see a lot of families joining the church. I don't think I've ever seen a family join the church. It's usually single guys that are kind of socially awkward.

Lance Kennedy [02:21:31] And so, you know, if you're really looking to Invigorate people and keep them interested and active. You know, you have a wellspring of that. It's just you got to get over your hang ups of being embarrassed about your own history. I mean, it is what it is

John Dehlin [02:21:44] and so own it.

Lance Kennedy [02:21:46] There's no other choice.

John Dehlin [02:21:47] Yeah.

Lance Kennedy [02:21:48] That's why, that's what I'm saying is just like you're going to lose members if you don't own it. You already are.

John Dehlin [02:21:52] Yeah.

Lance Kennedy [02:21:52] So you have to own it. And you may still lose members, but I think it'll be less.

John Dehlin [02:21:57] Yeah. I'll just tell you a quick little story or two. So you probably know that when Gordon B. Hinckley was president, he would do interviews like on Larry King, which was like the biggest talk show in the world at the time. And there was a time when someone asked Hinckley, is it true that Mormons believe they could become gods?

Lance Kennedy [02:22:21] We don't know anything about that.

John Dehlin [02:22:22] Yeah. And he said, I don't know that we teach it, I don't know that we empathize.

Lance Kennedy [02:22:26] We ever taught it.

John Dehlin [02:22:26] Yeah. And so he was clearly distancing us from that doctrine. And he did this two face thing where he said that to the public. But then when he returned to like a general conference talk, he told the members, reassured the members, hey, y' all have heard that. I did an interview, I'm paraphrasing. And he kind of said, don't worry, I understand the doctrine. And everyone laughed in the General conference. So basically, basically what he was doing is kind of being two faced. He was telling the world. Yeah, that crazy God maker stuff. We don't believe. But he was telling the members, don't worry, we still believe all those things.

John Dehlin [02:23:06] So one of my first sunstones, this is like 2004, Michael Quinn shows up and he gives a talk about something. This is just my memory. Do Mormons still kind of believe in theosis and this idea that Mormons could become gods? And I didn't realize at the time that he was still a full believer in golden plates in the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [02:23:31] But the way I remember him summarizing his sunstone talk was by jettisoning the doctrine of theosis to accommodate mainstream Christians, the Mormon Church is selling its birthright for a mess of pottage thousand percent.

Lance Kennedy [02:23:51] And that's the exact way I would say it because you got to remember, what did Joseph get killed for? I mean, a lot of reasons, but one of them was his theology he was teaching. It was way out there. I mean, and incorporating masonry and everything else. He was doing. So to then go back and say, actually we're just like these guys is a little bit, I think, insulting. And, you know, Michael Quinn was correct. I had actually had the opportunity to correspond with Harold Was Bloom, who wrote American Religion.

John Dehlin [02:24:20] Yale professor. Never Mormon.

Lance Kennedy [02:24:22] Yeah, never Mormon. Jewish scholar of literature. And his book was very influential to me for a number of reasons. I've adopted his. Largely his understanding of America's religion as gnostic. I think that's probably true. But I asked him, I said, I was talking to him through email and I said, you know, why is, you know, if you were so correct, you predicted the church have 200 million members. And his response was, well, that's because they didn't. Didn't affirm their gnostic elements. And so in a way, I'm kind of echoing a similar sentiment, which is you only have so much distinctives, like what's the offer you're making? Is your offer authoritarian methodism, or is this something truly unique and there's a lot of gray in between? But I think those are really your two kind of options you have.

John Dehlin [02:25:07] And I think it was the sociologist Rodney Stark that made that prediction that we would have 200 million members or whatever.

Lance Kennedy [02:25:13] It was based on the projections in the 80s and 90s, and they didn't see the number abating at all.

John Dehlin [02:25:18] Yeah, fascinating. The other thing I was going to say is there was a sociologist named Armand Moss. He was a Mormon sociologist. He wrote a book called the angel and the Beehive. He was a legendary Mormon studies scholar. And he made the point that throughout the whole history of the church, there are always these swings towards assimilation and retrenchment, assimilation and retrenchment, where the church becomes too distinctive and that starts to threaten their existence. Like with the federal government wanting to shut us down over assimilation. And so we assimilate, become more like the host population to survive. But then if we become too close to the host population, we.

John Dehlin [02:26:04] We lose our distinctiveness, we lose our value proposition. And then we swing more back towards retrenchment, which would be like Brigham Young and the Mormon resurgence, the Reformation, where you go, the Reformation, right. Or David O. McKay swinging us away from polygamy, which would be assimilation. But then Joseph Fielding Smith and Joseph F. Smith and Joseph Mbersama Conk in the 60s and 70s with Harold B. Lee, swinging us back towards correlation and more fundamentalism. And the idea is that we're always going to be doing this, oscillating between assimilation and retrenchment, and then back to assimilation.

Lance Kennedy [02:26:43] But you do two steps forward and one step back, right? Like this is the thing is like it's. Yes, there has been a pendulum. And you, you know, you do see like David O. McKay. I think that's where every member of missionary gets coined. That was kind of one of the big transition points to using more acceptable language. Then you have, of course, the subtitle to the Book of Mormon, Another Testament of Jesus Christ with, you know, Ezra Taft Benson. So there has been different moments. Then of course, the opposite direction happened with distinctives where you have correlation. I think it was Harold Bailey with the Garden Tomb saying this is the place that, you know, this occurred. So they wanted a distinctive. So there has been that. But it always ratchets back to, I think one level removed from where they began before. It never returns back to the distinctives.

John Dehlin [02:27:36] But I mean, on the other, I think you would agree that this is complex even for you, because I don't think you would go back to the one drop rule and taking push it away from black people. I don't think you would want polygamy to come back. I don't even think you would want Adam doctrine out of Adam God theory to come back. Maybe, but would you want the Masonic penalties put back in the temple ceremony?

Lance Kennedy [02:27:58] I'm not like, I don't know.

John Dehlin [02:27:59] They're so violent.

Lance Kennedy [02:28:00] They are violent, but I mean, like,

John Dehlin [02:28:02] seriously, you're cutting your throat. Like, you can't.

Lance Kennedy [02:28:05] And they, they kill animals in Islam during Eid. I mean, there's violence in religion. I mean, what is, what is the center focus of Christianity is torture. It's a, it's literally the electric chair of Roman style. So like, like the idea, this is making people so squeamish. Come on. Like, I, I get it, I get it. If you're never exposed to that before and, and granted, if you're going to Masonic Lodge, you know, you're, you're blindfolded, right? I mean, it's a little bit, you're anticipating something spookier to happen. But my point is, is like, I don't know if they can dial back and ratchet all of this stuff back, but clearly you could reaffirm the nature of God and Godhood.

