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Episode 225: Church historian Matt Grow encourages peacemaking amid historical misrepresentation

Sarah Jane Weaver hosts this important episode on peacemaking despite violent rhetoric

Since the founding of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on April 6, 1830, those outside the Church have shared erroneous or misleading accounts of events involving Church leaders and members.

In this episode of the Church News podcast, Matt Grow, managing director of the Church History Department, discusses a recent example of a depiction from the Church’s past that contributes to misunderstandings of the Church and its members today.

Former Church News editor and current Deseret News editor Sarah Jane Weaver serves as the guest host for this episode on encouraging peacemaking amid threatening rhetoric and historical misrepresentation.

Listen to this episode of the Church News podcast on Apple Podcasts, Amazon, Spotify, bookshelf PLUS, YouTube or wherever you get podcasts.

Transcript:

Matt Grow: Disciples of Jesus Christ have always lived in a world of violence, of contention. And I do have a deep concern that those who are coming to “American Primeval” without a lot of understanding will believe that this is who the Latter-day Saints are. And for those of us who study Latter-day Saint history, like I do, I think what I know now that I haven’t always known about Latter-day Saint history is that we contain in our religious tradition, in our scriptural tradition, a great capacity for peacemaking. I think it’s a capacity that we haven’t fully realized, but I believe that we have the historical and the scriptural resources, the organizational capacity of the Church and the will of Latter-day Saints to truly be peacemakers in the world today.

1:03

Jon Ryan Jensen: This is Jon Ryan Jensen, editor of the Church News. Welcome to the Church News podcast. Today, we are taking you on a journey of connection as we discuss news and events of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

After the founding of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on April 6, 1830, the Lord instructed the Prophet Joseph Smith, saying, “Behold, there shall be a record kept among you” (Doctrine and Covenants 21:1). This year, Latter-day Saints study much of that record through “Come, Follow Me” in Doctrine and Covenants. Other records of the Church’s history are included in other books and publications of the Church.

The recent completion of the four-volume “Saints” collection adds additional context through records, journals and other histories of the past 200 years. Throughout that time, those outside the Church have shared erroneous or misleading accounts of events involving Church leaders and members.

In this episode of the Church News podcast, we welcome managing director of the Church’s Church History Department, Matt Grow, to talk about one recent example of a depiction from the Church’s past that contributes to misunderstanding of the Church and its members today. Former Church News editor and current Deseret News editor Sarah Jane Weaver conducts today’s interview.

2:12

Sarah Jane Weaver: Ryan, thank you for that introduction, and Matt, it is great to be with you today.

Matt Grow: Thanks for having me.

Sarah Jane Weaver: As Ryan indicated, we’re here to talk about the new Netflix series that has actually put a spotlight on early Church history. And the show is set in the 1850s and depicts Brigham Young, the Shoshone and other indigenous groups, and Latter-day Saints as being very violent. Is this really what the early West was like?

2:40

Matt Grow: I think there’s a lot of inaccuracies in this portrayal. And I think it makes sense for us to begin with Brigham Young himself, putting him in a little bit of context so that we can understand his portrayal in this series. First of all, we have to understand how deeply Brigham Young believed in the gospel of Jesus Christ. He was a believer. He was a believer from his early days and all through his life. He considered himself a disciple of the Prince of Peace. And some want to argue — and this has always been the argument about Brigham Young — that he was mainly a practical leader rather than a spiritual leader. And that just does injustice to Brigham. He was a believer.

And some over time have compared him to Moses, that he was an American Moses that led his people out of one place and into another place. I think another appropriate comparison is that he’s an American Enoch. And what I mean by that is he was trying to build a people, build a city. And in his mind, it was the sort of city that we read about in the Pearl of Great Price in the book of Moses, that it would be a place of peace, a place of safety, a place where there would be no poor among them, a place of unity. That was really what Brigham Young was after.

And if we look at the whole of his life, we see that there were several critical junctures where he proactively chose peace to avoid violence. His first great general leadership assignment in the Church was to lead the exodus from Missouri in 1838 to 1839, when the Saints had been the victims of great violence, and his task was to get them out of Missouri safely. And I think he learned from that that one of the duties of disciples of Jesus Christ is sometimes to turn the other cheek, to sometimes be victims. And as he led that great trek from Missouri where people were dying, I think he internalized some of these lessons.

