Chapter 23
Every Effort
On Wednesday, November 6, 1985, Young Women general president Ardeth Kapp looked out her office window in Salt Lake City. A flag nearby was flying at half-staff to honor President Spencer W. Kimball, who had passed away the night before. The prophet’s declining health had kept him largely out of the public eye for several years, so his death was not a surprise. Yet Ardeth felt his loss deeply.
The news came as she and the Young Women general board were preparing to hold the first-ever Young Women satellite broadcast. The broadcast was scheduled for that Sunday, and Church leaders decided to proceed with it, despite the prophet’s passing.
Ardeth and her board had been planning the event for months. To help introduce the seven new Young Women values, Ardeth had asked Janice Kapp Perry, her husband’s cousin and a prolific Latter-day Saint composer, to write a song for the broadcast. She also sought permission to create a special issue of the New Era, the Church’s youth magazine, to further promote the values.
After calculating the cost of the issue—roughly fifty cents per copy—she went to Elder Russell M. Nelson, her presidency’s adviser in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, to approve the large expense. Knowing he had nine daughters, she tried to put the cost in perspective. “Elder Nelson,” she asked, “is a young woman worth fifty cents?”
Elder Nelson smiled. “Ardeth, you rascal,” he said. The Priesthood Executive Council soon approved the special issue and had it translated into sixteen languages.
On November 10, the day after President Kimball’s funeral, young women filled the Salt Lake Tabernacle. The general presidencies of the Relief Society and Primary, many general authorities, and past Young Women leaders sat on the stand with Ardeth and her board members.
A choir of four hundred young women opened the meeting by singing “As Zion’s Youth in Latter Days,” a hymn written expressly for the Church’s new hymnal, published three months earlier. Elder Nelson then gave the first talk.
“Strive to be rooted in Christ the Lord,” he urged the young women. “Bind yourselves together—rooted in truth, reaching to teach and testify, preparing to bless others with fruits of the Spirit.”
When he finished, Ardeth took the stand to introduce the new Young Women motto, “Stand for Truth and Righteousness,” based on the Lord’s promise in Moses 7:62: “Righteousness and truth will I cause to sweep the earth as with a flood.”
“We have moved into a period in which the adversary is openly flaunting his power, and many are being deceived,” she told the young women. “If they should look to you, would they see anything visibly different from the world that would help them identify the right path, the truth, the refuge they are seeking? Could you stand up and lead out for righteousness?”
The broadcast continued with a video presentation introducing the seven values. Next, a young woman from the Philippines stood up and repeated the values, one by one, as colorful banners representing each principle dropped down from the balcony. Second counselor Maurine Turley then presented the new Young Women theme, and the congregation recited it together:
We are daughters of a Heavenly Father who loves us, and we love Him. We will “stand as witnesses of God at all times and in all things, and in all places” as we strive to live the Young Women values.
The choir performed Janice Kapp Perry’s song “I Walk by Faith,” and Elder Gordon B. Hinckley offered closing remarks. After that, as choir and congregation sang the hymn “Carry On,” two hundred young women paraded down the aisle carrying flags in the seven colors representing the new values.
Ardeth was overjoyed. “The Young Women fireside was GLORIOUS!!” she wrote in her journal. A new chapter had begun for the young women of the Church.
The morning after the Young Women broadcast, eighty-six-year-old President Ezra Taft Benson stood at a lectern in the Church Administration Building. The Quorum of the Twelve Apostles had recently ordained him as president of the Church, and the time had come to announce the news to the press. His counselors in the First Presidency, Gordon B. Hinckley and Thomas S. Monson, sat behind him. Reporters and cameras filled the room.
After learning of President Kimball’s death, President Benson had felt weak—weaker than he’d ever felt before. Yet the influence of the Spirit had rested powerfully upon him. At President Kimball’s funeral, he had honored the late prophet as a man of great humility, meekness, and faith. “He knew the Lord,” President Benson had testified. “He knew how to speak to Him and how to receive answers.”
Under President Kimball’s leadership, the Church had grown by nearly two million members, many of them in Latin America. Among the hundreds of stakes organized during his presidency were the first stakes in Bolivia, Colombia, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela. To manage this growth, he had created and expanded the First Quorum of the Seventy and advocated leadership through area, regional, and family councils.
President Kimball had also emphasized the need for temples, missionary work, and gospel study. During his presidency, twenty-one temples were dedicated and the number of full-time missionaries increased from seventeen thousand to over twenty-nine thousand. In 1979, the Church had published an edition of the King James Version of the Bible with maps, a Bible dictionary, excerpts from Joseph Smith’s inspired translation of the Bible, and thousands of footnotes and cross-references to Latter-day Saint scriptures. Two years later, in 1981, the Church had released similar editions of the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price. The Doctrine and Covenants included two new sections—137 and 138—featuring revelations by Joseph Smith and Joseph F. Smith about the redemption of the dead and the Savior’s ministry in the spirit world. The edition also published the historic announcement of the revelation extending priesthood and temple blessings to all worthy Saints, regardless of race.
At the funeral, President Benson numbered this revelation among the most significant of the dispensation. “That revelation,” he declared, “opens the door to exaltation to millions of our Father’s children.”
