Chapter 8
A Matter of Saving Souls
As the new Primary president in Colonia Suiza, Uruguay, Delia Rochon relied heavily on her lesson manual. The Church had produced the handbook specifically for Primary teachers and leaders living in the missions, and Delia prayed frequently about how best to use it. The manual had been written before the Church’s Correlation Committee had begun reviewing and simplifying all Church materials, and it was three hundred pages long. Still, Delia was grateful for the many ideas for activities and crafts it provided. Although the Primary children were sometimes rowdy during her lessons, Delia was patient. If they misbehaved, she could always get their parents to help.
When preparing Primary lessons, Delia felt a duty to follow official Church materials closely. One day, she came across instructions for holding an annual fund drive for the Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City. The drive, which had taken place each year since 1922, encouraged every Primary child to donate pennies to help other children in need. Delia had never seen a penny before, and she knew very little about the hospital. Nor did she have to go looking for children in need—there were plenty in her Primary class. But she and branch president Victor Solari felt she should still hold a penny drive for the hospital.
Instead of pennies, Delia asked the children to donate vintenes, the coin with the lowest value in Uruguay. One of the parents made a little wooden collection box, which Delia hung on a wall in the meetinghouse. She told the Primary that the money would help children who were ill, but she was careful not to put pressure on her class. She did not want them donating any vintenes they could not afford to give.
Over the next few months, Delia did not look inside the little box or point out who was donating and who was not. Sometimes the children would bring in vintenes, and other times a parent would donate a few coins to support the Primary. Occasionally, she would hear the clink of a coin as it was dropped inside, and the children would clap at the sound.
When the mission leaders visited the Colonia Suiza Branch, Delia decided to open the box. It was much fuller than she expected. When she counted the coins, the children had donated nearly two American dollars. In Delia’s hands, the coins felt like a fortune.
More than that, she realized, the vintenes represented the faith and sacrifice of the Primary children—and the children’s families. Each coin was a widow’s mite, given with love for others and the Savior.
Two days before Christmas in 1964, Suzie Towse sat nervously on a train. Her mission at the British Area Office of the Church Building Department was over. Now she was on her way back to Beverley. Her parents were glad she was finally coming home, but they were still upset that she had chosen to finish her mission against their will. She had hardly heard a word from them in nine months.
Suzie did not regret her choice. Serving in the Building Department had brought her and hundreds of other young women and men closer to their Heavenly Father, and they returned home with stronger faith and valuable work experience. Their efforts had contributed to the completion of nearly thirty construction projects in the British Isles, including a beautiful chapel in Beverley. And more than forty other projects were still underway. As Suzie reflected on their work, a building missionary motto kept coming to mind: “As we build churches, we build people.”
Now, with her mission over, Suzie could look forward to a new chapter in her life. A year ago, mission leaders had let her and other building missionaries return home for the Christmas season. At a New Year’s Eve dance, her friend and fellow branch member Geoff Dunning had approached her and asked her to waltz. Knowing he was a member of the branch’s fellowshipping committee, she had teased him. “Geoff,” she said, “you don’t need to carry your fellowshipping this far.”
They had begun writing to each other as boyfriend and girlfriend after that, and they were engaged within a few months. Geoff had even sent her a diamond engagement ring through the mail, and the postman had knelt when he delivered it. They planned to be sealed in the London Temple after Suzie’s mission. But since the law required them to be married civilly, they would have a wedding ceremony in the Beverley chapel first.
At Suzie’s request, Geoff had visited her parents several times, hoping to soften their feelings toward her and the Church. At first, Suzie’s mother had resisted Geoff’s efforts, but she soon warmed to him.
When Suzie arrived in Beverley, her parents welcomed her home. But they told her they would not be attending her wedding because it was taking place in the branch meetinghouse. Disappointed, Suzie and Geoff prayed for her parents to have a change of heart.
As she adjusted to life after the mission, Suzie found that her branch had changed in her absence—and not just because of the new chapel. Across Britain, missionaries were now spending more time instructing prospective converts, and they taught whole families when possible. Rapid baptisms, baseball games, and the aggressive mission goals that propelled them were gone. President McKay had continued to oppose such practices and directed local leaders to reach out to the youth affected by them, making every effort to encourage these converts to stay in the Church.
“They are members, and we must keep them,” he declared. “It is a matter of saving souls rather than statistics. We must work with these young boys and girls.”
Ten days before the wedding, Suzie and Geoff’s prayers were answered. Suzie’s parents decided to attend the ceremony. Her father wanted to walk her down the aisle, and her mother agreed to organize the wedding reception in the chapel.
