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In explaining his thesis, Brother Lawrence cites the official Church missionary manual Preach My Gospel: “The people you meet often do not realize that they are looking for the restored gospel until they have found it.”
This is a crucial point. Gary Lawrence’s contention is that a sizable proportion of Americans already agree with us on certain centrally important issues. They simply don’t realize that they do because, as he showed in his earlier book, despite our nearly two centuries of missionary effort they know remarkably little about us.
Of the doctrinal questions the survey measured, the following three beliefs are especially unique to us in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Here are the percentages of non-LDS Christians who agree with us on each as described in the survey questions:
Pre-earthly existence — 24% –We lived with God in heaven before coming to the earth.
Gradations in heaven — 23% — There are different levels in heaven and in hell.
Proxy baptisms for the dead — 22% — Someone else can be baptized on his behalf after he dies.
Given such statistics (and many others), Dr. Lawrence concludes that there are audiences out there that are ready-made for our message, if we can only devise ways of reaching them
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