Lance Kennedy [02:28:40] I personally think Adam God was taught by Joseph Smith. I think that's, that's clear through affidavits and also some contextual clues. Book of Abraham and others. But that wouldn't bother me. I think they should. I think that's a, that's obscene that they changed it.

John Dehlin [02:28:56] Well, surely you acknowledge the difficulty of their job. Right. I thought balancing all this, I think

Lance Kennedy [02:29:02] I out of any member of the church really understand what those guys are dealing with at the top. I mean, and I do have a lot of empathy for them, them and largely respect them. With President Nelson, I'll be honest with you and listeners, that was a hard one for me. It really was from the COVID vaccine, not being able to get a religious exemption, not be able to give religious exemptions to people who most of my congregants were.

John Dehlin [02:29:30] Oh, it was a branch president.

Lance Kennedy [02:29:31] Yeah. They were government employees working for border patrol or ATF or FBI or hsi couldn't get religious exemptions even though they wanted them because we, we were told not to. Yeah. So I definitely think that was hard. But I think there is going to be potentially a pushback. But I don't know, I don't know if it's in the Mormon consciousness to push back on things.

Where Lance Stands with the Church Today

John Dehlin [02:29:52] So where does that leave you in 2026? A couple ways. Number one is like what do you even want to talk about? Because there is some risk to talking about it. Do you even want to talk about what distinct distinctive Mormon beliefs you maintain?

Lance Kennedy [02:30:07] Sure, yeah. I mean, I, I, look, I, I have unique views on really any number of Mormon issues. But I do think though that some of the traditional, when I call traditional Mormon views on God need to be reemphasized. I think, you know, like Adam God. Right. It was taught in the temple to becoming a seven deadly heresy. It's like this weird transition. But I do think that that's a 19th century belief that is kind of beautiful in a way. It connects us with God even more so it opens some other questions about who Joseph Smith was. If you know, the Father comes at the beginning of time and the Son comes at the meridian, who comes at the dispensation of fullness.

Lance Kennedy [02:30:46] Some fundamentalists believe that Joseph happened to be the Holy Ghost, but I remember that. Yeah, but that's the logic. Right. And you know, but I, I think where it leaves me is I wish that, that if we were to loosen up and liberalize some things, it would be things that more of the cultural side. So like the word of wisdom. I think most Mormons probably need a beer to chill out. Like you have way too much time on your hand. You're too worked up on this. Like, you know, you know, just go, go, go drink a beer like Brigham did.

Lance Kennedy [02:31:16] I think that would be one. Loosen up the word of wisdom. I think I would make it, you know, the numbers, of course Come down, just really have a clean numbers, you know, and make it a more elite perspective rather than this. We're a mass church. I think you could reaffirm any number of traditional doctrines and not use the same transition of verbiage that they're using now.

John Dehlin [02:31:37] Does the church apologize for the priesthood and temple ban of black people?

Lance Kennedy [02:31:42] I think they probably should, yeah. Just to get it out of the way.

John Dehlin [02:31:44] What do they do with Joseph Smith's polygamy?

Lance Kennedy [02:31:47] I mean again, I think as a progressive John, you know, people can choose the way they arrange their sexual lives. No, I would say, I would say that that doesn't bother me. I mean, you know, again, now when you get into 14 year olds and things like that, we can have another conversation. But how can you get away from. And Joseph was a polygamist, you know, it's a fact.

John Dehlin [02:32:09] What do you do with Joseph's teenage brides?

Lance Kennedy [02:32:12] I think you have to say he made mistakes. These were wrong, you know. Now look, I'm not saying that 14 was normal in 19th century America. It was a different world. World. Right. So is it the same as today in 2026? No, I'm not going to say that. Am I going to say he shouldn't have done it? Yeah. So there's a difference there.

John Dehlin [02:32:30] But in your mind that doesn't disqualify him from being a prophet, having 14 year old brides?

Lance Kennedy [02:32:35] No, it didn't disqualify David from being king to kill someone, I mean, I think.

John Dehlin [02:32:42] Or having concubines and wives.

Lance Kennedy [02:32:44] Yeah, like look, what I'm saying is Joseph was sinful. He didn't have to be perfect. He had a lot of foibles and problems and you know how many pastors and preachers and priests have had sexual issues? A lot. How many popes? A lot. Does that mean Joseph shouldn't have done it? No, I just.

John Dehlin [02:33:02] It means he shouldn't have done it.

Lance Kennedy [02:33:03] No, that's what I mean. Yeah, of course, yeah, edit that.

John Dehlin [02:33:06] No, no, no, we get it. What about Book of Mormon historicity? What would you want to say about the importance of that?

Lance Kennedy [02:33:13] I think that, I think that the way the church is heading is that it is going to be a revelation, not a translation. Yeah. You can't ground it in a literal translation. And so Blake Ostler, who I know, one of the more forward thinking Mormon theologians, he proposed that in the 80s. Now whether that's satisfactory to people or not, I'm not saying it is, but what I am saying is that's the only. I think place you can kind of reside at this point and say some expansion theory of a Book of Mormon that it wasn't a pure translation, but

John Dehlin [02:33:47] that implies that there really was a Mormon and a Moroni and an Alma.

Lance Kennedy [02:33:50] And I think you, if you're going to be at any, I think to be a affirming Mormon of any level, you'd have to believe in some level of historicity of there was a group of Israelites who came here to the New World.

John Dehlin [02:34:04] So you're still okay with that?

Lance Kennedy [02:34:05] I'm okay with that, yeah. By being proved like I just don't care. Like that's not, you know, to be honest, the Book of Mormon never was the driving force of my faith. People always ask me, you know, did you convert after reading the Book of Mormon? I'm like, actually, no, I don't find it that interesting. Enthralling. I find Doctrine and Covenants to be a lot more interesting. And Pearl, great prize.

John Dehlin [02:34:26] Interesting, fun.

Lance Kennedy [02:34:28] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:34:29] Okay, last. Last. Ish. Question. What are you able or wanting to say about whether your local ward today is providing enough goodness to you, your wife, your marriage and your kids to where you're getting the value of membership or do you know, do you want to avoid that?

Lance Kennedy [02:34:55] No, I'll answer it. Okay, so I'll say this, and this isn't me prefacing it with a compliment, but I'll just kind of give you the context. So, like, my ward, I'm in, it's what you would call a, like a primo type ward. You know, we're, we're stacked with very high net worth educated people. You know, we're on the west side of Austin. You know, it's so it's a, it's a, it's a great ward in terms of the membership or highly capable. The bishop has whoever he wants to pull from in terms of quality, of teachers and all that. Like my Sunday school teaching companion's an ER doctor, right. Who played basketball for byu. So like, you know, we have pro, pro baseball hall of Famers and like that type of people were there. So it's great in terms of the community and who we're exposing our kids to.

John Dehlin [02:35:39] Being around the young Men's Young Women's program must be amazing.

