12 Keys of Discipleship
Key Nine: Ask Questions, Part 2
Or Seek & You Shall Find
Where are the Seekers?
After the experience in Idaho Falls, we concluded that we must experiment with different approaches.
Curtis did have a bit of good and bad luck in the Idaho Falls, Idaho, area. He was fired from his job from his Mormon boss who was freaked out that he was excommunicated, but then he received an answer to one of his ads from a guy who was very enthused about our teachings. I made a trip over there and we visited him together. He said that God had spoken to him and all he had was ours for the asking. For starters he said he had $50,000 worth of gold in his basement and we could take what we wanted. (Keep in mind that amount is worth about $164,000 in 2009 dollars – or $230,000 in 2024 dollars). That sounded almost too good to be true. We figured some unseen force must be helping us so we told him that we could start off with maybe $10,000. We explained that the first thing we needed to do was to move Curtis and his family to Boise so we could work together. He agreed and traded in $10,000 worth of gold and handed us the cash.
We immediately moved Curtis to Boise, Idaho, and just as he was settling in we received a call from the guy. He said that he and his wife were going to be in town the next day and wanted to visit with us. We immediately sensed there was a problem and sure enough when we got together they both had a very serious look on their faces. He explained that now God was telling him something else and he wanted his money back.
I took Curtis aside and we had a brief conference. We realized that since he had given us cash and we had it in our possession that we could just tell him we were going to keep it but we decided against this for a number of reasons and decided to give him back what we had left over.
We went back in their presence and I explained that we had used $3,000 to move Curtis to Boise and get him a place, but we would give him back the cash we had. He agreed, took the money and we never heard from him again.
“Well,” I told Curtis, “At least we got you moved here so we can work together.”
Meanwhile to keep body and soul together I worked at my real estate business that was dealing with rising interest rates and Curtis started a tree and shrub business.
Along the way I came across a book from the local library containing revelations from a guy who called himself Onias. The book contained a number of revelations that started out authoritatively proclaiming, “Thus saith the Lord.” They were mostly directed at the authorities in the LDS church condemning them for not living up to their own stewardships and previous revelations. I shared this with Curtis and he found the writings particularly interesting and wanted to contact him. We wrote him in care of the publisher and a short time later he called us back on the phone.
It turned out the guy lived in Canada and he had been trying to draw attention to his revelations for some time and was thrilled to talk to someone who found them interesting. He then told us he was going to take a trip down to Idaho to meet us.
A few days later he showed up and we spent some time with him. He was looked about sixty (but was only 50), balding with white hair and kind of looked like a prophet. He then shared with us two revelations that were not in his book. The first was “The Parable of The Pear Tree” and the second was “The Parable of the Deceitful Merchants” which can be found at:
We read these over and concluded that this was his best work to date. Then I came up with what I thought was a masterpiece of an idea. We could send these out to every single Mormon in the Boise area and if that went well, we could send them out to every Mormon in the country. We figured that if anything would jar the LDS out of complacency that these writings would.
Both Curtis and Onias thought this was a great idea and we later pooled what funds we had and began the project. Onias was long gone back to Canada and Curtis and I started an organization that we called “The Restorers.” Under this name we published and distributed my writings and the two parables of Onias.
The major hurtle we now faced in sending out the writings was getting mailing lists of the LDS in the Boise, Nampa, Caldwell, Idaho, area that we wanted to cover as a test. The lists were under tight control of the Bishops and we figured that the various Bishops would be very suspicious if we asked for a copy of a list of the local members. Then I had an idea. I told Curtis that there was another person in each ward that had a copy of the list and that was the female Relief Society president. She is not pestered for things nearly as much as the Bishop and was likely to be much less suspicious. Now Curtis was quite charming with the ladies so I told him he was the best one to carry out this project and I would handle the nitty gritty of compiling lists and creating the mailing labels. His job would be to charm the Relief Society Presidents into lending him the lists for a few moments while he photocopied them.
Curtis carried out this project admirably and wound up getting a copy of every single list in the designated area. If you every meet him at a gathering he will he happy to tell you stories of how he did this and sometimes succeeding by a hair.
I headed up compiling the list and made labels, and altogether we had about 10,000 LDS families that were going to receive the most startling piece of theological mail of their lives.
We printed up 10,000 copies of the writings and sent them out in several different mailings. The first mailing was around 2000 homes. A day after sending them out we sat by the phone waiting for it to ring. What kind of response would we receive we wondered. Would we get some calls from a few of those who are seeking the truth but know not where to find it?
We soon found out. A day after the mailing the phone did ring, but it wasn’t from anyone seeking the truth. An angrier bunch we had never encountered. Those who called did so to let us know how upset they were that we had sent them such trash and that they were going to burn it. Many of them said they had called the post office to complain and warned us to never send them a piece of mail again.
Fortunately for us it was not against post office regulations to send unsolicited mail or we would have been in big trouble.
We didn’t get the response we wanted but we decided to forge ahead with the complete mailing anyway and we sent out the whole 10,000 pieces.
After we got over the shock of there not being anyone seeking higher knowledge we got kind of a kick in answering the phone and dealing with the angry Mormons.
Then, a short time later we found out we had a greater impact than we thought. We talked to an active member of the church and he told us that the churches in the whole area were alarmed at the mailing and had notified headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah, about it. One of the head apostles, Mark E. Peterson, then came to Boise, Idaho, and gave advice to the members and leadership about the problem.
The member told us that they were beside themselves about how we got all the names and addresses of the members in the area and wanted to put a stop to any more proliferation.
Actually, we would have done more mailings, but we ran short of money do they didn’t have to worry, but they didn’t know that.
Out of the 10,000 mailings we received one friendly call. He was a guy on the fringe of the church who was interested I what we were doing, but didn’t want to support us. He did come to some of our meetings and visited with us now and then.
After concluding that mailing directly to the LDS wasn’t going to find the seekers we decided to hold some seminars on interesting scriptural subjects and invite the masses instead of just the LDS.
This didn’t work either. We’d have maybe a half dozen people show up which was nothing to get excited about.
Then I had another bright idea. We would run short classified ads in national magazines using the two parable/revelations as a hook. We reduced the wording to the fewest possible words to save money. It ran as follows:
“Mormons! New revelations sent free!”
This was followed by our address. We ran the ads in The National Enquirer and about five other tabloid classifieds that were sold in grocery stores.
Again we waited in anticipation. Would we find some of those Mormons who were looking for truth?
We were pleased to finally get some reasonable response but somewhat amazed that most of it came from people who were not members of the LDS church. This was strange we thought. We advertise specifically to Mormons and non-Mormons respond.
When Curtis and I were active in the Church we figured that the LDS people were above average in seeking after truth, but now we began to wonder.
To those that were interested we sent them the two parables first and then followed up with several things I had written. We sent them the original draft of “Infallible Authority” and my first treatise on The Gathering called “The Literal Gathering of Israel.” We also used the story “Journey’s End” which is now in The Archives.
May 31, 2009
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