Welfare and Self-Reliance Services Department Vision
We strive to follow Jesus Christ by embracing the two great commandments to love God and to love our neighbors.
We do this as we
▪ minister to temporal needs.
▪ build spiritual and temporal self-reliance.
▪ bless both givers and receivers.
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O yes, Saints of ancient days, are these things new to you? “NO,” they reply, “but just exactly what we used to have among us; and you who have read the New Testament know it is so.” If this, then, is “Mormonism,” it is nothing new, but simply that which should have been in the world in order to constitute true Christianity.
Now suppose, after all these have been established, the people organize on them; and that in the enjoyment and cultivation of them, this people unite in their efforts, both temporally and spiritually, to build up themselves as a people, and each other as individuals, in righteousness upon the earth; and the Spirit of the Lord God into which they were all baptized, should make them very great in union—in union of effort, in counsel, in operation, in fellowship, in temporal things in a great measure, and in spiritual things, by which they are all of one heart and mind to a great degree, and growing in it every day—is this something new, because it is “Mormonism?” Or is this the very doctrine which was inculcated in days of old by the Apostles of Jesus Christ?
It was the main object for which the Holy Spirit was given, that they might all grow up in union, in fellowship, in cooperation, in holiness in the Lord. No man who has read the New Testament, will say this is new, when we say that the great object of the Gospel is, that we may all become one in Christ Jesus—one in knowledge, and in the love and practice of the peaceable things of God. Is it anything new? No. Well, it is a part of what the world calls “Mormonism;” and I would to God it was more perfected among this people than it is.
(1850s1853, PPP Mormonism ¶29–31 • JD 1:303)