BY AMANDA VERZELLO

Church members from Utah and abroad gathered on Saturday to hear some Book of Mormon stories their teachers have never told them.

The lessons centered around Mesoamerica, including Mexico and Guatemala, as the most likely setting for Book of Mormon peoples and events at the 7th annual Book of Mormon Lands Conference at the Red Lion Hotel in Salt Lake City.

The conference drew 280 attendees — the conference’s biggest crowd ever — as a result of key speakers such as Dr. John L. Lund, Joseph Allen and Jerry L. Ainsworth, said Stephen L. Carr, senior vice president of the Book of Mormon Archaeological Forum.

Lund spoke about Joseph Smith and his contributions to the pioneer publication, Times and Seasons. It was Joseph Smith as editor of the publication who suggested the Book of Mormon events took place in Mesoamerica, Lund said.

Although critics have tried to discount Smith, claiming he never wrote about the Book of Mormon’s location in the Times and Seasons, Lund presented evidence to the contrary.

The goal of the Book of Mormon Archaelogical Forum is to provide an open forum to discuss theories such as Lund’s, Carr said.

“We are a group that promotes the understanding of the culture and the geography of the Book of Mormon,” Carr said. “We base our ideas on the fact that they took place in Mesoamerica.”

Members of the church don’t hear about the theories of the Book of Mormon’s settings in Sunday School or Institute because they are the opinions of researchers, and not endorsed by the church, Carr said.

“Most Latter-day Saints don’t have a clue what the [geographical references in the Book of Mormon] are,” said Doug Christensen, a member of the BMAF board of directors, from Twin Falls, Idaho. “We mostly focus on the stories and skip the travel and wars.”

Kirk Magleby stressed the need for church members to come to a consensus on where the Book of Mormon events took place. He called the current lack of consensus “of particular delight to Satan and to the critics of the church.”

“If we can’t agree on where [the Book of Mormon] took place, how can people take us seriously?” he said.

There are specific conditions the BMAF has outlined for a geographic region to be considered a Book of Mormon land.

For example, the region must be a “narrow neck of land surrounded by seas,” with a major river flowing from north to south. It must also have had a highly literate society and an agricultural base that was capable of supporting millions of people.

All of the requirements come from the Book of Mormon’s text and only Mesoamerica fits all the criteria, according to the organization’s Web site.