On March 6, 1965, many of Suzie’s friends from the Church Building Department came to Beverley for the wedding. A week later, Suzie and Geoff traveled to the London Temple to be sealed. While they were at the temple, Suzie’s mother cleaned up a small home the couple had purchased for themselves in Beverley.
Thinking about the challenges she had overcome, Suzie remembered what her mission president had told her during those difficult days—“The Lord will prepare a way”—and now she knew He had.
The following month, in Salt Lake City, Ruth Funk and the committee over adult curriculum gathered nearly two dozen leaders from various Church organizations to propose a plan for teaching Relief Society, priesthood, and Sunday School classes. The proposal was the result of the committee’s three-year study of the Church’s past lesson plans. Committee chair Thomas S. Monson, who had been called to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles a year and a half earlier, conducted the meeting.
The All-Church Coordinating Council, which oversaw the new correlation program, had already introduced several important changes to the Church. Among them was the creation of priesthood executive committees and ward councils to help local leaders serve together more effectively. In response to concerns about the stability of home and family, the coordinating council had also emphasized two programs, home teaching and family home evening, to strengthen gospel learning.
These programs had deep roots in the Church. Since the days of the prophet Joseph Smith, ward or block teachers had regularly visited the homes of Saints to tend to their spiritual and temporal well-being. The home teaching program modified this practice, asking priesthood holders to visit the homes of fellow Saints every month to provide Christlike service and to deliver a correlated message from the Church.
Similarly, the Saints had been holding home evenings since 1915, when President Joseph F. Smith and his counselors had encouraged the Saints to set aside at least one evening a month for gospel lessons and activities in the home. Now, the Saints were to hold family home evening every week and use a manual the Church had recently published.
The Church’s correlated curriculum continued to face delays, however. Initially, Elder Harold B. Lee had thought the various correlation committees could produce lesson plans for all age groups by 1963, but they pushed the deadline back to 1966 in order to write lessons for the family home evening program.
As Elder Monson introduced the curriculum proposal to the assembled leaders, he acknowledged the challenge of producing the new lessons, especially when the organizations had generally written their own curriculum in the past.
“Agreement will not come easily,” he said. “We should take the instructions of the scriptures in 3 Nephi wherein the Lord said, ‘Neither shall there be disputations among you.’”
During the meeting, Ruth presented the committee’s plans for the women’s curriculum. In drafting their proposal, the committee had consulted women in a variety of circumstances—married, unmarried, divorced, or widowed. The proposal pointed out the many pressures women faced in the modern world and emphasized their purpose in God’s eternal plan.
As Ruth described it, the new curriculum for women, like the curriculum for men in the Church, would underscore the importance of priesthood and the role of the home as the center of gospel learning. Its main objectives were to inspire women to live and teach the gospel, provide compassionate service to others, gain practical knowledge of homemaking, and develop a sense of well-being through the teachings of Christ.
In the months following the presentation, Ruth was impressed by Belle Spafford and the other Relief Society leaders who cooperated with the committee. But not everyone was enthusiastic about the coming changes. When Ruth and other committee members suggested adjustments to the curriculum, some members of the Relief Society board resisted their efforts.
Ruth’s belief in the need for correlation helped her persist despite these problems. She could see how correlation strengthened the Church and its members. The challenge was finding a way to help skeptics of the program grasp the same vision.
Around this same time, LaMar Williams was still trying to secure a permanent visa to Nigeria. He longed to fulfill his duties as the country’s presiding elder, but how could he if its government refused to let him in?
Since his first trip to Nigeria in 1961, he had managed to obtain only one other short-term visa, allowing him to return to the country for two weeks in February 1964. At that time, he and his friends Charles Agu and Dick Obot had tried to petition the government to allow missionaries in Nigeria, but the official responsible for deciding their case declined to meet with them.
LaMar returned to Utah deeply frustrated by his lack of success, yet he refused to give up on his friends in West Africa. With his help, a scholarship fund was created so several Nigerian students could attend Brigham Young University. The students arrived in early 1965, and two of them, Oscar Udo and Atim Ekpenyong, joined the Church.
In Nigeria, meanwhile, Dick Obot learned that his worship group—known locally as “the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints”— had received government recognition, suggesting some hearts in Nigeria were softening. LaMar’s efforts to provide educational opportunities for Nigerian students, along with the ongoing lobbying of his friends in Nigeria, did not go unnoticed. Although the Nigerian government still refused to grant him a permanent visa, he received another short-term travel visa in August 1965. With President McKay’s blessing, LaMar returned to Nigeria in October.
