Chapter 22
More Like Our Lord and Master
On the morning of April 7, 1984, Ardeth Kapp sat on the front row of the Salt Lake Tabernacle. Gordon B. Hinckley, who had been called as an additional counselor in the First Presidency nearly three years earlier, was standing at the pulpit, asking for a sustaining vote of the general authorities and officers of the Church. He announced the calling of two new apostles, Russell M. Nelson and Dallin H. Oaks. He also put forward Ardeth’s name as the new Young Women general president.
The Saints in the Tabernacle sustained them unanimously. “A title is given, a call is made,” Ardeth later reflected in her journal, “and the members respond in love.”
Four months later, Ardeth and her counselors, Patricia Holland and Maurine Turley, and her administrative assistant, Carolyn Rasmus, met at a cabin in the mountains near Provo, Utah. It was the first Sunday of the month, and they came fasting.
The focus of their fast was Personal Progress, the Church’s achievement program for young women since the late 1970s. Ardeth had been a member of the Young Women general presidency that had introduced Personal Progress, yet she felt that many young women were not engaging with the program.
She and her counselors believed that each young woman needed a greater sense of divine purpose and identity. They also believed more could be done to help young women feel seen and appreciated as they sought to make and keep covenants with the Lord.
At the cabin, Ardeth, Patricia, Maurine, and Carolyn listed universal principles they thought were vital to a young woman’s life and well-being. Each of them then retreated to a spot in the woods to ponder the list and narrow it down to the most important principles. When they returned to the cabin, they found that their lists all looked similar. A warmth enveloped them. They felt the Lord was leading them in the right direction.
In its current form, Personal Progress focused on values shared by all Christian denominations. Ardeth and her counselors thought it should include distinct Latter-day Saint beliefs as well. As the women discussed what to emphasize, they identified five values that could help any young woman, no matter where she lived, grow closer to God and understand her true identity: faith, divine nature, obedience, knowledge, and choice and accountability.
In the months that followed, Ardeth and her counselors organized a Young Women general board and settled on seven values, replacing obedience with individual worth, good works, and integrity. Ardeth taped long sheets of paper to the walls of the Young Women boardroom, and she and the other board members filled the space with insights they gleaned from research studies and discussions with young women in the Church.
The board believed that each young woman ought to know who she was and how she fit in God’s plan. Each young woman needed to have spiritual experiences, make and keep covenants with the Lord, receive recognition for Christlike works, and be supported by her priesthood leaders.
At the start of 1985, Ardeth and her board were preparing to submit their ideas to the Church’s Priesthood Executive Council for approval. Under President Kimball’s leadership, decision-making through councils had become more frequent in the Church. The Priesthood Executive Council was one of the three main executive councils that made policy recommendations to the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. These councils included several apostles and other general authorities. During her presidency’s meeting with the Priesthood Executive Council, Ardeth hoped to present the board’s vision for Young Women clearly. But she was unsure how to do it.
One morning in January, Ardeth woke up early and grabbed a yellow notepad she kept at her bedside. Everything she and the board had discussed since their call was coming together in her mind like a beautiful mosaic. She began to write until words and inspiration flowed without interruption. When she finally jotted her last word down, she was emotionally drained but spiritually uplifted. She knew what to say to the council.
Six weeks later, Ardeth and her counselors knelt in prayer at the Church Administration Building. In a few minutes, they would be presenting their plan for the future of Young Women to the Priesthood Executive Council. If the plan was right, they prayed, let the ears of the brethren be open to it. But if it was wrong, they asked the Lord to close the council’s ears instead.
Before long, they were invited into a nearby boardroom where Ezra Taft Benson, the president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, sat with other members of the council.
Standing at the front of the room, Ardeth began her presentation. “Our focus is not so much on programs,” she said, “but on the fundamental principles which can help young women come to know and live the gospel.”
