Former Brigham Young University Professor Tells of Mormon Family’s Conversion to Christianity

A former Brigham Young University professor is sharing the story of how she and her husband, along all of with her children, left Mormonism for Christianity through God’s work of grace in their life.

Lynn Wilder is the author of the book Unveiling Grace: The Story of How We Found Our Way out of the Mormon Church, released in late August of this year. Until March 16, 2008, Wilder was a professor at Brigham Young University and a dedicated member of the Latter-Day Saints.

In a recent article in the Daily Beast, Wilder provided a condensed overview of her personal testimony, which occurred over a two-year period as God worked in the hearts of her family members.

Wilder states that in 2006, she and her husband Mike decided to visit a Christian church, but were careful to choose a gathering two hours away where no one would recognize them.

“We were paranoid, worried that if someone from Brigham Young University saw me at a non-denominational Christian church, I would lose my ecclesiastical clearance and my job as a professor,” Wilder wrote. “Only at BYU would someone lose their academic position for finding salvation outside the Mormon church.”

During this same time, Wilder’s son Micah became a born-again Christian. He announced to his fellow Mormon missionaries that he did not believe that men are saved by the works that Mormons require, and was sent home as “unworthy” to be a missionary. Just days later, Micah began serving a Christian organization in missions instead.

In the time that followed, Lynn Wilder began searching the Scriptures for answers. She states that the word of God opened her eyes to the truth.

“I read my Bible, sometimes hours a day, and truly felt I was being washed,” Wilder explained. “In its pages, I met a Jesus who was able to save me from my life of working to be ‘good.’”

Writer Sharon Lindbloom of Mormonism Research Ministry also notes that Wilder’s was impacted when she read 2 Corinthians 11:4, which states, “For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or if ye receive another spirit, which ye have not received, or another Gospel, which ye have not accepted, ye might well bear with him.”

“Another Jesus!” Wilder said to herself. “That’s exactly what we have.”

The movie Luther, which focuses on the life Protestant reformer Martin Luther and his repudiation of the requirements imposed under the Roman Catholic religion, hit home for Wilder as well. She knew full well of following man-made requirements under Mormon rules.

“I was simply overwhelmed by the Spirit,” she said. “I went face down in surrender to Christ.”

The Brigham Young professor then set out to buy herself a cross necklace to show her love for Christ, but there was one problem—crosses were taboo at the university.

“Mormons don’t revere the cross. They see it as an instrument of death, not the place where Christ became the savior,” she stated. “[I]f I was caught, I would be called in by my superiors and lose the ecclesiastical clearance I needed to work there.”

Months later, Wilder requested a leave of absence and took another job in Florida. On March 16, 2008 (3/16/08), she submitted her resignation in honor of John 3:16. Both Wilder and her husband had renounced Mormonism and turned to Christ.

“We lost a religion, but we gained Christ,” Michael Wilder stated in the 2011 documentary Unveiling Grace. “And that’s a good trade.”

When word broke, Wilder says that she received a lot of criticism, but states that her joys outweigh her sufferings.

“I was stupid, a liar, an adulterer, a drug addict, and had committed gross sins,” she said. “Despite the rejection I faced from 30 years of friends, despite the fact that I lost status, position, money, might lose children and our home, I walked away and never feared again.”

Now, Wilder is sharing her story with the world in spoken word and pen, and several of her children are likewise sharing the Gospel through the music ministry Adam’s Road—including her son Micah.

“Words cannot describe the feeling of finally knowing the Lord Jesus Christ in a way that you’ve always wanted to,” he said, becoming tearful. “Reading His word for the very first time and being washed clean by that word and understanding what his Gospel really was–that’s what changed my life. … I’ll never be the same.”

Uhh, Mormons ARE Christians.

I sat in pews in mormon chapels and heard the damnation of "Christianity" from the pulpit as it has been damned by mormons from the beginning of the sect.

The "adoption of the term Christian" by mormonism is very recent, and IMO the result of marketing directives by PR firms hired by Salt Lake City.

The following is a sample of the TRUE view of Christianity by mormons.

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"Christians— those poor, miserable priests brother Brigham was speaking about—some of them are the biggest whoremasters there are on the earth, and at the same time preaching righteousness to the children of men. The poor devils, they could not get up here and preach an oral discourse, to save themselves from hell; they are preaching their fathers' sermons —preaching sermons that were written a hundred years before they were born. ...You may get a Methodist priest to pour water on you, or sprinkle it on you, and baptize you face foremost, or lay you down the other way, and whatever mode you please, and you will be damned with your priest.

- Apostle Heber C. Kimball, Journal of Discourses, v. 5, p. 89

Prophet John Taylor (1808 - 1887):

"Christianity...is a perfect pack of nonsense...the devil could not invent a better engine to spread his work than the Christianity of the nineteenth century."

- Prophet John Taylor, Journal of Discourses, v. 6, p. 167

"Where shall we look for the true order or authority of God? It cannot be found in any nation of Christendom."

- Prophet John Taylor, Journal of Discourses, v. 10, p. 127

"What! Are Christians ignorant? Yes, as ignorant of the things of God as the brute beast."

- Prophet John Taylor, Journal of Discourses, v. 13, p. 225

"What does the Christian world know about God? Nothing... Why so far as the things of God are concerned, they are the veriest fools; they know neither God nor the things of God."

