Non-Mormons commonly look for information about the Church, and the language they use isn’t always the language that members of the Church use. If your neighbor searches for Mormon beliefs but you blog about LDS beliefs, search engines won’t connect the two of you. Good online missionaries bridge language gaps by using the vocabulary that non-Mormons use on their own blogs and Web sites.
Elder Ballard encourages us to ”use stories and words that [non-members] will understand.”
As the head moderator at LDS.net, Heather Newell of the More Good Foundation occasionally receives emails from Church members concerned with their usage of the term Mormon. She writes:
I receive emails expressing concern about using the word Mormon, especially using the term Mormon Church. As members of the church, we all know who we are, what we believe, and that this is Jesus Christ’s Church. Many of us understand the style guide set forth by the church to the media. But not everyone else does.
Even though I’m an active, daily participant in online conversation about the church, in the past I too have struggled with embracing the word Mormon. I want to share the insights I have gathered which have helped me respectfully say, “I am a Mormon.”
Read We Are Mormon and using language that people of other faiths will understand.
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I am really excited that we are being encouraged to do this. I’ve been communicating in this way for quite some time and find that it helps build and cross bridges between faiths.
This post is interesting and it also made me think that the Church has created mormon.org, again embracing the “Mormon” nickname, in order to have a site that would be easily searched by non-members looking for info about the Church, but wouldn’t type in LDS in a search engine.
Anyone else remember conference talks…hmmm…about a decade ago? One gave the correction, saying we should use the church’s official name. The next conference (or shortly thereafter) we had a talk about how “Mormon” was a perfectly useful title.
All I know is that when I lived in Florida and said, “I’m a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” I never got more than a wide-eyed stare. When I said, “I’m a Mormon” they at least recognized the name. Whether it was positive or negative widely varied.