Lance Kennedy [02:35:42] No, no, no. After CO. Come, follow me, man. Once they got rid of Boy Scouts, dude, it's, it's rough. It's rough. And I feel bad for my bishop. I mean, he's a great guy.

John Dehlin [02:35:51] Meaning the youth are inactive?

Lance Kennedy [02:35:52] No, no, not, not inactive. You're. Are you talking about activity or programming?

John Dehlin [02:35:55] Both.

Lance Kennedy [02:35:56] Activity. They're active. Yeah. I think they're overall active. Going on missions, doing what they're supposed

John Dehlin [02:36:01] to, but just the level of the, the rich activities.

Lance Kennedy [02:36:05] Yeah, the, the programming. And this goes for the church. This is like once they got rid of Boy Scouts, which I think was, the evidence says it was not a planned thing.

John Dehlin [02:36:13] I think they, it was damage control. Legal damage control.

Lance Kennedy [02:36:16] Yeah. But I'm saying even the program that they put out was a nothing burger. It's a nothing burger. Yeah. And, and the, the, the burden it put on me as a branch president. Right. And I didn't have that many young men, but to see it now, it's really tough. I, you know, and I think it's one of the things they'll maybe dial back at some point is allowing young men's presidencies. But that's an aside. In terms of programming, though, the problem you have now is because it's youth led, or at least theoretically youth led. You ask the youth, what do you want to do? They want to play basketball.

Lance Kennedy [02:36:50] They want to go like, you know, just they, they do the same activities over and over again. So the, the amount of activities is low. We have some abilities because again, affluence where like we have members with, you know, private shooting ranges and boats and so we can do some cool things like that. But like, in terms of like the way Boy Scouts was with campouts and projects. Yeah, that's gone. You went from, you know, the LDS Church went from having one of the most robust youth programs to one of the worst. And I say that honestly because like, and I'm saying that from a business perspective, from, you know, the way it's, it, it is a abject failure and they're going to lose the next generation of members because again, you're just not providing anything for them.

Lance Kennedy [02:37:34] Like, what's the point? The 20 minutes of Sunday school, like that's what you get out of it now. I mean, it's just not much.

John Dehlin [02:37:40] Statistics would show that, that 50 to 75% of your kids will leave the church.

Lance Kennedy [02:37:45] I think that's accurate. I was told by a mission Presidency Member that 50% of missionaries went inactive, but half of those came back. So out of RMs, they were losing about one in four. So I'd think, I don't know how many go on missions, but yeah, I think it's about 50%. That sounds accurate.

John Dehlin [02:38:01] And yet you're still deciding to raise your family in it.

Lance Kennedy [02:38:04] Yeah, well, I mean, some of that's A utilitarian decision. You know, again, it's, I liken it to being like Jewish. You want your kids to be around cultural Mormonism. And there is a distinctive culture there. You know, the buttoned up, crisp shirts and, you know, that, that culture, I think is really good.

John Dehlin [02:38:23] Striving for honesty, striving for morality, integrity, hard work.

Lance Kennedy [02:38:27] The spiritual component to material success that you, you know, you're not meant to be a monk. Somewhere you need to engage life. These are very Mormon things. I think those are good. I think the network is great, you know, and there is a spiritual component to it that's good. Right now, some of that's again, we've said watered down 100, but you know, for the time being, you know, that's, that's where we're going to be. But I think with my wife and I, a lot of it's utilitarian and you know, we, we also know what we can teach our kids at home. So they will see, you know, my, the scholarly books that I have, they will see books on Mormonism and Masonry.

Lance Kennedy [02:39:05] They will see, you know, books about the historicity of the Book of Mormon and Book of Abraham. Because I don't want them being lied to, you know, and then I have to answer questions and they're pissed at me as an 18 year old.

John Dehlin [02:39:15] Well, you want to inoculate them so they have a chance of staying.

Lance Kennedy [02:39:18] But if they, if they did. But at the end of the day, then they decide, I don't, I don't want this. It's on their own volition rather than feeling like I was lying to them.

John Dehlin [02:39:25] Yeah, yeah, because that's worse. That's what happened to me.

Lance Kennedy [02:39:28] I think it happened to a lot of people. I had a bishop, had a faith crisis after he read the gospel topic essays, and my mind was boggled that this guy's like 60 having a faith crisis over this. But yeah, it shows you that really that's kind of what people need to be inoculated for.

John Dehlin [02:39:46] I mean, they kind of shot themselves in the foot by hiding the problems for so long. And I think they were able to grow at a rate they probably wouldn't have grown at if they hadn't have hid the history from its members. So it's hard to know whether they made a mistake or not.

Lance Kennedy [02:40:04] It's hard. I mean, that, that is hard to say. I, I think it was, again, it was insecurity about being labeled as a cult. That's where most of it goes to is Joseph's involvement with the occult and Western esotericism.

John Dehlin [02:40:16] Yeah.

Lance Kennedy [02:40:17] So you want to distance yourself from that.

John Dehlin [02:40:20] So. Okay, now maybe the last two questions.

Lance Kennedy [02:40:24] Are we talking about pallial too?

John Dehlin [02:40:25] No. Oh, well, I was. Okay. Why don't we. Let me ask a couple more questions and then we'll talk. We'll give a preview of your research. But I think we should give your research its own episode. But before I end, before we give you the teaser, because he's done some really cool research. Really cool research. Two strains that I really want you all to see. I desire you all to receive it. Before then, I want to close with two questions. You must know that at least some people have received pressure, if not even threats of discipline or church discipline for coming on Mormon stories and for being honest. And then the second part of that is, if you knew that, which I know you did because you wrote it in your outline, why did you decide to come on and even do this episode? Well, I mean, two. Two questions.

Lance Kennedy [02:41:20] So one is, I'm hoping my church and its leaders are charitable enough to allow me the ability to say what I'm saying. There'd be a hope, but I mean,

John Dehlin [02:41:28] is there some end you.

Lance Kennedy [02:41:29] No, no, no. I'm prefacing what I'm gonna say with that. Yeah. Which is. Yeah, I mean, I. I had asked myself, I said this earlier on, you know, what was my motivation? 1. I mean, mean, I like the topics we want to talk about, about the origins of the true order, order of prayer, or, you know, the. The change in language. I mean, those things are fascinating, but, like, why would I want to put myself in the position of, you know, potentially getting in trouble or something? And really it came down to wanting to create a record, honestly. I mean, we're told to create records in the church.

Lance Kennedy [02:42:00] So I'm creating a record now saying, hey, you're making these changes. I don't think they're going to stop. I think you're going to continue doing it. And I want to know and show, you know, the people that tell me, you know, we use the word gaslight, right? Like, tell me, oh, no, this was always the case. I can point to a record and say, no, I said this was going to keep changing the trajectory. Was still that your. Your project of Protestantization, right, Of, you know, making yourself crypto evangelist evangelicals is. Is not. It's not a working model. It's failed every single time the churches have done it.