Another time that he chose peace occurred not less than a decade after that, after the murder of Joseph Smith. And Brigham Young faced the choice: Would the Saints stay in the Midwest? Would they protect themselves with violence? And they could have done this. They had thousands of men, they had a strong militia, they could have fought, but he chose to lead them across the plains rather than to stay and fight in Illinois. He said repeatedly to the Saints that he would rather be wronged than do wrong.

We see it again a decade after they came to the Salt Lake Valley, when, because of misunderstandings, the president of the United States sends an army to Utah. And again, Brigham Young has the choice: Is he going to proactively choose violence, or will he choose peace? And his response is to tell all the Saints in northern Utah that they’re going to move to Southern Utah to avoid violence. And this is tremendously disruptive on Latter-day Saint society. If you can imagine all the Saints in Salt Lake and Logan and Ogden moving to Provo and areas further south, it totally disrupts everything for years. But he does that because, fundamentally, I think Brigham Young is a man of peace. If you read his sermons, if you read his letters, that’s what he’s interested in.

6:12

Sarah Jane Weaver: Well, and Brigham had to be facing many challenges as he settled this area in the western United States. Tell us what it was like, what did he find when he got here, and what challenges did the early Saints face?

Matt Grow: For those of us who know Salt Lake City today, it is difficult for us to imagine how tenuous the Latter-day Saints’ settlement was in the first decade after they came here in 1847. They faced so many challenges in those early years — repeated crop failures, repeated threat of starvation, repeated difficulties with the emigration of Saints coming from the eastern United States or from Europe. This is the decade of the handcart disasters.

And one of the other difficulties that Brigham Young faces is that there is no government here. A few years after the Saints arrived, the federal government organizes a territory in Utah, and the president of the United States appoints Brigham Young to two positions: governor and territorial superintendent of Indian affairs. So for many years, Brigham is going to wear both his hat as President of the Church, an ecclesiastical office, but then he’s also going to wear other hats of these very important civil offices. And many of the other territorial officials came from the east. They weren’t Latter-day Saints. And there arose lots of misunderstandings, lots of tensions between Brigham Young and the Latter-day Saints and these outside territorial officials. So he’s always having to navigate that.

Now, when the Saints arrive in Utah, of course, there are indigenous peoples in what is now the state of Utah, and there’s a lot of complexity in indigenous society. But to speak broadly, central Utah is occupied by the Utes, northern Utah by the Shoshone, the western area of the state by the Goshutes, and the southwestern by Paiutes, with some Navajo in the southeastern part. So, he arrives to a lot of complexity in Native American relations. And as superintendent of Indian affairs and as governor, he has a charge to maintain peace between Latter-day Saint settlers and Native Americans, with some of the inevitable tensions that arose between Latter-day Saint settlers and native groups.

8:38

Sarah Jane Weaver: So, I want to talk about the relationship between the Saints and these groups. In “American Primeval,” it actually portrays the groups intermixing and all coming together. But I’m assuming, by the way you described them, that each sort of had their own lands and their own territory, and their interactions were separate from one another.

But what were their interactions? What was the relationship between Saints and the indigenous people here?

9:03

Matt Grow: Well, I do think that one of the injustices that “American Primeval” does to indigenous groups is to collapse them all together and to not really portray an accurate understanding of Native American culture.

Here, too, on the question of Brigham Young and American Indians, I think we have to begin with him as a believer, with the theology that he believed. And Latter-day Saints saw indigenous peoples very differently than did most other white Americans of the day. They had learned from the Book of Mormon that in the ancient Americas, there were civilizations. One of the civilizations, the Nephite civilization, had been destroyed, but the other civilization, the Lamanite civilization, had continued. And Brigham Young and other Latter-day Saints saw the indigenous peoples of the Americas as descendants of Book of Mormon peoples and heir to spiritual promises that they in the last days would learn again of the covenants that God had made with their forefathers and foremothers, that they again would be brought to a knowledge of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And not too long after Brigham Young joins the Church in the 1830s, Joseph Smith gives him a blessing and gives him a charge that Brigham will be instrumental in opening the way and turning the key to indigenous nations to learn about the gospel of Jesus Christ. And Brigham Young never forgets that blessing; he takes it seriously. And so you have this Latter-day Saint view of indigenous peoples that sees them as brothers and sisters in the family of God, and hopefully brothers and sisters in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Now, we put that against the backdrop of American history, which we know is full of violence against native peoples from the very early days of white settlement in the 1500s and 1600s.