- Prophet John Taylor, Journal of Discourses, v. 13, p. 225

Apostle Orson Pratt (1811 - 1881):

"Both Catholics and Protestants are nothing less than the ‘whore of Babylon' whom the Lord denounces by the mouth of John the Revelator as having corrupted all the earth by their fornications and wickedness. Any person who shall be so corrupt as to receive a holy ordinance of the Gospel from the ministers of any of these apostate churches will be sent down to hell with them, unless they repent."

- Apostle Orson Pratt, The Seer, p. 255

"But as there has been no Christian Church on the earth for a great many centuries past, until the present century, the people have lost sight of the pattern that God has given according to which the Christian Church should be established, and they have denominated a great variety of Christian Churches ... But there has been a long apostasy, during which the nations have been cursed with apostate churches in great abundance"

- Apostle Orson Pratt, Journal of Discourses, v. 18, p. 172

“This class of men, calling themselves Christian, uniting with the various forms of the pagan religion, adopting many of their ceremonies and institutions, became very popular, and finally some of the pagans embraced Christianity and were placed, as it were, upon the throne, and what they termed Christianity became very popular indeed. How long has this order of things existed, this dreadful apostacy, this class of people that pronounced themselves Zion, or Christians, without any of the characteristics of Zion? It has existed for some sixteen or seventeen centuries. It has spread itself and grown and gone into the four quarters of the earth. It is the great ecclesiastical power that is spoken of by the revelator John, and called by him the most corrupt and most wicked of all the powers of the earth, under the name of spiritual Babylon, or in other words Babel, which signifies confusion. This great and corrupt power is also represented by John as presenting a golden cup to the nations, full of all manner of filthiness and abominations.”

- Apostle Orson Pratt, Journal of Discourses, v. 14, p. 346

“But as there has been no Christian Church on the earth for a great many centuries past, until the present century, the people have lost sight of the pattern that God has given according to which the Christian Church should be established, and they have denominated a great variety of people Christian Churches, because they profess to be. They say, "We have built chapels unto the name of the Lord; we call our Churches Christian Churches, they are called the Church of Christ, St. John's Church, St. Paul's Church, St. Peter's Church, and after others of the ancient Apostles;" and one who had never studied the pattern which God has given of the Christian Church would almost really believe that they are Christian Churches. But there has been a long apostacy, during which the nations have been cursed with apostate churches in great abundance, and they are represented in the revelations of St. John as a woman sitting upon a scarlet colored beast, having a golden cup in her hand, full of filthiness and abominations, full of the wine of the wrath of her fornication; that in her forehead there was a name written—"Mystery, Babylon the Great, the mother of harlots." This kind of a church has existed in great abundance, for as John the Revelator says, she was to have her dominion upon many waters, and she was to make all nations drunken with the wine of the wrath of her fornication.”

- Apostle Orson Pratt, Journal of Discourses, v. 18, p. 172

“Q. After the Church of Christ fled from earth to heaven, what was left? A. A set of wicked Apostates, murderers, and idolaters, who, after having made war with the saints, and overcome them, and destroyed them out of the earth, were left to follow the wicked imaginations of their own corrupt hearts, and to build up churches by human authority, and to follow after the cunning craftiness of uninspired men; having no Apostle, Prophet, or Revelator to inquire of God for them: and thus, because of wickedness, the Church, and Priesthood, and gifts, and ordinances and blessings of the everlasting Gospel, were taken from the earth, and reserved in heaven until the fulness of times, when it was predicted that they should again be restored among men to continue until the end should come.”

- Apostle Orson Pratt, The Seer, Chapter 16, p. 205

Prophet Wilford Woodruff (1807 - 1898):

"The Gospel of modern Christendom shuts up the Lord, and stops all communication with Him. I want nothing to do with such a Gospel, I would rather prefer the Gospel of the dark ages, so called"

- Prophet Wilford Woodruff, Journal of Discourses, v. 2, p. 196

Apostle George Q. Cannon (1827 - 1901):

"After the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was organized, there were only two churches upon the earth. They were known respectively as the Church of the Lamb of God and Babylon. The various organizations which are called churches throughout Christendom, though differing in their creeds and organizations, have one common origin. They all belong to Babylon."

- Apostle George Q. Cannon, Gospel Truth, p. 324

Believers in the doctrines of modern Christendom will reap damnation to their souls.”

- Apostle Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, see pp. 45-46
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"...the Book of Mormon remains secure, unchanged and unchangeable, ...But with the Bible it was not and is not so....it was once in the sole and exclusive care and custody of an abominable organization [Christianity], founded by the devil himself, likened prophetically unto a great whore, whose great aim and purpose was to destroy the souls of men in the name of religion. In these hands it ceased to be the book it once was."

- Apostle Bruce R. McConkie, The Joseph Smith Translation, pp. 12, 13
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Brother Taylor has just said that the religions of the day were hatched in hell. The eggs were laid in hell, hatched on its borders, and then kicked on to the earth."

- Prophet Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, v. 6, p. 176
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"With a regard to true theology, a more ignorant people never lived than the present so-called Christian world."

- Prophet Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, v. 8, p. 199
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"The Christian world, so-called, are heathens as to the knowledge of the salvation of God"

- Prophet Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, v. 8, p. 171

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