So I've been an Institute teacher for the last 20 years,
and about a decade ago,
I began teaching at the Stanford Institute as a volunteer teacher and then became the volunteer director.
And my students came to me with lots of hard questions,
much different than any other place I had taught.
And as a result we became very serious about digging deeply,
into the research that had been done to answer these hard questions
and there's answers, there's answers everywhere.
And my husband said let's formulate a class for this and so between the Institute and the stake
we were able to get a
class on hard questions in church history.
And at the same time as we were doing this, I'm getting calls from family members and friends around the world,
who really are struggling with faith crises,
and it was breaking our hearts, to see these good people who didn't know where to go for the answers.
And I heard the words of Isaiah and I could hear these prophecies being fulfilled in my mind,
that the very elect were being deceived.
And they were not knowing where to go to get the right answer because
this generation requires answers from Google instead of answers from the normal sources.
And I saw this repeatedly over
and over that people would ask me these questions and
I had all the resources in my fingertips
but they didn't have them in their fingertips and they were going to sources that were not accurate.
So I'm having dinner with Jack Welch in Utah
when we went out for conference
and I said Jack we have a need, and you know more about the Book of Mormon than anyone alive.
We lost Hugh Nibley years ago and now it's you, and we need your expertise online.
I need everything you know about the Book of Mormon,
in one exhaustive concordance of a Book Mormon
site, online.
And he said we need more than that, we need more than just the hard questions answered.
We need something to stimulate testimony,
and something to excite people about getting into their Book of Mormon study.
And we also need a text that can be accessible in a way that we don't have online.
Where we can use the technology and what's available
to see maps and history and family charts
and be able to go back and forth we need more than just the hard questions answered, Lynne.
And so we got out a piece of paper, we wrote out a three-prong vision of Book of Mormon Central
and what it could be, and I took that napkin, the next Sunday back in California, to one of my bishops
he was serving in that time in the
singles ward, his name is Jay Verkler.
He was one that the church had hired to
do new Family Search
and I sat down with him in his office, in the Bishop's
office and said
I want to start a website with all the accurate scholarship on the Book of Mormon,
so that people could know this is a trusted source
and it's not sponsored by the church, it's sponsored by scholars.
and Jay Verkler said, it's about time.
We needed this three years ago, and I said
"Jay can you help me?,"
and he got out a piece of paper and wrote out what we
needed, what was gonna be required to financially
and what kind of genius minds we needed to get, and here I am in the middle of Silicon Valley
with all these Stanford graduates coming out asking me where they should go to work,
as well as having Jack Welch's pull from Brigham Young University
and his contacts over the last 50 years of research,
and we had the heavens open and people came through the walls, and we were able to get the help we needed
and in my mind the miracle is in the timing
where the Lord put people in our place,
like Kirk Magleby.
With Jack's team on board, and the funding that I was able to arrange here in the Bay Area,
we were able to get a start in a very short
amount of time.
And according to Jay Verkler's plan, we should have had plenty of money to survive on for quite a while,
but Kirk Magleby had another idea, and he had this desire to take it into other languages.
Well I was on top of that immediately because I've lived in four countries.
I'm well aware of the dearth of information in other languages and there is a void that needs to be filled
and if we can take that through a digital world, to a Spanish community and perhaps later in the future
adding in Portuguese or French or German, but my heart said, this is worth expanding.
And then the idea of the app as our digital world is changing
and when people now are moving in that direction
we have got to have these other resources to stay up with the times
and it is expanding beyond the needs that Jay Verklerr initially said that I would need financially
and I'm thrilled that generous latter-day saints,
have chosen to live the law of consecration and open
their pockets and help do the work,
because this is the work of building the kingdom of God.
This I think is what is required to remove us
from the curse that is on us for not taking the Book of Mormon seriously enough,
where Joseph was condemned, where President Benson reminded us that the condemnation had not been lifted.
I feel like people like Jack Welch
and Kirk Magleby and hundreds of others,
my colleagues at Brigham Young University and the religion department.
My colleagues at the Institute program of the church.
These people have been adding to the scholarship on the Book of Mormon, but it needs to be more accessible.
We need to be able to have it at the click of a fingertip
and to get it as the first sites that people will go to
or at least a trusted site that people will go to, is our aim and goal at Book of Mormon Central.
