Chapter 3
A Good Fight
At seven o’clock every morning, Monday through Saturday, Mosese Muti and his fellow missionaries met at the chapel construction site on Niue. Elder Archie Cottle, a building supervisor from Ogden, Utah, had come to the island in March 1957 with his family and two more Tongan missionaries to begin construction on the new meetinghouse and mission home. Now, Niue’s first permanent Latter-day Saint chapel was finally taking shape beneath a scattering of palm trees.
Mosese enjoyed his work on the island. He and another Tongan missionary were doing the masonry on the exterior walls of the chapel. The missionaries found that getting local men to help with the project could be challenging, especially since the men had other difficult labor to do on the island. But a dedicated group of older women regularly volunteered to help by hauling sand or assisting with other tasks at the construction site.
District president Chuck Woodworth grumbled privately about not making faster progress on the chapel. And Mosese couldn’t blame him. Chuck had not been called as a labor missionary, but the lack of volunteer laborers on Niue meant he had to devote more time to construction and less time to the spiritual well-being of the Saints in the district.
Mosese always urged Chuck to be patient. “These are fine people,” he once reminded the young man. “They are children of the Lord. I find no fault in them. Let’s look for their strengths and concentrate on their strengths.”
Besides, building a chapel was no easy feat for unskilled workers. The men had to break coral, dig foundations, pour concrete, and prepare mortar—all by hand. This often caused blisters, cuts, and other injuries. And sometimes people simply needed time to catch the spirit of service.
To illustrate this point, Mosese told Chuck about his experience building Liahona College as a labor missionary. “Five of us had started the Liahona and worked for over a year before anyone helped out,” he said. “When we were building it, we did so with our eyes on the future generations.”
Mosese was also patient with Chuck. He and Salavia spent many nights talking and counseling with the missionary, and he had become like a son to them. Chuck had even begun calling them “papá” and “mamá.” His own father had walked out on his family, leaving Chuck’s mother to raise six children alone. The young man carried around a lot of anger and pain, and he was grateful to have Mosese in his life now.
“He truly knows the meaning of faith and service,” Chuck wrote. “He has taught me things that would have taken me years to learn without his help.”
Still, from time to time, Chuck longed to serve somewhere else. One day, he learned that Liahona College was starting a boxing team, and he saw an opportunity for change. He had been a professional boxer before his mission. What if he asked the mission president to transfer him to Tonga to finish his mission as a teacher and boxing coach at the school? The college, after all, was occasionally staffed by missionaries.
Mosese was against the idea. Having spent more than a year working and teaching at Chuck’s side, he believed that God had sent the young man to Niue for a reason. Whenever a task was particularly difficult, Chuck would double his efforts and carry more than his share of the workload. And when Chuck learned that Mosese and Salavia had fasted so they could feed the missionaries and other laborers, he had quietly eaten as little as possible so there would be enough left over for the couple.
In June 1957, during one of their talks with Chuck, Mosese and Salavia mentioned how much they longed to go to the temple. They knew the temple in New Zealand was nearing completion, but traveling there was still out of reach for them financially.
Their words moved Chuck, and his desire to end his mission at Liahona College no longer seemed so important. What if, after his mission was over, he went to New Zealand and challenged a champion boxer to a prizefight—an event big enough to make the kind of money the Mutis needed to go to the new temple? It was the least he could do after all they had done for him.
Four days later, he wrote Johnny Peterson, his manager in the United States, and asked him to ship boxing gear to Niue.
Around this time, the Southern Far East Mission was in dire need of a new missionary. One of the four women serving in Hong Kong had just returned to the United States for health reasons, leaving an unexpected vacancy in the mission. President Grant Heaton knew the remaining sisters needed help immediately, so he called Nora Koot as a local full-time missionary.
During the past two years, Nora had become indispensable to the mission. When the Heatons first arrived in Hong Kong, they enlisted her to contact all the Saints in the area, and the mission headquarters had become like her second home. Sometimes she babysat the Heatons’ children. Other times she tutored missionaries in the Cantonese and Mandarin languages. Together with Luana Heaton, she taught Bible stories in a Sunday school class for children in the city.