Lance Kennedy [02:42:36] I mean, Vatican II, you had an 80% decline in Catholic education and vocations in the US alone after they. They did Their move to modernity, mainline Protestant dominations. They're, I mean they're literally vestiges of themselves.

John Dehlin [02:42:50] Is evangelical Christianity in decline though?

Lance Kennedy [02:42:53] It depends which, which type. Like so if you were saying the Southern Baptist Convention, right. It's had decreased, you know, decreased membership is still big. Right. But like mainline evangelicals, like Methodists, United Methodists who are now split. Yeah, they've, they've completely declined to the point of irrelevance in many ways. But like non denominational Christianity has exploded. But a lot of that's transitions from people from mainline Protestant and denominational churches into them switching. Yeah, so I don't think it's true conversions like you're not seeing some massive revival. You're seeing being really just transitioned from one church to the other. And I think that's what they're trying to capitalize on in our church is make the transition for converts easier.

John Dehlin [02:43:36] It seems like there's a resurgence in Catholicism right now. Have you noticed that? Just in the past year or two.

Lance Kennedy [02:43:43] So this is actually really interesting. If you had done the study and you'd ask the consultants who are the relying upon, you'd say hey, look at these guys are doing. They're getting the interest from gen Zers, the same demographic, we're you know, hemorrhaging.

Lance Kennedy [02:43:57] But I, I don't know if the numbers show a massive resurgence as it is a particular uptick as gen Zers. So like as a person, Gen Z men. Yeah, first group that's been more religious than women. Some of that I think is, you know, atomization, alienation from society, wanting some type of roots. And so they're drawn to these really traditional forms. But again, yeah, you go to, I went to an SSPX mass, Catholic Tridentine mass and it was full of, you know, 30 year olds, families, young families. I went to a Novus Ordo new modern Catholic mass. It was fairly empty. Now granted those are subjective samplings, but I do think that that is what they're seeing is these traditional churches are

John Dehlin [02:44:44] growing so strong, strong, traditional, confident, old school religions probably have the most viability,

Lance Kennedy [02:44:53] you're saying, or staying power. I mean look at Islam, they don't change at all and they're growing. I mean like, you know, that's, that's just, I think that's the nature of religion. Yeah, it's just the nature of psychology of people in religion. So you don't have to have a divine origin to say it's just because. Why do people want to be a part of this? Well, they need Something that's bigger than them, that's timeless, that's, that's rock solid, that has principles.

John Dehlin [02:45:13] Exactly.

Lance Kennedy [02:45:13] But if you're constantly changing, hint, hint, like some churches do. Yeah, well, what's the point? You're not giving me anything timeless and immortal and permanent. And so I think that's probably why we're seeing uptake. But yeah, we're going that direction.

John Dehlin [02:45:28] And every time the prophets make a big change away from what previous prophets have said or taught, they're in effect undermining their own authority.

Lance Kennedy [02:45:39] Correct. And this is why under President Nelson there was the, the decanonization of the Journal of Discourses. Those are no longer, they have now disclaimers on them saying they're not official publications. Why you want to unmoor yourself from prior, prior teachings. So those are no longer authoritative and the real focus has been re. Centered on the living prophet. So you know, in a way they're trying to I think shore up the problem with that which you're speaking of, which is, is how do you, how do you deal with the change that was made by a prophet in the past? I think right now the transition is. Well, it doesn't matter what a prophet said in the past. The living prophets, all that matters. And I think that's, that's kind of where we're currently at.

John Dehlin [02:46:25] To. In your mind, to our detriment.

Lance Kennedy [02:46:27] Possibly 100%.

John Dehlin [02:46:28] Yeah.

Lance Kennedy [02:46:29] Because you have to ask what the motivations are.

John Dehlin [02:46:30] Yeah.

Lance Kennedy [02:46:31] And like, you know. Yeah, you're uncomfortable. Certain things that are said in the journals of discourses. I mean, Brother Brigham gives us quite a few.

John Dehlin [02:46:37] Few.

Lance Kennedy [02:46:38] But what's the motivation? The motivation is this enables. Frees up my authority now I no longer have to deal with these pesky 19th century sermons. They're no longer authoritative.

John Dehlin [02:46:48] But what they'll tell the membership is God said so probably. Yeah. But you're saying many of the members are smart enough to see what's going on.

Lance Kennedy [02:46:58] I mean I would hope, I would hope. I think the biggest, the closest I've gotten has been like Stake Presidents and stuff. Sighing. You know, clearly they're not happy. They're like, yeah, there have been a lot of changes, you know, kind of under their breath, but they're not going to say more than that because the, you know, the really the only remaining, I think theological more moreing that the church has is authority and so anything else can be jettisoned.

John Dehlin [02:47:30] Yeah, no, that we are the. That is the most sacred thing in Mormonism right now in my opinion, is its authority.

Lance Kennedy [02:47:36] Well, of Course.

John Dehlin [02:47:37] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Even though they're moving to putting Jesus at the center at the end of the day.

Lance Kennedy [02:47:44] Well, I mean, you're vicar of Christ, right? I mean. Well, I mean, but like, what was the whole project of Mormonism? It's how do we have authority to do sacraments, to do these ordinances?

John Dehlin [02:47:53] Yeah.

Lance Kennedy [02:47:54] So authority is at the heart of the project.

John Dehlin [02:47:55] No. And so to close, I imagine if you still want to stay in and. Or raise your kids in the church for as long as you're able, you're hoping no church discipline comes about as a result of this interview.

Lance Kennedy [02:48:12] I mean, yeah, of course. I don't. I don't think I said anything that I wouldn't say to someone in conversation, a stake president. And, yeah, you know, I've. But, yeah, I don't think it will, but I hope it doesn't. And if it does, so be it.

John Dehlin [02:48:27] Yeah. All right, so let's give a preview for the really cool research you've done. Let's start with. Which do you want to start with?

The General Conference Word Project and Protestantization

Lance Kennedy [02:48:37] Well, since we've talked a lot about changes in the church, let's talk about the General Conference word project, the rejects study I did.

John Dehlin [02:48:44] Okay, go ahead.

Lance Kennedy [02:48:45] Yeah, so, you know, I. We've. We've kind of mentioned John quite a bit about changes and, you know, we can lay them all out, from curriculum changes, changes to name change of the church, to the hinge comment about, you know, the Rome Temple dedication being the hinge point, removing Moroni and so forth. I, I wanted to, of course, you know, see where all these changes were being made. But, you know, at the end of it, I, I needed some type of empirical proof other than these type of, you know, public PR type of things that we're all kind of noticing the Church is making. And the, the way that I did that was actually by.

Lance Kennedy [02:49:21] By looking at all the public general Conference talks that BYU has housed through their conference index. And I think it might be the Scriptural index project. But what I did was I looked at that, looked for changes where word patterns started being amended and then really placing that on a chronology. And the findings were fascinating.

