More Good Foundation

I work in the Religion Department at BYU, a job I've had for almost four years and love. About a month ago, my boss called four or five of us employees into his office to meet with a woman from the More Good Foundation. I had never heard of it before, but their goal is to spread a positive image of the Church, using the internet.

The Foundation has bought dozens of domain names, like mormunchurch.com and lds.net, and made them into social networking sites where people can ask or answer questions, bear their testimony, or just discuss gospel topics. The goal is that when people use search engines and type in things about the Church, that good stuff will come up, and not anti-Mormon things.

My boss told us that he wanted us to start posting on these websites and emailing back and forth with this woman from the More Good Foundation as part of our work for him. This is something that I was unsure about, I'm very private with my feelings on gospel topics most of the time. But these websites really are amazing, they've had baptisms as a result of them, and lots of people on there are not members and they have questions that they just want answered.

The Church is trying a lot harder to use the internet for missionary work. There are tons of videos on YouTube of people bearing their testimonies, and conference talks, and things like that. The Church website can't really do all of the things that these other sites can, because it is the official one. But as members we can answer people's questions and get into a dialogue with them about what we believe.

I've never really had many opportunities for missionary work--I don't think giving the Temple Square sisters Kim's phone number really counts--but this is a cool opportunity for it.

Elder Ballard has given a few talks recently about using "new media" as a way to share the gospel, and I think it's amazing what can happen if we do.

So check them out, you'll be surprised how non-weird it is.