Nora readily accepted the mission call. One other local Saint, an elder named Lee Nai Ken, had served a short-term mission in Hong Kong, and President Heaton was enthusiastic about calling more local Saints as missionaries. The North American missionaries often struggled to learn the Chinese language and local culture. Many people in the city were suspicious of foreigners and sometimes confused the elders with agents of the United States government.
Nora and other Chinese Saints, however, already understood the local culture and did not have to worry about the language barrier. Also, they often related better with the people they taught. As a refugee from mainland China, Nora knew what it was like to start life over in a crowded city, where housing and employment were in short supply.
Many Church members and prospective Saints in Hong Kong were refugees, and President Heaton sought ways to provide for their spiritual well-being. In 1952, the Church had introduced seven lessons, or discussions, to help potential converts prepare for Church membership. Adapting to local needs, President Heaton and his missionaries developed seventeen gospel lessons to appeal to the many people in Hong Kong who were not Christian or had only a basic understanding of Christian beliefs. These lessons addressed such topics as the Godhead, the Atonement of Jesus Christ, the first principles and ordinances of the gospel, and the Restoration. Once baptized, converts received an additional twenty lessons for new members.
On the night before she was set apart as a missionary, Nora had a vivid dream. She was standing on a busy street, surrounded by chaos and commotion, when she noticed a beautiful building. She walked inside and immediately felt peace and calm. People inside the building were dressed in white, and Nora recognized some of them as the missionaries currently serving in Hong Kong.
When Nora reported to the mission home the next day, she told the elders about her dream. They were astonished. How did she know what a temple looked like? She had never visited one before.
Chuck Woodworth’s boxing gear arrived on Niue in October 1957, and the whole Muti family rallied behind his training. Salavia made him a punching bag out of potato sacks, and Mosese helped repair it when necessary. With so many mission responsibilities on the island, however, neither Chuck nor the family had much time to spend on training. Some mornings Chuck would wake up as early as five o’clock for a run. Since it was dark outside, the Mutis’ sixteen-year-old son, Paula, would ride a motorcycle behind him, illuminating the road with the headlight.
Fortunately, Chuck was in decent shape for boxing. Crushing coral for the past year had kept him physically strong. He had also held a few boxing exhibitions on the island to raise money for the chapel. But would occasional training be enough?
Before his mission, Chuck had spent hours upon hours at the gym, training for prizefights in the western United States and Canada. Most bouts had pitted him against other small-time professional boxers, but he’d also fought world-class boxers like Ezzard Charles and Rex Layne.
The fight against Rex, a famous Latter-day Saint heavyweight, had been the hardest of Chuck’s career. Rex was past his prime as a boxer, but he was about twenty-five pounds heavier than Chuck, and his savage, unrelenting attacks kept Chuck on the ropes for ten brutal rounds. Chuck stayed on his feet, but the judges gave the match to Rex.
“Woodworth,” the local newspaper reported, “wasn’t strong enough.”
In December, word arrived on Niue that a boxing association in New Zealand had matched Chuck against Kitione Lave, the “Tongan Torpedo.” Like Rex Layne, Kitione was a bull-like fighter who used his size and strength to punish opponents. In a fight against one of the top heavyweight boxers in the world, Kitione won in the second round with a knockout punch.
Chuck was released from his mission in early January 1958, just after he and the other elders put a roof on the new chapel. Salavia wrote him a farewell letter, assuring him of her family’s love and unfailing support. “My child, try your hardest,” she told him. “Do not be discouraged and you will triumph. When your strength is accompanied with our prayers, there is nothing that will interfere with you. We rely on God to help you.”
The fight was scheduled for February 27, 1958. All that day Mosese, Salavia, and their children fasted and prayed for Chuck. When evening came, they gathered at the chapel with dozens of Church members and friends to tune in to the fight on the radio. Since the broadcast was in English, Mosese translated it into Niuean.
A record crowd of almost fifteen thousand people had come out to Carlaw Park in Auckland, New Zealand, to witness the event. The odds were against Chuck as he entered the ring. Kitione had a twenty-pound advantage on him, and in the days leading up to the fight, Chuck heard that Kitione had called him a “sparrow” who wouldn’t last a single round against him.