John Dehlin [02:49:44] So I think it makes sense to go ahead and, and show, you know, just. We. We'll just go and show the slides and we'll also probably do a separate.

Lance Kennedy [02:49:57] Yeah, we can do.

John Dehlin [02:49:58] We can just do a couple episode as well.

Lance Kennedy [02:50:00] Just pick the one you want me to talk.

John Dehlin [02:50:01] Turn. I'll turn the thing towards you so you can see it a little bit.

Lance Kennedy [02:50:04] No problem.

John Dehlin [02:50:04] Why don't you talk People through this.

Lance Kennedy [02:50:06] Yeah. So this is the, I call it the Reformation Index. Protestantization is a, a mouthful. And I also felt like seeker sensitivity or church growth wasn't. I don't know, it wasn't descriptive enough. So I went with the Reformation Index. And what it charts are seven different metrics across all general conference talks From I believe, 1948 till the last of President Nelson's talks. And it looks at Mormon distinctive doctrines, certain scriptures that are being mentioned, phrases like Holy Week or other generic pieties and things of that nature, and then looked at the, you know, the amounts that those are being, are being specified.

John Dehlin [02:50:49] So let's jam through it.

Lance Kennedy [02:50:50] Yeah. So the first slide just kind of goes over it. It just says Mormon conference rhetoric has gotten measurably Protestant. It's real, it's accelerating, it's picked up. President Nelson had a market increase and it really played the same playbook that I saw under the seeker sensitive movement. Movement. And we can go to the next slide. This is really the data set. And so you can see it uses the BYU Scripture Citation Index. Roughly, what is that? How many talks? Over 5,800 talks. 11.1 million words. So it's a fairly substantial data set that covers roughly 11 prophetic eras. And so what we have here is kind of a heat graph that goes through some of these. The first is the ratio of quotes. Quotes between the living prophet and Joseph Smith. You can see there's been a clear trend line towards the living prophet. Same thing with.

John Dehlin [02:51:48] So focusing more on the living prophet being true versus what Joseph said.

Lance Kennedy [02:51:53] Yeah, like quotes from President Nelson. President Nelson says. President Nelson teaches.

John Dehlin [02:51:57] President Oaks says.

Lance Kennedy [02:51:58] Yeah, but it was mostly President Nelson and also the other previous prophets as well in relationship to quotes by Joseph Smith. And, and it was actually fairly stable until recently.

John Dehlin [02:52:12] In other words, so trending towards more emphasizing the current prophet than Joseph Smith. Correct.

Lance Kennedy [02:52:17] But it wasn't even just a trend. It was a, a massive spike.

John Dehlin [02:52:21] Okay, so that's the heat map. Yep.

Lance Kennedy [02:52:23] And you also have other metrics like grace versus works. Right. 2015, I think, was kind of the high watermark of grace talk with President Uchtdorf at the time. And then you have other, these other metrics, but it tracked them across again, 11.1 million words. And then I charted them on some graphs. So maybe we could.

John Dehlin [02:52:41] Okay, go to the graphs.

Lance Kennedy [02:52:43] So again, Nelson is the high water mark. So if we do the composite score of those seven metrics that were on that heat graph, you can see that President Nelson was the highest and he was number One across eight. Robustness. This test, you can see there has been this general uptick. And Nelson, of course, is the spike. President Oaks has an asterisk. Just because there aren't. There isn't enough really to sample from at this point. He's only had, what, two general conferences, so. But you can see under President Nelson, this massive spike of all these different metrics showing.

John Dehlin [02:53:15] And that could just be Nelson. It doesn't necessarily mean to be a trend going forward.

Lance Kennedy [02:53:20] Correct. But the, the trend has not abated. And there are, you know, index indices that are showing that it hasn't. So we had the recent change with President Oaks with female Sunday school presidents. That's not, again, this huge, massive change per se. I think in Mormon culture kind of is. But the point is, is that I think we're still going to see that. And there could be a dialing back. I just, I haven't seen it yet.

John Dehlin [02:53:47] Okay, what's this slide?

Lance Kennedy [02:53:49] So this is the Lorenzo Snow couplet at as God once was, man now is. As man now is, or as God now is, man may become. I, I may have butchered it there. But the point is references to this couplet, as you can see, has just completely plummeted over the period from President Grant to President Nelson. It's also mentions of the plurality of Gods, the gods and so forth, and King Fallet style exaltation. So you can kind of see it's. It's down to 16%.

John Dehlin [02:54:20] So the theosis stuff is in decline.

Lance Kennedy [02:54:23] Any of the distinct. The, the way we phrase Mormon theology has the distinctive ways we phrase the gods created the heavens. Abraham, chapter 4. That verse has not been mentioned in over, like 15 years in general conference. So they're, they're clearly trying to stay away or repackage distinctive Mormon doctrines in generic Christian phrasing.

John Dehlin [02:54:45] Okay, all right, what about this next one?

Lance Kennedy [02:54:48] So this is two other kind of points. References to grace, Grace versus the liturgical calendar. So what we see here is in green, all the, the prior presidents of the church prior to President Nelson. You can see there is a slight uptick over time to references to grace versus work. So there was beginning to be a little bit more emphasis on grace versus works righteousness and works salvation. But it spikes again under Nelson. And then the other slide really is, I think, I think very telling. This is the phrase Holy Week. And you can see there's a couple other.

John Dehlin [02:55:23] You're calling this liturgical calendar mentions. And I don't think Mormons even know what the term liturgical means.

Lance Kennedy [02:55:29] Okay, so, so when, seriously, I Never

John Dehlin [02:55:33] heard that word ever growing up.

Lance Kennedy [02:55:34] Yeah. So in the New Testament, the word is liturgical. Liturgos. Okay. And what is kind of the. What you would go to. To a Catholic Mass is a liturgy. It's a scripted ceremonies like the endowment. The endowment is a liturgy. It's a similar process you go through. So within those churches that are liturgical, that use a liturgy, they also will have calendar dates and feast days and seasons of the year that correspond to certain colors. And this calendar repeats itself over time. One of those phrases that we have or two is Advent. Of course, leading up to Christmas, Deseret has now been publishing Advent calendars, and Ensign has Advent calendars, but Holy Week, specifically dealing with the week from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday.

Lance Kennedy [02:56:20] And under President Nelson, this is a unique phrase that started being used over and over and over again. So you have to again, ask the question of why is it the re. Emphasis on Easter, or is it this, you know, attempt to kind of use something that's very familiar.

John Dehlin [02:56:36] So Nelson mentions Palm Sunday and Holy Week and Good Friday, like exponentially more than anybody else.

Lance Kennedy [02:56:46] But not just President Nelson. All the speakers under his authors General conference talks.

John Dehlin [02:56:51] So clearly there was some talk. Let's start amping up the.