She spoke of the many problems young women faced in society: harmful media and advertising, crime, sexual immorality, eating disorders, drug and alcohol abuse, suicide. She provided data showing that young women in the Church had fewer resources, opportunities for recognition, and adult leaders than the young men did. In comparing the Young Women and Young Men programs, Ardeth said, she was not suggesting that they needed to be identical. Rather, they needed to receive all the resources and support necessary to help youth succeed.
Finally, Ardeth and her counselors proposed structuring Young Women around the seven values. “Such structure,” Ardeth said, “could provide an identity for young women so that they and others better understand what it means to be a young woman.”
After the presentation, President Benson invited the council to stand in recognition of the importance of the presentation. “Not only were our ears opened,” he said, “but also our tear ducts.”
Later that day, Elder Dean L. Larsen, a member of the council, called Ardeth on the telephone. “How soon can you have a satellite broadcast for young women ready?” he asked.
“By November,” Ardeth said.
Elder Larsen was surprised. “That long?”
“We’ve got to have all the pieces in place,” Ardeth replied. “We won’t have a second chance.”
On December 14, 1984, President Gordon B. Hinckley dedicated a house of the Lord in Guatemala City, Guatemala. As she looked on, Carmen O’Donnal, the matron of the new temple, marveled at the miraculous growth of the Church across Central and South America.
In 1948, when Carmen was baptized in a small swimming pool south of Guatemala City, she had been one of the earliest people to join the Church in Guatemala. Now the country had over 30,000 Latter-day Saints, more than half of them baptized in the last four years. More and more people in the region were making covenants to follow Jesus Christ, and temple building was at the center of this work.
“The Lord has allowed me to live to see this miracle with my own eyes,” she said during the dedication.
Prior to her call as temple matron, Carmen and her husband, John, had been working in the Mexico City Temple, which was dedicated in December 1983. It was the first house of the Lord in Mexico, which had over 360,000 members—more than any other Spanish-speaking country in the world. Among those who attended its dedication were Isabel Santana and Juan Machuca, the former teachers at Centro Escolar Benemérito de las Américas, who had married more than a decade earlier. They now lived in Tijuana, Mexico, where Juan worked for the Church Educational System.
Farther south, the Church continued to thrive in Brazil. When the São Paulo Temple was dedicated in 1978, the country had 56,000 Saints in twelve stakes. By early 1985, membership had grown to around 200,000 in forty-seven stakes. And as the Church grew, so did the responsibilities of Hélio da Rocha Camargo. After his service as bishop of the São Paulo Second Ward, he served as a stake president in São Paulo, a mission president in Rio de Janeiro, and a regional representative of the Twelve. Then, on April 6, 1985, he was sustained as a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy, the first general authority from Brazil.
“This is an experience I never wanted to have,” he told the Saints in the Salt Lake Tabernacle. But his faith in the restored gospel was firm, like that of so many other leaders around the world. “I know that the Lord lives,” he testified. “I know that I am a child of God, and that this gospel is the plan for the happiness of all the children of God in this world.”
In Chile, meanwhile, there were now over 130,000 Saints in forty stakes. Shortly before the Mexico City Temple dedication, Chilean Saints had rejoiced at the dedication of the Santiago Chile Temple, the first house of the Lord in a Spanish-speaking country. Thousands of Saints assembled for the occasion, some of them traveling hundreds of miles by bus.
Carlos and Elsa Cifuentes were in the temple for the dedication. Carlos was one of the earliest members in Chile. In 1958, two missionaries approached him in his backyard garage, introduced themselves as representatives of Jesus Christ, and asked if he would like to learn about the Church. He was baptized a short time later. In 1972, when the first stake was formed in Chile, Carlos was called to be its president.
By the time of the Santiago Chile Temple dedication, Carlos’s body was weakened by cancer. But he mustered the strength to stand and bear fervent testimony. “I know without a doubt that this is the work of the Lord,” he said. “I know that God lives. I know that Jesus Christ, His Son, lives.” Carlos passed away a month later.
