Wednesday, October 4, 2023

George H. Brimhall (former BYU President) on the Importance of the Local and Global Church

  

I am to spend the next few minutes with you on the problem of “Why Have a Church?”

 

First, have a Church because the organized is superior to the unorganized, and the Church is an organization of individuals. It can be more.

 

Second, because in the Church I can be all that any man of my potentialities and possibilities can be and something more than he can be out of the Church. I can do all in it that may be done without and get something more.

 

The Church is an instrument and the person can do more with an instrument than he can without an instrument. A man asked me: “Why have a Church?” I answered him, “Why have any institution; why have a nation; why have an organized community; why have a school?”

 

God didn’t finish his work in the Garden of Eden by producing organisms. The highest form of organism that was created was that of man. But he did not leave his work there. He put the finishing stroke upon that work by establishing an institution. That institution was the fundamental institution of the human family—marriage.

 

An institution makes it possible for a man to go by leaps and bounds where he must otherwise wander zig-zag from his trail.

 

I say, “Why have a Church?” Not only because I can get more development with it than I can without, but I want a Church because there is more happiness in the Church than out of it. I can enjoy something in the Church that I cannot enjoy without it. There is a feeling of activity in the Church that cannot be found without.

 

I want a Church because the Church has been the support of the posterity of a great organization. The non-church nation dissolves; the non-church community becomes a place that is undesirable for me to live in; the non-church community is fading.

 

Finally, I want a Church because there is in the Church more faith—the assurance of things hoped for. There is more happiness in the Church; there is an organized affiliation with the divine; there is more love and charity that is unselfish. When I give through an institution, I humiliate no man or woman.

 

God bless those who do not belong to churches. Bless them that they may have the power to see. I never desire to speak evil of the man who doesn’t belong to a Church; I pity him, because I feel that he is losing that which he might have.

 

Prize your church. (George H. Brimhall, “Why Have a Church?,” January 18, 1926, in Long and Short Range Arrows [Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1934], 138-40)

 

Blog Archive