The year that the Church is organized, in 1830, the federal government passes a very important law called the “Indian Removal Act,” and this is indicative of how white Americans see indigenous peoples, that they are a nuisance, they are a threat, they should be removed from areas that are impeding white settlement. And even Americans that rejected that view largely accepted the view that native peoples were on the decline, that there was nobility in these native peoples, but that they would inevitably disappear, that they really wouldn’t be part of the future of the United States.

So, Latter-day Saints are very different in both how they see native peoples in the present moment and how they see them in the future, and they feel a sense of obligation, a sense of responsibility, to bring the gospel to them. Now, of course, that’s the ideal, and things don’t always work out on the ground, because white Latter-day Saints and native groups have very different cultures. They have very different understandings of things like private property. For the Saints, the ownership of livestock, the ownership of horses, was very important, whereas for native peoples, they had a more communal understanding of property and a sense that the infringements of white Latter-day Saints on territory that had once been their hunting grounds and once had been their places, that they needed to be compensated for that, and sometimes they took horses and cattle as that sense of compensation.

So there are inevitable clashes. And what’s interesting, if you look at the records, if you look at Brigham Young’s sermons, he is constantly preaching about white/native relations. He is constantly trying to restrain his people from violence. He knows that there’s these tensions, he knows that there’s these misunderstandings. He knows that the impulse, even though they believe in the same theology that he does, that some of them want to engage in violence with indigenous peoples.

And sometimes we see this with indigenous leaders as well, that they are trying to restrain some of their people from some of the inevitable violence that is happening. So there is sometimes tensions and violence on the ground. Brigham Young himself authorizes, as governor and superintendent of Indian affairs, some military campaigns against Native Americans. And so the ideal isn’t always what happens, but I really do believe, if you look at his sermons, his letters to Native leaders, his letters to others, that he wants to create peace in the valleys of the West.

13:47

Sarah Jane Weaver: So, as we talk about Brigham Young and how he felt about violence, you’ve given us a great overview. You also have some specifics, right?

Matt Grow: Absolutely. One of the great treasures we have in our Church History Library is almost 100 letters that Brigham Young wrote to Native American leaders, as well as lots of sermons he gave about them. One time he said this about the Latter-day Saints: “There [is] no people — no political party, no religious sect — that places the [Native Americans] of this continent so high in the scale of humanity, as we do.” So it wasn’t just about the way that they treated Americans; it was really about the way they thought of them as brothers and sisters.

I also love this quote that Brigham Young said to the Latter-day Saints about one of the Ute leaders in central Utah. He said: “He is perfect. I do not believe a better man lives on the earth. He will do good all the time and will not do an evil if he knows it.” This is not the way most white Americans spoke about native peoples in the 1800s. There’s a real admiration, and it’s an admiration because he knew them. He took the time to talk with them, to interact with them in a way that most white Americans just did not.

15:13

Sarah Jane Weaver: And in recent days, the Deseret News published an op-ed by Darren Parry, who’s the former chairman of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation. And so much of the interactions in “American Primeval” deal with this group, the Shoshone.

Let’s talk specifically about how they are depicted, because they’re depicted at great length in this film. What do we know about Shoshone/Latter-day Saint relationships specifically?

15:42

Matt Grow: Yeah, and I’m really glad that Darren Parry published that article. I always feel more comfortable with Darren speaking on the history of the Shoshone than me speaking on the history of the Shoshone. But it is one of the injustices of “American Primeval,” and one of the things that “American Primeval” does is there are statements that of course this is fictional, that these characters are fictional, but there also is a claim to authenticity. There is a claim to authenticity that they’ve studied, that they have a historical consultant, that at least the big questions that they’re tackling that they understand. And on the question of the Shoshone, I think this is one of those places where “American Primeval” gets it 100% wrong. It’s inverted history.