After arriving in Lagos, LaMar met with a lawyer who was optimistic about securing both a permanent visa and Church recognition. Two days later, LaMar spoke with about a dozen communications officials about the Church. He then flew to Enugu, the capital of Nigeria’s Eastern Region, and spent time with its minister of state, who declined to drink coffee, tea, or alcohol in LaMar’s presence out of respect for his beliefs.
Everywhere LaMar went, strangers asked him if they could become members of the Church. LaMar assured them that if the Church were established in their nation, they could be baptized. One Sunday, over four hundred people gathered to hear him speak.
On November 6, a visit to the premier’s office in Enugu resulted in a ninety-day extension to LaMar’s visa, and a government official began the paperwork necessary to register the Church in Nigeria. LaMar returned to his hotel room with good reason to be cheerful. After years of roadblocks and runarounds, the permission he needed to begin the work might finally be granted.
Then he heard a knock at the door. The private secretary of the minister of state had a telegram for him from Church headquarters.
“Discontinue negotiations in Nigeria,” it read. “Return home immediately.” It was signed by the First Presidency, with no further explanation attached.
At the time LaMar Williams left Nigeria, Giuseppa Oliva was living in Palermo, Italy, trusting in the promise that the Church would one day come to the city. A century earlier, missionaries had tried to establish the Church in Italy, but their efforts were short-lived. Many of their converts were Waldensian Protestants from northwest Italy who emigrated to Utah before missionaries withdrew from the country in the 1860s. Giuseppa was not one to sit still and wait for missionaries to return, however. Soon after arriving from Argentina, she began sharing the gospel with her relatives, neighbors, and friends.
Some people were put off by her enthusiasm, and they would shut their doors in her face or demand that she leave their homes. But one day one of her brothers, Antonino Giurintano, asked why she was not attending Catholic Mass. When she told him about the Church, Joseph Smith, and the Book of Mormon, he became intrigued. He had spent several years visiting different churches but felt unsatisfied by them.
After that, Giuseppa talked to him about the restored gospel almost every day. Much to her joy, he soon asked to be baptized. But without any missionaries in Sicily, there was no one who could perform the ordinance.
At the time, the Swiss Mission oversaw Italy and several neighboring countries, and the missionary force was spread thin. Although there were some small congregations on American military bases in Italy, the Church had only recently received approval to preach the gospel in the country. The thirty or forty missionaries serving in Italy were mostly in the north, far from Giuseppa and Antonino’s island. Still, Antonino wrote to the mission headquarters, and in return, mission president Rendell Mabey sent him some Church literature and a copy of the Book of Mormon.
Then, on the evening of November 22, 1965, Giuseppa was startled by an unexpected visit from her brother. Antonino told her that two men from the Church had finally come. Giuseppa rounded up her husband and son, and they followed Antonino back to his home.
One of the visitors, Giuseppa discovered, was President Mabey. He was a tall, cheerful American who did not speak Italian. The other visitor was Vincenzo di Francesca, an elderly Italian Latter-day Saint who happened to live on the island, some four hours away. In 1910, Vincenzo had found a coverless copy of the Book of Mormon while training to be a Protestant minister in New York City. He read it eagerly and embraced its message of Jesus Christ. Sometimes he even preached from the book, and upon returning to Italy, he learned more about the Church and made contact with it. After years of waiting for someone with priesthood authority to come to Sicily, he was baptized at long last in 1951.
Giuseppa and her family talked with Vincenzo and President Mabey for several hours. Then the mission president concluded that Antonino was ready for baptism.
Early the next morning, Giuseppa, Antonino, President Mabey, and Vincenzo purchased some white clothes and took a taxi to a quiet bay up the coast where they could hold the service. A small cove provided a dressing room, and rocks along the shore offered a place for Vincenzo to sit and act as witness for the baptism.
President Mabey and Antonino hobbled, hand in hand, over the beach’s small, sharp rocks. Battling the cold and rough waves, President Mabey spoke the baptismal prayer and lowered Antonino into the water. The men then returned to shore and changed into dry clothes, and Vincenzo confirmed Antonino a member of the Church.
Joy and love filled Giuseppa’s heart as she watched the service. Later, she sent an emotional letter to her daughter Maria, who was still living in Argentina. Antonino had joined the Church, she exclaimed. He was the first person baptized since she returned to Palermo.