Orlando, USA - Micah Wilder found Jesus as a Mormon missionary in Orlando, Fla., and the experience led him out of the church that sent him.
Wilder's awakening began with an evangelical minister's challenge to read the Bible more closely, noting discrepancies between the ancient text and Mormon beliefs. The young missionary pored over the scriptures to prove the man wrong, he says, but instead found himself discovering a different Jesus than the one he had known as a Latter-day Saint.
"I learned that salvation came through the gift and grace of God, not by our works. I learned that believing in Christ was enough. . . . I learned that the priesthood, temples, ordinances and prophets were
Adam's Road
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all fulfilled through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ," he says in a written testimony. "God reached into my heart and changed everything I had ever known."
Wilder shared his newfound faith with fellow LDS missionaries Joseph Warren and Steve Kay, Mormon convert Jay Graham, and his brother Matt, who had just returned from a mission to Denmark. They all had a "born again" experience and gave up membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Three years later, Wilder and the other four have formed a Christian band, Adam's Road, which is performing in Utah this week. The name refers to the biblical Adam as representing the path all people must take to return to God through Jesus. At every concert, band members wear ties with their button-down cotton shirts and jeans as a subtle dig at Mormon missionary attire and describe their love of Jesus Christ.
They live together in a Florida hotel, own a bed-and-breakfast and have spent the past few months playing concerts up and down the East Coast. They sing about God's concern and intimate knowledge of his wayward children and Jesus' atoning sacrifice with lyrics such as "Only by Your Grace Am I Alive" and "God Is Crazy About Us."
The band members allude to their Mormon roots in "Stone Temples," which says, "You're not where I thought you were in stone temples made by their hands. You're even closer. You're inside of me."
They don't go out of their way to offend believing Mormons, but do feel an obligation to share their conversion with members of the LDS Church, Matt Wilder says. "As a band, we are not afraid to testify to what we believe."
That approach created a small problem on SundayAug. 17 when organizers of Worship '08, a nondenominational Christian concert at Gallivan Plaza in downtown Salt Lake City, suggested that they tone down or eliminate their rhetoric about Mormonism. They refused to play without it and organizers relented.
The Rev. Gregory Johnson of Standing Together, a consortium of Utah's evangelical churches that sponsored the event, denied that that was his instruction.
"We talked about their Mormon background in our press release," Johnson insisted, adding, "but this is not an ex-Mormon gathering."
Warren, a lead singer, felt free to describe his spiritual journey toward the end of the performance, when fewer than 200 people were in attendance.
"I lived my whole entire life without knowing Jesus," Warren said. "I did not know what [God's] grace was."
Growing up as a Mormon in Kaysville, he knew only "a vengeful, unforgiving God, full of condemnation, that only gave love to those deserving of it. I did not feel like I deserved His love, I lived in fear of God's disappointment and punishments," Warren wrote on his MySpace page. "I was seeing the God of the Old Testament, and I was living a similar life as those who were under the law of Moses; a religion full of laws, regulations and judgment."
After his conversion, Warren came to see God's love as unconditional and all-encompassing.
The lyrics resonate well with Wilder's father, Michael, and mother, Lynne, who resigned from the LDS Church in response to their son's prompting after being active Mormons for more three decades. Lynne Wilder gave up a tenured position at Brigham Young University.
At his son's insistence, Michael Wilder says, he re-read the New Testament and began delving into little-known aspects of Mormon history.
"It opened my eyes," he said. "Once I got into Mormon doctrines, I realized this is not what Christ would teach. We are not anti-Mormon, just anti- Mormon doctrine."