Lance Kennedy [02:56:54] Well, there has to be, because again, the quotations of President Nelson, the emphasis on certain doctrines. I mean, of course, I'm not privy to what general authorities go through to get their talks approved, but it has to be correlated. And so they, they're. They have to be given some. Because the, the, the indicators that you're seeing here, they wouldn't be. If one person makes the difference. These have to be a concerted effort on the body.

John Dehlin [02:57:18] That bar is just on the right. Crazy.

Lance Kennedy [02:57:21] I mean, it could be we're trying to be more Christian and emphasize the, you know, the passion Easter, which is not a big deal to Mormons, let's be honest. But I think again, you've seen it for probably part of the same reason I was talking about with other issues.

John Dehlin [02:57:34] Well, I was taught growing up it's not only that the Catholic Church is evil and that evangelicals are wrong, but that wearing the cross is evil, bad. Don't do it offensive.

Lance Kennedy [02:57:45] Yeah, Jesus. Like getting hit by a car. I've heard that. I always thought that was kind of

John Dehlin [02:57:49] silly, of course, but still, those were the rules.

Lance Kennedy [02:57:53] But that happened, you know, mid 20th century, the DE. Emphasis of the cross.

John Dehlin [02:57:57] Right.

Lance Kennedy [02:57:57] So, I mean, do I get.

John Dehlin [02:57:58] The Mormons didn't know that?

Lance Kennedy [02:57:59] No, they didn't.

John Dehlin [02:58:00] They didn't know. We just grew up thinking it was bad. Knowing it was bad. And the Mormons don't work out crosses.

Lance Kennedy [02:58:05] But now you see a lot. I see missionaries wearing crosses.

John Dehlin [02:58:07] Totally. It's weird.

Lance Kennedy [02:58:08] It is weird.

John Dehlin [02:58:09] It is weird.

Lance Kennedy [02:58:09] My, my mother in law has had some questions about that.

John Dehlin [02:58:12] Yeah. And then mentions of the living prophet eclipsing Joseph Smith.

Lance Kennedy [02:58:18] Yeah, this was the one I think was really telling to me. You know, I've never met a, a humble surgeon. But that being aside, you know, it really does show that there was this, this market increase and concerted effort to mention President Nelson.

John Dehlin [02:58:37] You're saying he got mentioned as prophet more than any other past prophet?

Lance Kennedy [02:58:41] Well, clearly, yeah. Including Joseph Smith. You can see the ratio relative to Joseph Smith. Yeah, exactly. And so he's the only president of the church to ever be mentioned in this fashion more than Joseph Smith. Now Hinckley got close on a couple years. I think there may have been one year where he went above, but. But Overall, yeah, it's 100% Nelson.

John Dehlin [02:59:03] Which means that couldn't be a coincidence.

Lance Kennedy [02:59:05] It's not. There must be. That's why I said the hinge point of the church is the, the Rome temple. What was he talking about? Rolling out all these changes to resuscitate the Church. Because what's the hinge? The hinge is church growth. We're going to see it flip back the other way.

John Dehlin [02:59:19] So you're saying it was 3.6 to 1 under Nelson?

Lance Kennedy [02:59:22] Yeah, I think so. I've run, I run this study a couple times.

John Dehlin [02:59:25] He was mentioned almost four times as much as Joseph Smith in general conference talks. So you're saying there might be a little bit of surgical narcissism there. Surgeon narcissism?

Lance Kennedy [02:59:35] I would never imply that about a prophet.

John Dehlin [02:59:37] You did imply it.

Lance Kennedy [02:59:39] Oh, I did? Well, I mean, you combine a surgeon with a prophet, I mean, I wouldn't consider those to be two humble professionals.

John Dehlin [02:59:48] I was excommunicated by surgeon so that you're getting in a sensitive territory for me.

Lance Kennedy [02:59:52] Oh, there you go, man.

John Dehlin [02:59:53] He was an orthopedic surgeon. Brian King. Hey, Brian.

Lance Kennedy [02:59:55] Hey, Brian.

John Dehlin [02:59:56] I'm sure he's watching. Okay. Language doesn't drift its steps.

Lance Kennedy [03:00:00] Yeah, and so this is kind of, again, extrapolating it on a longer timeline. It's not fair to center this solely on the Nelson era. There has been a general drift towards more generic piety. Really? Starting under David O. McKay, which is the television, you know, era. And again, every member a missionary. It was this kind of outward focus on the world. Clean shaven, white suited prophet and he kind of, I think, started this trajectory.

John Dehlin [03:00:29] Yeah. And then materialism flat, piety surging. What does that mean?

Lance Kennedy [03:00:34] Well, what it means is, is that, you know, so for the uninitiated, Mormons believe in a corporeal God, a God that has a body. Matter and spirit are identical. You know, matter is eternal. These are all very distinctive doctrines. Actually. They're the inversion of Christian doctrines about ex nilo creation and God being unique and so forth and simple. He doesn't have parts or passions. But yeah, so. So those would be what I would call the distinctive Mormon beliefs on God or the material God material aspects of spirituality. Material. You know, God lives on a planet. Planet or near a star called Kolob.

John Dehlin [03:01:12] All that stuff was in the temple ceremony when I was growing up.

Lance Kennedy [03:01:15] It's still there. It's still there. But what's happened is, you see is that the materialism language stays fairly static. So it's not as if they're not mentioning these things, it's that they're getting subsumed by general piety. And what I mean by general piety are language that a Baptist, a Methodist, a Presbyterian, a Pentecostal would all recognize. Like for instance, President Nelson's ministry. Like that was a phrase that kind of stuck out to me. It's like this is a weird term for a Mormon prophet.

John Dehlin [03:01:45] Because it's more evangelical.

Lance Kennedy [03:01:46] Yeah, because it's like a familiar term. Ministering versus home teaching. We're going to take down, you know, all of the distinctive artwork in our chapels and replace him with Jesus. Same with the temple. We're going to add Jesus to the temple and explanatory glosses. So the point is, is they didn't necessarily jettison the distinctives. They're just memory holing them or subsuming them in the general piety language.

John Dehlin [03:02:10] Coming to Christ grace, hear him the Savior.

Lance Kennedy [03:02:14] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:02:15] So you're saying this is the seeker sensitive playbook.

Lance Kennedy [03:02:19] Yeah, it's seeker sensitive. So again, the synchro sensitive methodology, both of Willow Creek and Saddleback Church was to do market driven research on what type of church would be productizable, sellable, commodifiable. And you know, these guys weren't doing it for nefarious reasons. They were doing it because they're like, how do we go get these unchurched people in Southern California and Chicago to come to church? And that's like, that was their, their, their mindset. So they wanted to make a church that was appealing to them, but it is a synchronized playbook. And the reason it was so controversial within evangelicalism was because you inadvertently have to, or not inadvertently, you have to downplay your distinctives.