In neighboring Argentina, construction was proceeding on a house of the Lord in Buenos Aires. Fifty-four-year-old Betty Campi was serving as stake Primary president in a rural town called Mercedes. During her lifetime, she had watched the Church in Argentina grow from a tiny acorn to a mighty oak, just as apostle Melvin J. Ballard had predicted it would. In 1942, the year of her baptism, there were around seven hundred Church members in Argentina. Now the number was almost eighty thousand. Betty faithfully held a current temple recommend, eagerly anticipating the day when she could use it in her home country.
And Argentina was not alone. Elsewhere in South America, plans for temples in Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador were moving forward. Brigham Young and Joseph F. Smith had prophesied that temples would be established across the earth. Now it was coming to pass.
After her baptism, Olga Kovářová was eager to share her happiness with her family and friends. But because the government in Czechoslovakia did not recognize the Church, she knew her opportunities would be limited. Also, her generation had grown up in an atheistic society and knew very little about religion. If she tried to tell people about the Church, they probably wouldn’t understand what she was saying.
As she thought and prayed about how to share her beliefs, she spoke to Otakar Vojkůvka about her dilemma. “You could become a yoga teacher,” he said. The government did not restrict yoga instruction, and Otakar saw it as a good way to meet new people and do God’s work.
At first, Olga thought his suggestion was strange. But as she thought more about it, she realized he was onto something.
The next day, Olga signed up for yoga teacher training. And not long after she finished the course, she began teaching classes at a gym in Uherské Hradiště, her hometown in central Czechoslovakia. She was surprised by how popular the courses were. Class sizes ranged from 60 to 120 students. People of all ages registered for her lessons, eager to learn more about physical and mental health.
During each class, Olga taught yoga exercises followed by a simple lesson based on true principles. She used nonreligious language, drawing on uplifting quotes from eastern European poets and philosophers to support what she taught.
Through her teaching, Olga realized how much her students hungered for more positive messages in their lives. Some people seemed to attend her classes just for the lessons.
Before long, she and Otakar introduced some of their students to the Church, and several of them chose to be baptized.
The classes were so well received that Olga and Otakar created yoga camps for their interested students. Groups of fifty people spent weeklong breaks during the summer benefiting from Olga’s and Otakar’s instruction.
Olga wished her parents, Zdenĕk and Danuška, could feel the same happiness her students discovered through the camp, and she prayed for them often. But religion was not an important part of her parents’ daily lives, and there was not a branch in their town. Olga would have to approach the conversation carefully.
Knowing her mother struggled with headaches, Olga said one day, “Mom, I want to teach you how to relax and strengthen some muscles in your neck. It might help you.”
“You know that I always trust you,” her mother replied.
Olga demonstrated some simple exercises and recommended her mother continue doing them on her own. Within months, the headaches went away. She and Olga’s father both became interested in yoga and attended one of the yoga camps. Within a few days, her father was fully immersed in the camp and was the happiest she had ever seen him. Her mother also embraced the routines and the ideas being shared in the lessons. Soon Olga began sharing her beliefs with them too.
Her parents immediately loved the Book of Mormon and its teachings. They also gained testimonies of Joseph Smith as a prophet of God. Before long, both her mother and father decided to join the Church.
They were baptized in the same reservoir where Olga had received the ordinance. Afterward, Olga and her parents returned home and sat around the kitchen table, holding hands and weeping with joy. “This calls for a celebration,” her mother said.
They made Olga’s favorite snack and shared their testimonies with each other. Smiling broadly, her father said, “Great beginnings happen within small walls!”
“I wish that you could feel what I feel inside,” said Henry Burkhardt. “I also wish that I could tell you how much gratitude I have in my heart at this time.”
It was June 29, 1985. Henry was standing at a pulpit in the newly completed Freiberg German Democratic Republic Temple, addressing a roomful of Saints who had come for the temple’s dedication. President Gordon B. Hinckley had opened the services earlier that morning, and Elder Thomas S. Monson had also spoken.
Henry was no longer the president of the Dresden Mission. Rather, he had the honor of addressing the Saints as the newly called president of the Freiberg Temple.