The Shoshone leader at the time of the Saints’ settlement in 1847 is Sagwitch. And Sagwitch is a man of peace as well. Sagwitch wants to create a peaceful understanding between him and Brigham Young, between the Shoshone and Latter-day Saints. And of course, that’s not perfect. There are tensions, and those tensions exist, but they never really break out into large-scale violence between the Shoshone and the Latter-day Saints. What happens is that in 1863, a federal army that is in territorial Utah slaughters about 400 Shoshones in what’s called the Bear River Massacre. It’s an absolutely terrible tragedy, and Sagwitch himself survives. He’s injured, but he survives. There are many Shoshone that survive this massacre. And about a decade later, some of those Shoshone have visionary experiences that they believe come from God and are telling them to join The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They do so. Hundreds, eventually thousands, of Shoshone joined the Church.

And the decade after they joined the Church, they are involved in contributing to the building of the Logan Temple, which is not far from where they live. And then after its dedication, they participate in ceremonies in that temple, which they believe connect them eternally to their deceased kinspeople, including those who died at Bear River. And so you see this story of this violence perpetrated against the Shoshone and the way that many of them come to believe that they have now been eternally united with their kinspeople.

And so, if you look at the “American Primeval” story — which has violence, just terrible violence against the Latter-day Saints and the Shoshone — and then you look at the real history, it’s almost incomprehensible to me that this is what “American Primeval” did, that this is how we’re going to depict the Shoshone, that this is how we’re going to depict the Latter-day Saints. When in reality, sure they came from different cultures, there was tensions, but at the end of the day, they united under the gospel of Jesus Christ. And these were not half-hearted conversions by the Shoshone; they believed. They remained Latter-day Saints. Not all of them, but many of them. Many of them remain Latter-day Saints today.

19:16

Sarah Jane Weaver: And I also want to talk about another group that we see interacting with early Latter-day Saints in this miniseries, and that is other settlers. The most notable is interactions that occurred in history at the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

Now, that is depicted differently in the miniseries, but can you give us a high-level summary of what happened at Mountain Meadows?

19:41

Matt Grow: Yeah. Let me tell you, first, just a little bit about interaction with settlers passing through in general. Salt Lake City over time has been called “The Crossroads of the West.” And when the Saints arrived, they did so out of a hope of seeking isolation, but that isolation is mostly just a dream. From the very early time, settlers who aren’t Latter-day Saints are passing through Salt Lake City.

This really begins with the gold rush of 1849, and when gold is discovered in California, the great question is, “How do you get to California quickly enough?” And many of those forty-niners are going to pass through Salt Lake City. And this is something that these settlers passing through — beginning with the forty-niners but continuing with others — that is mutually beneficial for those passing through and for the Latter-day Saints. For the Latter-day Saints, once the forty-niners get to Salt Lake City, they’re eager to purchase produce and food from the Latter-day Saints, and they’re eager to sell to the Latter-day Saints at pretty bargain prices some of the goods that they had carried across the plains. And so these interactions tend to be positive, tend to be peaceful, tend to benefit both sides.

Now, a decade later, in 1857, there’s a terrible tragedy — a massacre, as you mentioned — the Mountain Meadows Massacre. And at a high level, what is going on is that there’s great tensions at this moment. This is the high point of tension between the Saints and the federal government, and the Saints and other white Americans. There’s a federal army that’s been sent along with a new governor to replace Brigham Young as governor, and there’s great fear among the Latter-day Saints that this federal army will persecute them. They remember Missouri, they remember Illinois, when the government not only did not stop violence against the Latter-day Saints but actively perpetrated it. There was an extermination order against the Latter-day Saints issued in Missouri. In Illinois, the federal government stood by while the Latter-day Saints were attacked. So there’s great suspicion and great fear of this federal army.

At the same time, you have a wagon train of emigrants from Arkansas headed through Utah Territory to California. So they’re going to come in through northern Utah and pass the length of the territory. And there’s misunderstandings all along the way. By this point, Brigham Young has said, “There’s a federal army along the way. We’re not going to sell our grain to passing emigrant companies.” Well, that’s what passing emigrant companies had come to expect. Plus, this company had a very large number of cattle, and so there’s tensions all along the route over where their cattle are grazing, and are they taking the grazing land that the Saints need for their cattle.

