John Dehlin

Upcoming Events and Announcements Overview

[00:00:00] Mormon Stories Listeners I have five very important announcements that I'd like to make to you, my listeners, and I'll try to make it brief. I am planning on holding some workshops and a reception at the Sunstone Symposium on August 4th and 5th. Here are the details for the workshop. I'm planning on hosting a two part workshop in the morning. The topic will be how to navigate an LDS Crisis of Faith for anyone who is struggling in their faith or who knows someone who is struggling in their faith. The goal won't be to keep you in the church or to get you out of the church, but will be to help you navigate the waters of dealing with a crisis of faith.

[00:00:41] The second part in the afternoon will be for couples and it will be dealing with what to do in a marriage when one of the partners in a marriage loses their testimony. Here's what I need to know from you. Are any of you interested in attending a symposium or a workshop like this in Salt Lake on August 4th? If you are, please let me know. The cost will be $25 for a single session and $40 for the full session. I am also planning on going out to dinner that night with folks after the workshop, so it could be a really fun way to meet some of you and to see if we can help each other figure out how to navigate Mormonism.

[00:01:22] So if any of you are interested in either of these workshops or know someone who might be, please email me@mormonstoriesmail.com Also, I'm exploring the option of hosting a Mormon Stories listener reception on August 5th on Thursday evening again in conjunction with the Sunstone Symposium. So if any of you are interested in spending an hour or two with me, along with maybe some former interviewees and some fellow Mormon Stories listeners, please let me know via email@mormonstoriesmail.com I'm only going to hold the workshops and the reception if there's enough interest.

New Private Listener Forum Launched

[00:02:00] Okay, point number two. I have started a private Internet forum for listeners to Mormon Stories and the formula is pretty straightforward. This is a private Internet forum. You can only join the forum by invitation only if I let you join. Everyone in the forum uses their real name, although there is an exception to that. But the reason why we use real names is to help make the forum conversations more constructive and healthy and to build a sense of community within the forum.

[00:02:31] So all the conversations in the membership list within the forum will be copyrighted and will not be shared outside the forum. If you are unable to use your real name specifically, if you're like a church employee or BYU employee and you can't identify yourself for risks of losing your job. We can make special arrangements to protect your anonymity, but the purpose of this forum is to provide people with a safe place to speak with other like minded Mormons about their Mormon experience. We have Mormons of all types on the forum. It's going very strong and we have true believers on the forum, people who are in the middle and people who have left the church.

[00:03:12] And the only requirement other than maintaining the confidentiality of the group is that you always treat forum members with respect regardless of their status in the church. So believers must be respected, non believers must be respected, and violators of this policy will be removed. If you want to join this community, please friend me on Facebook both as John Dehlin and and as Mormon Stories. And once you friend me, send me an email which basically tells me your story and why you're interested in being a part of the forum. And you also have to promise that you're willing to comply with the rules. Once you've done that, I will add you to the community and you can enjoy this wonderful community that now exists.

Non-Profit Status and Fundraising Goals

[00:03:57] Okay, so that's number two. Number three is a very important announcement. Mormon Stories is now an official non profit 501c3 organization, thanks to a good friend, Ryan Millicom, who's a corporate attorney at Gammage and Burnham in Phoenix, Arizona and also a longtime fan and listener.

[00:04:18] Ryan helped me establish a 501 nonprofit called the Open Stories Foundation. We didn't use the word Mormon because we wanted to avoid being sued, but it's basically a non profit organization which will allow your donations to Mormon Stories to be completely tax deductible.

[00:04:36] We did this in hopes that it would encourage you, our listeners, to better support Mormon Stories because you'll get a big tax break from it. Also, as a 501, I'm very interested in creating a formal board of directors to help shape the future of Mormon Stories. I'm looking at the possibility of growing Mormon Stories into a radio show or a TV program someday. And if any of you are interested in sitting on the board of directors helping me shape and grow Mormon Stories for the future, please join the Mormon Stories Community forum as I indicated earlier, and let me know of your interest in being on the board of directors.

