Gordon Monson: What other LDS leaders can learn from apostles Dieter Uchtdorf, Dale Renlund and Patrick Kearon

This column isn’t meant to leave anybody — any apostle — out.

Well, maybe it is.

It’s intended more to dial in on three Latter-day Saint apostles their quorum colleagues could learn from and perhaps model. This trio heals a world that needs healing and shepherds a flock that needs shepherding.

Let’s say it all plain here: Almost all Latter-day Saints have their favorite church leaders. And, it turns out, many of them have the same ones.

As has been noted in this space and many others, Dieter Uchtdorf is a popular mainstay in the upper echelons of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I haven’t taken an official poll, but the guess here is that he ranks among the most favored and admired — if not the most — of all the church’s top spiritual brass. Members sometimes line up not just to get his blessing but also his autograph.

Why is that?

It can’t be just because he looks like he stepped straight out of central casting for a role as a religious leader — be it a pope or a cardinal, a prophet or an apostle. Put him in robes of antiquity and you could see him standing dignified, with his silver hair swept back like the wind foil on a chariot, preaching in front of King Agrippa.

The good news is he’s got company: Fellow apostles Dale Renlund, who looks like a happy grandpa, and Patrick Kearon, a cheery youngish English gentleman, elicit similar responses.

They are the Trifecta for Their Times, Apostles for Their Age, which is to say they are ecclesiastical champions who connect with folks inside and outside the faith in ways that seem to stand apart from other, more traditional general authorities. (Such an awkward term and title to begin with.)

To be sure, they’re powerful people, decked out in the typical G.A. suit-and-tie garb, but notably and unmistakably, they come across as empathetic and understanding, as open-minded and clearheaded friends with whom you could share your secrets and from whom you could take sound advice.

About the Big Three

Renlund, a cardiologist before being called to the cushy chairs in the Conference Center, has a gentle and gentrified quality to him, a brilliant mind and a sincere depth. He’s more than acquainted with the traditions of the past and seems willing to utilize a contemporary approach in addressing what’s real in the here and now.

Kearon, with his soft British accent, carries a caring tone that enhances his messages of good news, not threats of the damnation that awaits those who fail to qualify, who stumble at times off the church’s highway to heaven, the ubiquitous “covenant path.” Who could forget his conference talk doing away with the notion that God purposely puts up roadblocks to mess everybody over? No, Jesus is your advocate, rooting for you, he said. Good stuff.

Nobody’s better at that kind of positivity than Uchtdorf.

And it’s not his soft-yet-powerful voice with the added accoutrement, like Kearon, of an accent. It’s not the commanding presence that comes with the veteran experience of a former high-ranking Lufthansa aviator and executive. Anybody who regularly flies in a commercial aircraft wants to see a uniformed pilot who has the distinguished manner and bearing of Uchtdorf standing by the cockpit entrance before a flight. That captain is going to get you where you’re going.

He, along with Kearon and Renlund, inspires that kind of confidence.

If these guys sat down across from you at a table and told you the Earth is flat, you might not believe them, but they would make you rethink the idea for a moment or two.

There’s something more. And it’s something of which the church needs more, something more welcoming, more charitable, more reassuring.

It’s the warmth they extend, the hope, the kindness, the benevolence, the grace, the inclusion. I’ve written in the past about their talks at General Conference, the way they instruct but still soothe the soul. None of the three is anybody’s shrinking violet, and yet they speak to Latter-day Saints as though they are blossoms opening up in summer’s sunlight to a world of great promise.

The politics of love

Like most other top church leaders, they don’t preach outwardly about their politics, but there’s a sense of bleeding-heart progressiveness to their messages that catch the ear in a conservative church filled with so many conservative leaders and members, voters the majority of whom inexplicably cast ballots for Donald Trump.

Uchtdorf, Kearon and Renlund resonate — with their tender words, with their desire to wrap their arms around everyone, including immigrants and refugees who, like Uchtdorf and his family, sought safety and opportunity in a new country.

Again, I do not know specific politics here, and am not suggesting these men are revolutionaries, but I have heard them mention their gratitude for the grace of God and the need for humans to love and help other humans, especially the poor, the overlooked and the underserved.

Makes you wonder, in the case of Uchtdorf, was it divine inspiration that prompted his removal from the church’s First Presidency when church President Thomas Monson died and Russell Nelson took over? Was that a routine change or a downgrade because — speculation alert here — the apostle appears to be more sympathetic to the LGBTQ+ community? Is it because he gives the impression that he really does love everyone as they are and that God does, too? Or was he simply too dang popular?

Point is, the church could use more leaders who reach out to those already in the faith, those who have left it, and those who have never heard of it.

I’m not these apostles’ agent, nor their kin. But I see what I see, I hear what I hear — from people inside the church and outside it.

Uchtdorf, Renlund and Kearon obviously are committed to the church, firm in the faith, but, judging by what they preach from the pulpit, they extend open palms, not clenched fists to a wide — or wider — range of people.

Regular folks and dopes like you and me. People who are trying to do the right things for the right reasons as they bump and skid along. They realize God gives commandments, but they seek the kind of faith that warms them to a God who wants and loves them.

That’s what these three so frequently offer them. That kind of optimism and assurance. It’s not a desire to bend God’s rules to their liking as much as it is giving them and all humans a place to belong, as they are, as God created them, in so much grand goodness, goodness that’s embodied — or at least should be — in the women and men who say they represent and speak for the Lovingest and Mightiest of All.

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