And eventually this company is going to pass through Cedar City in southern Utah, and there’s verbal altercations between some members of the company and the Latter-day Saints, and they’re going to camp at a place called Mountain Meadows. And it’s at Mountain Meadows that local Latter-day Saints who hold both civil offices as well as ecclesiastical offices — they’re the mayor and the major in the militia as well as the stake president, sort of thing — they come to believe that they should kill these emigrants.

And of course, everything I’ve said here about putting this in a little bit of context would never justify what happens at Mountain Meadows. And there’s a series of decisions that the local Latter-day Saint leaders make in this moment of great tension to kill these emigrants, to murder them. They recruit some local Paiutes to assist them in the task. And before they do so, they send an express writer to Brigham Young, who brings a message that says, “We’ve got this emigrant company trapped. What should we do with them?” The express writer comes to Salt Lake, Brigham writes a letter back, saying, “Don’t meddle with those emigrants. Let them go.”

And of course, the letter arrives a couple of days after the massacre, in which Latter-day Saint men, assisted by some Paiutes that they had recruited, slaughter all of the men, women and older children, everyone in the company that they believed would be able to tell anyone what had happened, leaving only a handful of small children that they don’t kill. It’s about 120 people that die at Mountain Meadows.

And for those of us who study Latter-day Saint history, like I do, there’s nothing like this, nothing even close to this in the Saints’ passage. It’s almost incomprehensible that the Saints in southern Utah — because of their fear, because of their suspicions — are led down this path. People who otherwise seem to have led normal, good lives are brought to this point where they are killing others, rejecting the very tenants of the gospel of Jesus Christ to participate in these killings.

25:05

Sarah Jane Weaver: Well, and I have been to the site at Mountain Meadows. It’s somber. The Church has put up a beautiful monument and made sure that that land is considered hallowed and sacred, and has apologized for those acts as well.

Matt Grow: Absolutely. One of the responsibilities that I have in the Church History Department is to oversee our historic sites. And most of those historic sites are places where the Saints received great revelations or where they — they’re places of joy. They’re places where, like the Sacred Grove or Kirtland or Nauvoo, where heaven touched earth. But Mountain Meadows, of course, is this very somber site where we tried to remember this tragedy, tried to remember the lessons of the tragedy.

We work actively with descendants of those small children that were spared at Mountain Meadows to honor their ancestors and those others that were killed there. We do consider it sacred ground. And it’s almost been 20 years or so that President Henry B. Eyring went to Mountain Meadows and was there present with these descendants of this wagon train, as well as he was there with descendants of those who perpetrated the massacre. And he acknowledged and apologized for this tremendous tragedy that some of our people participated in in 1857.

26:37

Sarah Jane Weaver: As we look at the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, there has always followed with the Saints some misunderstanding. We know there was misunderstanding right from the very beginning. I was thinking this weekend about President Gordon B. Hinckley being in England and actually being very frustrated by what the British tabloids were writing about the Church when he was there as a missionary. And so this continues to this day, where I think any one of us might be able to pinpoint quickly, “Oh, that frustrated me,” or “Oh, the media didn’t get that quite right.”

So my question is: Is this Netflix miniseries, “American Primeval,” accurate?

27:23

Matt Grow: It’s not accurate. It’s not accurate in the big questions or the little details. It’s not accurate in the sense that the portrayal that religion leads to violence, that’s a common sort of belief. Religion has been a great force for peace in the world today and throughout history. Of course, there has been religiously inspired violence; I’m not trying to minimize that. But overall, religion has been a force for peace.

And then it’s just not accurate in how it portrays Brigham Young and the Saints. It’s not accurate in how it portrays the Shoshone and other indigenous peoples. One of the things I think back on is that in 1823, when Moroni, the angel Moroni, first visited Joseph Smith, one of the things he told him was that his name would be had for good and evil throughout the world and throughout history (see Joseph Smith—History 1:33). And that’s certainly come to pass. It’s come to pass with Brigham Young. It’s come to pass with other prophets.

That seems to be one of the hazards of being a prophet is that, of course, those who know you will love and respect you, but there’s great misunderstanding — there always has been — about our prophets, about us as a people. And we need to do our own part in dispelling those misunderstandings today on a personal level, and also know that on sort of the broad societal level, where most of us probably feel incapable of: “How are we going to prevent another ‘American Primeval’?” or something like that.

