Becoming a Center of Strength

In response to petitions from former missionaries in South America, Church President George Albert Smith called Frederick and Corraine Williams to open a mission in Uruguay in 1947. When the Williamses arrived in Montevideo that August, they quickly obtained recognition for the Church and established an office and mission home there. By December 1947, however, only three of the 24 missionaries in Uruguay spoke Spanish. A small core of expatriate members formed the seed of the Church community. On November 4, 1948, the mission hosted its first baptismal service.

Over the next decade, small but growing branches were formed in many communities throughout Uruguay. As the branches grew, however, little effort was made to call local converts to serve as leaders. “I got the feeling that this is a Salt Lake church,” Thomas Fyans, the mission president, observed shortly after his arrival in December 1960. “Missionaries [were] in charge of everything.”

When he was set apart as mission president, Thomas had been charged with organizing a stake in Uruguay. Knowing that a stake would never be possible without local leadership, Thomas set a goal of calling local leaders in every branch within three months. Each weekend, Thomas traveled to new branches, where he interviewed and called local members—many of them very recent converts—to serve as branch presidents.

On the Sunday when they planned to call a new branch president in Paysandú, Thomas still had not found a local member to lead. However, as the sacrament meeting began, Thomas had a clear spiritual impression. As the meeting continued, Thomas invited José Maria Ghiorsi, a convert baptized just five weeks earlier, and Haydée, José’s wife, into a private room, where he asked them if José would serve as branch president. José was sustained just minutes after he accepted the call. By the end of April 1961, all but three branches in the mission were led by local members.

Under local leadership, attendance at meetings increased, members began visiting and encouraging one another more often, and members began introducing the missionaries to their friends and neighbors. The missionaries, free from leadership concerns, spent more time teaching. Convert baptisms in 1961 were twice what they’d been the previous year.

In 1962, Thomas’s focus turned to organizing a stake. Many of the new leaders in Uruguay had a strong desire to more fully organize the Church; however, none knew how a stake actually worked. Thomas, through a series of miracles, was able to send the district president, Juan Echizarto, and his counselors, Vincente Rubio and César Guerra, to Utah to observe stakes there.

With the information gathered during this trip, Juan, Vincente, and César returned, “striving with new vision and dedication to lift the level of the entire mission.” The three took the lead in teaching local members to work together to increase cooperation and cohesion among the branches. On November 12, 1967, after nearly five years of applications and conversations with Church headquarters, Elder Spencer W. Kimball of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles organized the Montevideo Uruguay Stake, with Vincente Rubio as stake president. Thomas, then working on translation projects for the Church, was also present at the meeting. When the time came for Elder Kimball to announce the creation of the stake, Thomas stood in as translator as Elder Kimball said, “Tom, you and I are going to form the first stake in Uruguay.”