“For over thirty years,” he said, “it has been my desire to do something to make it possible for the Saints in this country to go to a house of the Lord.” He spoke of when he and his wife, Inge, had been sealed in the Swiss Temple in 1955, before the border between East and West Germany had closed. Now he was overjoyed that Saints in the GDR and other countries under the political influence of the Soviet Union had a temple in Freiberg.
“It was the will of the Lord,” he said. “The Lord made it possible to build this house, a house in which we can receive blessings that cannot be given in any other place than here in His house.”
Henry was still amazed, after so many years of dealing with government opposition to the Church, that the temple had been built with so little trouble. After Henry secured land for the project, Church architect Emil Fetzer had worked with officials, architects, and engineers in the GDR to finalize the design for the temple. Inspired by traditional German architecture, they settled on a simple, modern structure with stained-glass windows and a single tower arching over the entrance.
The groundbreaking had taken place a short time later. To Henry’s surprise, most of the government officials who attended the ceremony had bowed their heads during the prayer. The building contractor was a government-owned company, so the project had no problem securing workers or getting permits approved. The government allowed the Church to tap into a nearby natural gas pipeline so the temple did not need to be heated by coal. And Henry and Emil were able to find three crystal chandeliers for the celestial room and sealing rooms, a rarity in the GDR.
Perhaps the greatest surprise, though, was the government’s willingness to respect the sacredness of the building. Although officials were legally allowed to monitor any religious meeting at any time in the country, the government had agreed not to do so in the temple. In fact, throughout the building process, the officials had been respectful of the Church, its teachings, and its practices. When it came time for the open house, nearly ninety thousand people came to tour the building.
“My wife and I are grateful, my brothers and sisters, that we can serve you here in this house,” Henry told the Saints at the dedication. “We do it gladly.”
Following Henry’s remarks, Inge stood and bore her testimony as the temple matron. “I want to tell you that I have never felt more joy than I feel when I am in the house of the Lord,” she declared. “When I think of our young brothers and sisters who will have the possibility in the near future to begin their joint life here in the temple, sealed together, and that their children will also be born with this spirit inside, my heart is filled again with gratitude.”
“I believe that we are all trying to become more like our Lord and Master,” she continued, “and I give you my testimony that when we come here to His holy temple and when we are prepared to serve, then we will be able to do so.”
On July 18, 1985, thousands of Orthodox Jews, dressed in traditional black coats and wide-brimmed hats, gathered in protest at Jerusalem’s Western Wall. With the encouragement of the city’s chief rabbis, the demonstrators bowed down and recited prayers usually set aside for days of mourning. Above them hung a massive red banner with a clear message: “Mormons stop your missionary project now.”
Since breaking ground a year earlier, the Church had made steady progress on the BYU Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies. But in that time, the city’s Orthodox population had come to view the center as a threat to Judaism. They were most alarmed by the Church’s reputation for missionary work. After the Holocaust, when the Nazi regime systematically exterminated millions of Jews, many Orthodox Jews had become particularly sensitive to Christians seeking converts among their people. They feared the Jerusalem Center would become a hub of Latter-day Saint missionary activity in Israel.
Reports of Orthodox opposition to the project troubled the First Presidency, prompting them to send apostles Howard W. Hunter and James E. Faust to Jerusalem. The Church had leased the land for the Jerusalem Center fairly, and there had been no public demonstrations during the early phases of the project. The center also continued to enjoy the support of Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek and other Jewish leaders in the city. In fact, construction on the center was already a fourth of the way complete.
The day after the protest at the Western Wall, Elder Hunter and Elder Faust met with Rabbi Menachem Porush, an Orthodox member of the Israeli parliament, at his office in Jerusalem. Several other Orthodox leaders crowded into the room as well.
“We would like to appeal to you as friends to quietly withdraw from the project,” Rabbi Porush told the apostles. He was a large, imposing man, but he spoke with a subdued, courteous voice. “I don’t know if you fully appreciate the significance of what happened at the Western Wall,” he continued. “Rabbis from all over Israel gathered together to give expression to their opposition.”