I think we need to recognize that the Saints have always been mocked. The Saints have always been scorned. If you think we have it bad today, go back a century, when the derision in which Latter-day Saints were held — the mocking, the scorning, the inaccurate portrayals — was just so deep, so over the top. And so what we have to deal with today is annoying, but it’s not like what Latter-day Saints in the past have had to deal with in terms of public misrepresentation. So I think we can feel a kinship with those in the past who have also undergone misrepresentations and misunderstandings, and go forward in our lives and try to do what we can do on a personal level to help people understand who the Latter-day Saints really are.

29:47

Sarah Jane Weaver: And one of the reasons I asked Ryan Jensen if he might be willing to let me step back into the Church News podcast to do this interview was because I’d read some comments online where people who weren’t familiar with the Church were saying things like, “Wow, I didn’t know that about members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” And I was frustrated and discouraged and wanted to set the record straight.

What worries you about someone seeing the series who is unfamiliar with our history?

30:15

Matt Grow: I do have a deep concern that those who are coming to “American Primeval” without a lot of understanding will believe that this is who the Latter-day Saints are. And I would encourage anyone to look for good, reliable sources on Brigham Young.

About a decade ago, the Church published an essay called “Peace and Violence among [19th-Century] Latter-day Saints.” It covers these topics well. It doesn’t pull punches. It recognizes that there have been violent episodes in our history. But overall, I think it makes a strong case — and a case I really believe, from my own study of our history — that the Latter-day Saints have been peacemakers, that this is one of the calls that we have as disciples of Jesus Christ, is to promote peace, and most Latter-day Saints over time have done that.

31:05

Sarah Jane Weaver: And from this podcast transcript, we will link to both that essay, and we also had a previous Church News podcast with historians Rick Turley and Barbara Jones Brown talking about all the details of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and to an op-ed that you wrote for the Deseret News about this topic, which also has additional information that includes the Church’s stance on peace and some of these things that we’ve discussed today.

And so, as we conclude today, there is a question that we ask everyone who joins the Church News podcast. And I’m grateful that you have taken this discussion to a place where viewers are thinking about peace and thinking about religion and faith and moving forward.

So, what do you know now, after contemplating the recent portrayal by Netflix of early events of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?

32:07

Matt Grow: Unfortunately, disciples of Jesus Christ have always lived in a world of violence. So, this very period that we’re talking about, the 1850s, this is a period in which there’s violence between antislavery and proslavery forces in the United States. This is an era in which there is a lot of violence against indigenous peoples across the United States. This is an era in which slavery, and all the violence that that system entails, is still very much alive. This is a period when we are on the cusp of probably the most violent era in American history, with the Civil War.

Disciples of Jesus Christ have always lived in a world of violence, of contention, and I’m drawn to President Russell M. Nelson’s call for Latter-day Saints to be peacemakers. His conference sermon a few years ago, “Peacemakers Needed,” is, I think, a masterpiece in what religion can do to promote peace, and what each of us can do to promote peace in our relationships as well as in the broader world. I think what I know now that I haven’t always known about Latter-day Saint history is that we contain in our religious tradition, in our scriptural tradition, a great capacity for peacemaking. I think it’s a capacity that we haven’t fully realized.

I think there’s a lot that Latter-day Saints need to do to fulfill our mission to be peacemakers in the world. But I believe that we have the historical and the scriptural resources, the organizational capacity of the Church and the will of Latter-day Saints to truly be peacemakers in the world today.

34:04

Jon Ryan Jensen: Thank you for listening to the Church News podcast. I’m your host, Church News editor Jon Ryan Jensen. I hope you learned something today about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and had your faith in the Savior increase by looking through the Church News window as a living record of the Restoration. Please subscribe, rate and review this podcast so it can be accessible to more people. And if you enjoyed the messages we shared today, please share the podcast with others. Thanks to our guests; to my producer, KellieAnn Halvorsen; and to others who make this podcast possible. Join us every week for a new episode. Find us on your favorite podcasting channels or with other news and updates about the Church on TheChurchNews.com or on the Church News app.

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