My good friend Kandace S. suggested this blog's title over a decade ago. As a Latter-day Saint organist who has spent time on the organ benches of various Roman Catholic and Protestant churches in addition to those of my own church, my perch has given me a broad range of first-hand perspectives about 1) both the cultural and canonized theologies of different faiths and 2) the virtues and vices of their respective worship practices. (I include my own faith's cultural versus canonized theologies and the virtues and vices of my church among those.) "Off the Mormon bench" entails waking up and doing something more, magnifying one's calling as a latter-day witness of Jesus Christ and His restored gospel and realizing that we each have a role in helping God's work move forward. Off the bench is also a reference to private religious observance. We don't meet the measure of our call if we live as cultural Mormons, sitting comfortably in our pews, mindlessly putting our time and being ambivalent about the mediocrity of so much that goes on during our meetings; rather, we are called to rise up and grow into the high title that we've taken on ourselves, that of Latter-day Saint.
The 1828 Webster Dictionary that documented the American English of church founder Joseph Smith's era defines a saint as follows:
"A person sanctified; a holy or godly person; one eminent for piety and virtue. It is particularly applied to the apostles and other holy persons mentioned in Scripture. A hypocrite may imitate a saint."
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