Lance Kennedy [03:03:05] That could turn people off. And in doing so, those become forgotten doctrines. And so that's the consequence. So by running the same playbook, we're going to become generic, we're going to become easy. It's going to be easy. Church. It's not hard. It's easy. Your garments are shorter. It's clearly the same playbook of we want to make this the bar as low as possible for int country.

John Dehlin [03:03:31] Coca Cola is okay.

Lance Kennedy [03:03:33] Diet Coke.

John Dehlin [03:03:34] I mean, even the church doesn't care nowadays if you smoke cannabis or do psychedelics. Like as long as it's prescribed or you just don't. It doesn't ask. There's a don't ask, don't tell.

Lance Kennedy [03:03:45] Yeah, probably. I, I mean there, there clearly is again, there is a loosening of some of those, those parameters.

John Dehlin [03:03:53] And some say coffee is going to be. Coffee and tea are going to be legalized at some point.

Lance Kennedy [03:03:58] Now this is secondhand, but close friend, his first cousin's a member of the, one of the quorums of the 70, was a general authority and I saw the plan, the conversation, the notes from a conversation about that topic that they were having at church headquarters. Now, this was a number of years ago that it's being discussed, that it had been discussed. They have discussed at the highest levels that issue.

John Dehlin [03:04:21] Coffee and tea.

Lance Kennedy [03:04:22] Coffee and tea. But also other issues about changes they can make.

John Dehlin [03:04:25] Make. You don't want to say which ones.

Lance Kennedy [03:04:28] We could guess things you would be happy with, John.

John Dehlin [03:04:32] Oh, well, now I don't know what you're talking about.

Lance Kennedy [03:04:35] Okay.

John Dehlin [03:04:35] LGBT stuff probably. I'm not gay. You're not?

Lance Kennedy [03:04:38] No.

John Dehlin [03:04:39] Joking. No, I'm kidding. I, I'm not kidding, but I, I see what you're saying. Well, Saddleback's doing okay, right?

Lance Kennedy [03:04:45] Like, I don't know how, how Saddleback's doing, but I think the. There's still massive evangelical churches, but I think they've hit their. We're several generations now past the seeker sensitive phase. So I mentioned previously in the interview, the young restless and the reform reformed crowd, those churches grew really fast. There was a transition, I think back at some of these secret sensitive churches to being a little bit more theologically engaged. But specifically Saddleback or Willow Creek. I mean, Willow Creek's had major hard times because they're, you know, Bill Hybels had to resign a number of years ago.

John Dehlin [03:05:22] So, so the next slide is, did it work? And recently we've discussed Jeff Strong's data that shows that 40% of Mormons raised in the United States have left the church over the past 25 years. You have data too. What does your data show?

Lance Kennedy [03:05:40] Well, the data shows the growth rate of the church based on the percentage of, you know, the membership. In other words, so this is the growth rate relative to church membership size along with that Reformation index that I talked about. And as you can see, they crossed somewhere around 1990, but the index kind of stayed level and then spiked under President Nelson or right before. And then you see the growth trend has stayed low. It bounced back a little bit after Covid, but.

John Dehlin [03:06:13] So the Protestantization of Mormonism is not working in terms of retaining or growing the membership in the U.S. i mean,

Lance Kennedy [03:06:22] I don't, I don't, I, I don't have the empirical numbers other than some of the recent numbers that came out of states like Washington that showed a decrease in membership. So based on those, I would say no, clearly not. I mean, look, ask any, you know, believing person Mormon, go to their war board and just ask when's the last time a full family walked in and joined? You may have one, but in 20 something years, that's not who joins the church. That's not who I see. So we're not really seeing the same growth that they had in like the 70s where like, you know, people would join as a family and, you know, and so forth.

Lance Kennedy [03:06:56] But in terms of actually seeing the way it plays out, I think it's going to be 10 years before we can actually point definitively because by then this will have played out and then we'll actually have the, the numbers to go on.

John Dehlin [03:07:07] All right. We won't show the rest of the slides other than the last one, which is where you can find your data. So it's Reformation index, jerusalem and athens.com. yeah, that's where you can. And there's the slide.

Lance Kennedy [03:07:21] Yeah, I just hosted it on there and it gives you the, you know, all the, the ways that I pull from the data set and analyzed it. So if people want to critique it or do their own, they, they can do the same thing. But it's all open source information.

Masonic Origins of the Temple Endowment

John Dehlin [03:07:32] Okay. All right. And so the final thing I want to just give a teaser about. I want this to be an LDS discussions episode, which I think is a big deal. But how do you want to preview your discoveries about the temple ceremony and possible origins for some of Joseph's doctrines or practices?

Lance Kennedy [03:07:55] Yeah. So without going into too, too much know, too, too much detail, you know, we mentioned I'm a Mason. I was the District Deputy Grand Master of Austin, and I've been a past master, founded my own lodge. And, you know, so I've been through as many degrees and things and as. As one can probably go through with some exceptions. And so I fundamentally understand, I think, the way ritual works and ceremony and initiation, and that's what the Endowment is. It's a Mormon initiation with, of course, Masonic parallels. So I've been fascinated with it.

John Dehlin [03:08:30] Parallels or plagiarisms?

Lance Kennedy [03:08:32] Both, you know, but. But the point is, is like. The point is like, I've been legitimately fascinated with the Endowment as a ritual and Joseph's more esoteric work, because even, like, things like the Endowment were in public when, you know, he released them. And. And this is partially why I accept certain teachings that I think Joseph was teaching, preaching like Adam, God and so forth, because I think he was doing it under the cuff. You know, he wasn't publicly proclaiming this stuff.

Lance Kennedy [03:08:58] But one of the things I started researching was some of the aspects that were removed in 1990 was the Adamic phrase pale ale. And I started looking at figuring out, okay, what is the actual etymological origins of this word? And there have been a number of solutions that have been proposed, like D. Michael Quinn or Hugh Nibley and others have proposed their own variations. But I looked and I saw there was another word that was very similar that Joseph concocted, which was Barak ale, which was a code name that he used for himself in the United Order sections of the Doctrine and covenants in the 1840s, because these were legal.

Lance Kennedy [03:09:42] He was afraid of legal, you know, know, either prosecution or lawsuits based on the United Order. And so in the 1840s, he used a code name for himself, Barack Ale. So Pale Ale, Barak Ale, they have the same ale ending on the words. And that just kind of started a little research project that led me to conclude some of the originations of where Joseph was gleaning this material and what pale Ale is, and then also really what the purpose of the Endowment is.

John Dehlin [03:10:15] So you're saying that you found a likely source. And most current Mormons who aren't 56ish years old or older won't even have ever heard the term pele el. Correct.

Lance Kennedy [03:10:29] They wouldn't know about the penalties either.

John Dehlin [03:10:31] Yeah, but when I was going through the temple, we'd say pele el instead of, oh, God, hear the words of our mouth. There's the. Well, I don't know the.