[00:05:13] There will obviously be a limit to who I can add, but I'm interested in people who are interested in helping support in that level. That's number three. Number four, I am conducting a three month experiment or a donor drive on Mormon Stories and here is the background.

[00:05:32] Over the past few months I've worked very, very hard to bring you some very high quality interviews both in audio and video. From the Ed Kimball interview to the Bent Washburn interview to the how to raise your children in the church as semi believers. I've tried really hard to give you guys things that would be helpful.

[00:05:52] But a new situation has risen where I need your help. Many of you know that I just finished up my first year of a six year psychology PhD program. It was kind of crazy to leave my six figure job with MIT and with four young children at home to go back to school.

[00:06:10] But my work with Mormon Stories has really led me to feel like I need to become a counselor and a psychologist, specifically to work with folks who struggle within the LDS Church. My hope someday is to hold seminars and workshops and to write books that help people who are struggling in their faith find joy, whether that's in or out of the church. And to help keep marriages from breaking up when one or both of the members loses their faith. If it's not healthy for the marriage to break up. If it's a good marriage in every other way.

[00:06:39] So the glitch is the I was recently offered a $15,000 assistantship to cover some of my expenses next year as a grad student. And it would have been a 20 hour a week assistantship where I would have to be a full time student and work 20 hours a week. But if I had taken it, I would not have been able to continue with Mormon Stories because I just wouldn't have had the time. So I took a bit of a crazy gamble. I turned down the assistantship with the hope and faith that I could recruit enough monthly support from my listeners to at least make up for the assistantship that I turned down.

[00:07:15] Basically that $15,000 over the year. So here's what I'm going to do. Over the next three months I have planned some of the most exciting and fascinating and interesting guests and projects to date for Mormon Stories. I really think that what we have planned is going to be outstanding and what I'm going to do in exchange is to see how many of my listeners you I can get to sign up for an automatic monthly subscription to Mormon stories can be $5 a month, $10 a month, $20 a month, whatever you can afford.

[00:07:49] If I can get enough people to sign up for monthly subscriptions, I will definitely keep Mormon Stories going at the rate it is now, which is one multi part interview per week. If I can't get enough listeners support me in this way, I will probably keep Mormon Stories going, but it will likely have to be.

[00:08:10] I'll probably have to get a part time job for next year and I'll only be able to release the episodes that I can release after school and work currently. My web statistics tell me that each Mormon Stories episode is being downloaded thousands of times, which means that I technically have thousands of listeners. So I guess I'm asking for those of you who have enjoyed Mormon Stories and benefited from it to please consider signing up for a monthly donation.

[00:08:39] If I can get only two or three hundred of you to do this, I promise to make Mormon Stories even better than it has been to date. And I also promise that the guests that I have coming up and the projects that I have coming up will be even more exciting and valuable to those of you than they have been in the past. So to donate and to sign up for a monthly subscription of Mormon Stories, please please click on the donation button at the top of mormonstories.org we do this through PayPal and you can use a credit card or a bank or a checking account or whatever works for you.

Volunteer and Community Support Needed

[00:09:18] Final thing, in addition to people who can make monthly contributions, I am urgently looking for volunteers to help donate their time in various ways to keep Mormon Stories strong. So if any of you, especially those of you who have interviewing skills or audio editing skills or web skills, or who spend a lot of time on the Internet in the various Mormon forums, please consider helping out by joining Mormon Stories Forum as a community member to donate some of your time.

[00:09:53] If you guys can help me out, that would really help relieve some of the technical burdens that I have and allow me to spend my time on creating more cool interviews. Anyway, those are the five projects that I'm working on. If you want to read about what I just told you to get more information, go up to mormonstories.org episode number 48 and you can read about what I just told you. And I hope that this experiment will go well. I love doing Mormon Stories. I hope you guys have enjoyed it. I'm not trying to extort any of you, but I really feel like this is a great way for me to provide you with great programming and to help me get through grad school simultaneously.

[00:10:31] So I hope to have a really bright future in partnership with all of you. Thanks for your support and and look forward to more interviews coming very soon. Thanks a lot. Bye.

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.