As soon as the bell rang, Kitione rushed at Chuck. “It’s going to be a massacre,” someone groaned from the crowd.
Chuck dodged the charge and jabbed at Kitione without effect. Kitione fired back with his fists in rapid succession, striking Chuck’s head and torso. Then Kitione went for the knockout. He wound up and threw a powerful left-handed hook. Chuck took a step back, and Kitione’s glove slammed into his chin. The force of the blow threw Chuck onto the ropes. And for a moment, everything around him seemed to fade.
Acting on instinct, Chuck grabbed hold of Kitione and held on while the world around him spun. The referee tried to break them apart, but the bell rang. The round was over.
Chuck’s head cleared as he waited in his corner. When the next round started, he moved to the center of the ring with new momentum. Kitione met him with fists flying, ready to strike a finishing blow, but Chuck stayed light on his feet. He circled his opponent, keeping clear of the corners, and pelted him with jab after jab. The Torpedo couldn’t keep up. With each new round, Chuck felt himself getting stronger. He could hear the crowd cheering for him as he racked up points.
The match ended after twelve rounds, and the judges handed the victory to Chuck. Kitione took the loss well. “I enjoyed the fight,” he said. “That Woodworth’s a good, fast boxer—and a very nice fellow.”
Mosese sent Chuck a telegram the next day. “Thank you very much for a good fight—and being victorious,” it read. Chuck responded by wiring enough money to feed the family for the rest of their mission and send the couple to the New Zealand Temple.
A few months later, on the opposite side of the world, police in the German Democratic Republic arrested twenty-seven-year-old Henry Burkhardt. He was returning to the eastern, communist-controlled sector of Berlin after meeting with Burtis Robbins, the president of the Church’s North German Mission, in the city’s western sector. Although it was not illegal to travel to West Berlin—an area under the authority of the United Kingdom, France, and the United States—doing so as often as Henry did raised suspicions.
It had been nearly a decade since Germany split into the Federal Republic of Germany (BRD), or West Germany, and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), or East Germany. Both countries continued to be key players in the Cold War between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies. Situated deep in GDR territory, West Berlin had become a symbol of resistance to communism. The GDR, meanwhile, had emerged as one of several Soviet-influenced countries in central and eastern Europe.
As these rival powers vied for global dominance, they raced to develop stronger weapons and more sophisticated technologies. Trust among opposing nations was a scarce commodity. Anyone might be sneaking secrets to the enemy.
Henry put up no resistance when the police hauled him off to a station in Königs Wusterhausen, a town outside of East Berlin. The Stasi, the GDR’s secret police force, had been monitoring him and his family for some time. His calling as first counselor in the mission presidency placed him in regular contact with President Robbins and other American Church leaders. And that, along with his frequent visits to West Berlin, made him a suspected enemy of the state.
He was nothing of the sort. After being sealed in the Swiss Temple in November 1955, Henry and his wife, Inge, had returned to the GDR and submitted to the government’s many restrictions on religious people. There were no foreign missionaries or leaders in the country, and Henry could not communicate directly with Church officials in Salt Lake City. He and the Saints also had to submit their sacrament meeting talks to government officials for screening before they could deliver them.
Being the highest-ranking Church leader in the GDR consumed Henry’s life. He only saw Inge and their newborn daughter, Heike, during short visits home. Otherwise, he was traveling throughout the mission, attending to the five thousand Saints spread out in forty-five branches across the country.
Whenever a Church member denounced the government, encouraged someone to emigrate to the United States, or failed to pay a debt, Henry was implicated. Two years earlier, when police had tried to stop local missionaries from visiting another Church member, he submitted a formal complaint to the government, asserting the missionaries’ rights and asking for “better cooperation” from the police. He was deliberately polite and diplomatic with government officials, and that usually worked in his favor.
At the police station in Königs Wusterhausen, Henry spent the night under interrogation. In his car were a few gifts from President Robbins and materials for the Church’s East German office. When the police saw these items, they accused Henry of violating the GDR’s ban on its citizens receiving donations from foreign organizations. He had committed, in their words, a “violation of economic regulations.”