Lance Kennedy [03:10:42] At the true order. Yeah, the word or the phrase or whatever. Yeah, I mean, and so once you unlock though the meaning of Pele Ale and what the, in my opinion, logical and likely etymology is in origin, it unlocks the whole purpose of the endowment and it becomes crystal clear because like things like for instance, certain elements, like when Satan shows back up and tries to trick him. And then of course, you know, Peter, James and John giving the token of the Aaronic priesthood. And then these certain aspects are like, what is the true door of prayer? They don't make sense, they're kind of disjointed. But once you start unlocking some of these things that I'm talking about, it becomes very clear what Joseph was trying to teach.

John Dehlin [03:11:24] And I don't know if you mind, but again, Pele El comes from where, according to your research.

Lance Kennedy [03:11:30] So Pele El, along with Barak and Ale are derived from a book called the Magus by Francis Barrett. And the Magus was a grimoire, a magical text. We have multiple points of contact with Joseph and his history. And I'm not the first to say this, but multiple points of contact with this book which happened to be subtitled the Celestial Intelligencer.

Lance Kennedy [03:11:53] And in that book it talks about things about light transfer from planets or angels as resurrected beings. But one of the individuals or angels that's mentioned is Peliel. P E L I E L. And when you use the same transliteration to get Barakael, you can reconstruct it as Peliel. And the reason that's significant is why would Peliel be the person? It's because that's the preceptor of Jacob is the angel that Jacob wrestled with. It's God's spokesperson.

Lance Kennedy [03:12:27] So when you're in the telestial world, who would come talk to you but God's spokesperson? So anyway, the Magus is the source text and we've been identifying really dozens of points of contact with scripture that we currently have, but also Joseph's history and other coincidences that all point to this source.

John Dehlin [03:12:49] And I mean if you run this by Dan Bogle and folks like that to get their blessing. Not that they're gatekeepers, but they kind of.

Lance Kennedy [03:12:57] No, I, I haven't. Nick Ly, who is one of the co authors of Method Infinite, is a good friend of mine. And we've been, we've been working on this. He's also a mason and so he wanted, he wanted Cheryl Bruno too, right?

John Dehlin [03:13:12] Yeah, I mean, has been involved in that.

Lance Kennedy [03:13:14] Correct? Cheryl Bruno was. Yeah, she was, she was one of the authors, the three. And so. But Nick and I have been working on this quite a bit. Nick is one of the individuals that kind of helped decipher some of the magical parchments that are in the Smith family. And then we've been kind of working with each other on this Magus theory.

John Dehlin [03:13:34] And is it the type of thing that eventually you might publish in dialogue? I mean, this is a classically dialogue like article.

Lance Kennedy [03:13:42] I submitted it to Sunstone Stone, but it's in the editorial process. I have no idea.

John Dehlin [03:13:47] They've got to approve this.

Lance Kennedy [03:13:48] I hope they do.

John Dehlin [03:13:49] Yeah. But also dialogue.

Lance Kennedy [03:13:50] I should write it, say a good word, put me in contact.

John Dehlin [03:13:53] Oh, for sure.

Lance Kennedy [03:13:54] Yeah. Because, I mean, legit, though, like, the amount like, like, again, no one noticed that the subtitle was Celestial Intelligencer, and the symbols were on Joseph Smith's parchments and on his Jupiter talisman and the Mars dagger. You have so many points of contact, not only at the beginning, end of his life, but also in the scriptures too, that point to this as a source text.

John Dehlin [03:14:14] Maybe this belongs in the Journal of Mormon History, but maybe if I put you in touch with John Turner, he can review it, become a co author, and then I would love it. Okay.

Lance Kennedy [03:14:23] Yeah, I love his critique. And I'm not a guy that wants, like, you know, hey, I came up with a Paliel thing, but, like, if people want to stress test it and get some credit for expanding it, that's great.

Closing Reflections and Farewell

John Dehlin [03:14:34] All right, well, Lance Kennedy, I am so happy that you were willing to come, come to Utah and tell your story and share your research with us. But mostly I'm just. I love it that, you know, I've always tried to interview active, faithful Mormons. So I just have loved your story today and all you're wanting to share, and I love it that you're still Mormon.

Lance Kennedy [03:15:01] Yeah, no, I mean, and John, I really mean this. This is like, I'm not blowing smoke, you know, Rubber. I. I really do appreciate your show and it has been a great resource and I know probably for a lot of people, just because if you don't have people to talk to, like, I didn't have my family or friends that could talk about some of these historic things, you know, you need a resource. You provided that. And it also gave me a way to start processing my own thoughts, you know, and not feel like I was by myself, which was great. And. Yeah, I just appreciate you, man.

John Dehlin [03:15:32] Thank you. And I love you telling the world that not only have you never been confused about. About who owns and runs Mormon Stories podcast, but the Mormon stories helped you join the church and has helped you stay in the church.

Lance Kennedy [03:15:45] Yeah, I won't comment on the being

John Dehlin [03:15:47] confused, but yeah, you already did, by the way.

Lance Kennedy [03:15:51] I did. I know. Thank you for reminding me.

John Dehlin [03:15:52] All right, Lance Kennedy, if people want to reach out to you, contact you, how do they do it?

Lance Kennedy [03:15:56] Just, just email me. Lance Kennedy, Gmail. It's fine.

John Dehlin [03:16:00] Oh, that's. You got that, you got that early?

Lance Kennedy [03:16:02] I got it real early. Or you, you can lanceancekennedy.com but that's my law firm one, so the Gmail one's fine.

John Dehlin [03:16:08] Beautiful. All right, well, thanks for joining us today on Mormon Stories, everybody. Thanks everyone who donates to make it possible. We couldn't do it without you. Please like and subscribe to this channel on YouTube and elsewhere. Please comment. Email us@mormonstoriesmail.com if you donate. Thank you. If you don't donate. Thank you. And you want to see us continue, you can go to mormonstories.org donate Become a monthly donor. If you want to donate to our legal fund to help us survive the multimillion dollar lawsuit that the church has launched against us, you can go to mormonstories.org legal and donate to our defense fund.

John Dehlin [03:16:48] We're a nonprofit. Our donations in the US Are tax deductible. And thanks to Brooklyn and Julia for all they do behind the scenes to help keep us afloat, along with Margi and our board. And yeah, if you want to like Lance, be interviewed on Mormon Stories podcast, all you gotta do is go to MormonStories.org apply and do a 3 minute video and fill out the form. And if you're a good storyteller with a good story and you have a really good sense for how our audience will would love your story, then there's a good chance we'll accept you to be interviewed. So please apply if you think that works.

John Dehlin [03:17:32] And yeah, again, tune in in the next days, weeks and months for more Mormon Stories Podcast episodes. Be good to each other, be kind to each other and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories Podcast. Take care.

Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.