Rolling Quickly

In 1946, four missionaries were asked to learn French to bring the gospel to the French-speaking people of Quebec. Little progress was made, and in 1950, the work came to a sudden end when the missionaries assigned to labor among the French were transferred to the French Mission.

Ten years later, under the direction of Thomas S. Monson, president of the Canadian Mission, permanent proselytizing began in the French-Canadian areas. The work was slow, and there was not much growth, mainly because of the strong presence of the Catholic Church in Quebec. However, through consistent effort, a French-language branch was organized on June 7, 1964. It was a dependent French Sunday School, meaning that it did not hold its own sacrament or priesthood meetings but combined these with the English-speaking branch.

Stephan Jehoda, an early convert, recalled that in the beginning, the French Sunday School meetings were “made up primarily of a few people who were in the English branch who had some interest in seeing the French work develop” and two other French-speaking members besides himself. As the work progressed, they found that the system of a dependent branch did not work very well. There was a “lack of manuals, lack of money, and lack of support, because any decision being made had to be checked with the Montreal First Branch. And the Montreal First Branch had their own problems.”

Five years after his baptism in 1964, Stephan was called as branch president of that French-speaking unit. He worked closely with the district president to make the unit independent because by then, the branch had grown from three members to nearly 75. They began by changing the unit’s name from the Montreal Second Branch to the Hochelaga Branch. This was a significant name to Stephan because Hochelaga was the first Indigenous settlement where Montreal was built, and the distinctive name was rooted in local heritage. During his first meeting as branch president with his counselors, Sam McCracken and Luc Salm, they discussed the needs in their branch and determined that the only way to develop a long-lasting organization would be to reorganize the branch from the ground up. They were not sure how to go about doing something of such magnitude, so each member of the presidency wrote down their own lists of planned meetings and lists of officers for the priesthood, Relief Society, Young Men, Young Women, and Primary organizations. When compared, those lists were identical. They immediately knelt to pray, giving thanks for the inspiration they had received, and then went about making those changes in the following weeks and months.

The next year, Stephan was called to the district council, where he could help meet the needs of the French-speaking units and create other independent branches like the Hochelaga Branch. The Church grew rapidly in French-Canadian areas after that, especially in the decade following the Terre des hommes (Man and His World) exposition held in Montreal in 1969 and 1970. Nearly 50,000 people visited the pavilion the Church had rented to introduce visitors to Latter-day Saints and their beliefs through photographs of Church life and the film Man’s Search for Happiness. Sandra Jehoda, Stephan’s wife, recalled that the “French work [was] rolling quickly.”