Henry had never heard of the ban before. He told his interrogators that he traveled to West Berlin every month. “The only purpose of my meeting with Mr. Robbins,” he explained, “was to discuss with him religious activities as well as related financial matters.”
The gifts from the mission president were not out of the ordinary either. “I have received presents in this form, or in the form of medicine, at each of our monthly meetings,” Henry reported. “We also receive packages in the mail sent to our office in Dresden and from abroad.”
The police confiscated the gifts, searched Henry’s briefcases, and rifled through some of the mission reports he had brought with him. Finding nothing suspicious, they ordered Henry to read, approve, and sign an official report of his meeting with President Robbins. By that time, it was well past four o’clock in the morning. They finally released him from custody later that day.
Henry’s arrest could have turned out much worse. When police caught an East German missionary with a copy of Der Stern, the Church’s German-language magazine, they had imprisoned him for nine months. Henry and others had tried to help the elder keep his courage up, but there was little they could do. He had confessed to having the magazine, and government officials—at least in this case—were unbending.
Such run-ins with the police were changing Henry. He no longer had any fear when dealing with the authorities, especially when he or the Saints had done nothing wrong. Every day involved taking risks for the gospel, and it was becoming normal.
He’d gotten used to feeling like he was already standing with one foot in jail.
On the morning of April 12, 1958, Mosese and Salavia Muti caught their first glimpse of the New Zealand Temple. It stood on the crest of a grassy hill overlooking a sprawling river valley seventy-five miles south of Auckland. Its design was simple and modern, like the Swiss Temple. It had white-painted walls of reinforced concrete and a single spire that rose more than 150 feet in the air.
The Mutis had come to New Zealand just in time to take part in the open house. Thousands upon thousands of people from all over New Zealand, Australia, and the islands of the Pacific were eager to see the temple, so Mosese and Salavia had to wait an hour and a half before they could take the tour.
Once inside, they could admire the beauty of the temple and appreciate the tremendous sacrifice of the local Saints. Like the chapel in Niue, and a growing number of Church buildings throughout Oceania, the temple had been built largely by labor missionaries. These workers had moved there with their families to build not just the temple but also the adjacent campus of the Church College of New Zealand, a new Church-run high school.
The day after their tour of the temple, Mosese was invited to speak at a sacrament meeting of Tongan Saints in the area. As he approached the stand, he thought about the promise George Albert Smith had made him twenty years earlier, when he said that Mosese would attend the temple at no cost of his own. Mosese had not told Chuck Woodworth about this promise. When the young man paid for the Mutis’ trip to the temple, he had unknowingly fulfilled prophecy.
“I am a person who testifies of the words the latter-day prophet has spoken,” Mosese told the congregation. “I know that George Albert Smith is a true prophet of God, for my wife and I have become testaments of his words.” He then spoke of Chuck’s sacrifice for the Muti family. “We are here this night because of a man’s undying love,” he testified. “We will never forget it in our lives, no matter what happens.”
One week later, President David O. McKay came to New Zealand and dedicated the temple. The building fulfilled a prophecy he had made almost forty years earlier, when he visited New Zealand on his first apostolic mission around the world. At that time, he told a group of Māori Saints that they would one day have a temple. His interpreter during the talk had been Stuart Meha, who had now just finished translating the endowment into Māori.
As President McKay offered the dedicatory prayer for the temple, he paid tribute to the labor missionaries and other Saints who had consecrated their all to construct the temple and other Church buildings. “May each contributor be comforted in spirit and prospered manyfold,” he prayed. “May they be assured that they have the gratitude of thousands, perhaps millions, on the other side for whom the prison doors may now be opened and deliverance proclaimed.”
Mosese and Salavia were endowed and sealed for time and eternity a few days later. While in the temple, Mosese felt the glorious presence of God. “How can I not love my Father in Heaven and His Son, Jesus Christ, with everything I have got, when I know They were there for me in the temple?” he said afterward. The experience gave him a new perspective on God’s eternal plan.
“All the things I have done and do in the Church are all pointing to the temple,” he realized. “It is the only holy place where a family organization can be united and remain intact forever.”