“We feel we have done nothing wrong in establishing our center here,” Elder Faust told him. BYU students had been coming to Jerusalem for over fifteen years without any disturbances. Their purpose was to study local history and culture, not to conduct missionary work. Like Mayor Kollek, Church leaders believed the Holy Land could be shared peaceably by different faiths.
“We know about your strong youth missionary programs,” said another rabbi in the room. “We cannot tolerate such programs here.”
“Let us agree that you will stop construction for a two-week period,” Rabbi Porush suggested. “I’ll fly to Salt Lake City to explain to the appropriate leaders the need to halt construction.”
“We can’t stop construction,” Elder Hunter said. “We are under contract.”
“I have built many buildings,” said Rabbi Porush, “and I know arrangements could be made to stop construction.”
“We can’t stop construction,” Elder Hunter repeated, “but we can continue to discuss matters in order to resolve our differences.”
“Please think it over,” the rabbi insisted.
The following evening, the apostles called the rabbi to inform him that their minds had not changed. Construction would continue.
Once they returned to Salt Lake City, Elder Hunter and Elder Faust counseled with the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles about what more they could do to gain the trust of those who opposed the project.
To show that the Church was committed to doing no missionary work through the Jerusalem Center, the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve asked Elder Hunter, Elder Faust, and BYU president Jeffrey R. Holland to write up a formal nonproselytizing agreement to reassure religious and political leaders in Israel.
The committee finished the agreement on August 1. The next day, President Holland left for Jerusalem with the document in hand.
As a Relief Society president in Soweto, South Africa, Julia Mavimbela wanted every woman in her branch to feel respected and accepted. Throughout her life, she had seen women mistreated for lacking money or social status. She yearned for everyone in her care to be treated with dignity.
At this time, women in the Church held monthly “homemaking” lessons where they studied principles of self-reliance, money management, first aid, nutrition, and disease prevention. Knowing that many in Soweto were in financial hardship, Julia taught the Relief Society women how to store up food and conserve water, how to save money, and how to make do with little. She urged them to mend their old clothes rather than buy new.
On one occasion, someone donated clothing and other goods to the branch. Nearly everyone in the Relief Society was in need, and Julia prayed about how to distribute the donations fairly. The Lord prompted her to give each Relief Society member a numbered piece of paper. She then randomly drew numbers so every woman got a fair chance to choose something from the donations.
Although most Relief Society lessons were in English, Julia prepared lessons in Sotho and Zulu for women who were not as fluent in English. When assigning Relief Society sisters to minister to each other as visiting teachers, she relied on inspiration for guidance. “This is who the Lord wants you to visit,” she would tell the newly called sisters. “Assess the needs in that home, and then we can discuss together what we can do for them as a family.”
As Julia led the Relief Society in Soweto, she followed the progress on the temple being built in Johannesburg. She especially looked forward to seeing the angel Moroni statue hoisted atop the temple’s tallest spire. But when that day came, anti-apartheid activists in Soweto staged a “stayaway,” a community-wide strike to block working and shopping in the white areas of Johannesburg.
Julia supported the activists’ cause, but she was determined to witness this milestone in the temple’s construction. Joined by her grandson, she made her way into Johannesburg. No one stopped or questioned them along the road. At the temple site, they were able to witness the placement of the statue.
A year later, on September 14, 1985, Julia received her endowment in the house of the Lord. For the first time, she felt a sense of full belonging—a covenant oneness with her brothers and sisters in the gospel, despite their differences in race and language. And, at long last, she was sealed to both her late husband, John, and to her parents.
“What a wonderful day this has been!” she rejoiced. “So many blessings have been given to me.”
“Gladly I will pledge, this day, to so live that I may always be worthy to come to the house of the Lord and serve Him, my Savior and Redeemer,” she said. “Oh, how very much I appreciate knowing who I am and why I am here.”