Now, as President Benson contemplated the future, he was eager to build upon President Kimball’s legacy. Many challenges, old and new, still lay ahead of the Saints. For many years, Latin American nationalist groups had resented the Church for sending missionaries and mission leaders from the United States abroad, and their opposition was beginning to threaten the safety of Church members in the region. President Benson was also concerned about the people of central and eastern Europe, where most countries were still closed to the Church.
In Utah, meanwhile, a Church member named Mark Hofmann had recently come under investigation after three bombs exploded in the Salt Lake City area, killing two people. Mark was a rare documents dealer who had sold several items to the Church. Some of these documents contained information that cast doubt on the Church’s traditional account of its history, leading some people to question their faith. While the authenticity of these documents had been called into question, the incident had attracted worldwide attention, and reporting often portrayed the Church unfavorably.
As President Benson stood before the press, he also knew people had questions about his own presidency. Throughout his life, he had been active in government, and some people wondered how his views would influence his decisions as Church president.
“My heart has been filled with an overwhelming love and compassion for all members of the Church and our Heavenly Father’s children everywhere,” he told the press. “I love all our Father’s children of every color, creed, and political persuasion.”
He planned to lead the Church just as his predecessors had done. A few years earlier, the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles had announced a threefold mission for the Church: proclaim the gospel, perfect the Saints, and redeem the dead.
“We shall continue every effort to carry out this mission,” President Benson declared.
In early 1986, sixteen-year-old Manuel Navarro was a priest in the San Carlos Branch in Nazca, a small city in southern Peru. The San Carlos Branch was considered a “basic unit” of the Church, a designation created in the late 1970s for branches where the Church was new and had few members. In some of these units, including the San Carlos Branch, youth and adults met together in combined classes and quorums on Sundays.
Manuel enjoyed meeting with the Melchizedek Priesthood holders during the third hour of church. There were around twenty young Aaronic Priesthood holders in the branch, but fewer than half of them attended regularly. Meeting with the elders in the branch gave Manuel a chance to learn about the duties of both the Aaronic and Melchizedek Priesthoods.
Manuel had been a member of the Church for two years. He was baptized with his parents and younger sister. Now his father was a branch president, and his commitment to the Savior strengthened Manuel’s. “If Dad is in this,” he told himself, “it is because this is good.”
So far, 1986 was turning out to be an important year for the Church in South America. In January, temples were dedicated in Lima, Peru, and in Buenos Aires, Argentina—the third and fourth temples on the continent. The house of the Lord in Lima served not only Manuel and the 119,000 Latter-day Saints in Peru but also the more than 100,000 Saints living in Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela. Immediately after the dedication, two hundred Peruvians and two hundred Bolivians received their endowment.
Manuel soon began his second year of seminary, a program the Church had been expanding throughout the world for more than a decade. Previously, Manuel’s branch had offered seminary classes in the evening. But in 1986, the regional coordinator for the Church Educational System in Peru had implemented daily early-morning seminary for most of the country’s 298 wards and branches. Church members in Peru approved of the change. They wanted seminary classes to be held close to the homes of the students and their local volunteer teachers.
The first seminary classes Manuel attended were held in his home, but eventually they moved to the branch’s rented meetinghouse. Each weekday, Manuel walked about two miles to attend class at six o’clock in the morning. At first, waking up early was not easy, but he came to enjoy going to seminary with the other youth. With the encouragement of his teacher, he developed the habit of praying right after he awoke in the morning, even if it required getting up even earlier.
In seminary, Manuel received a set of “scripture mastery” cards. Printed on these cards were important scriptural passages that seminary students around the world were expected to learn. Since Manuel’s class was studying the Book of Mormon that year, the first scripture mastery verse he learned was 1 Nephi 3:7: “I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded.”
One seminary teacher, Ana Granda, taught Manuel and his classmates about their eternal value and destiny as children of God. Listening to her teach, Manuel felt that he mattered to someone. He gained a testimony that God truly cared for His children.
He also saw how keeping the commandments protected him from many of the problems other youth his age experienced. Although he played soccer with friends who were not Latter-day Saints, he found that his closest friends were the youth at church. On Wednesdays, they would attend “missionary nights,” where they played games and socialized with the missionaries serving in the area.
Manuel’s friends studied with him, supported him, and helped him stay on the right path. When he and his cousin went to parties on Saturday nights, their friends outside the Church never offered them alcohol. They knew they were Latter-day Saints and respected their beliefs.
Later that year, seventeen-year-old Consuelo Wong Moreno visited her older sister Carmen in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Cuernavaca was about six hundred miles south of Consuelo’s home in the city of Monterrey. Her father regularly sent her and her siblings there in the summer.
The temple in Mexico City was far away from Consuelo’s hometown, so when she learned that the youth in Cuernavaca were going to do baptisms for the dead, she got Carmen’s permission to go. She then had an interview with the bishop. He did not know her well and seemed to hesitate when she expressed interest in going on the trip.
“Look,” Consuelo said, retrieving an old tithing receipt from her scriptures, “I pay tithes.”
The bishop smiled as she unfolded the slip of paper and handed it to him. He conducted the rest of the interview and found her worthy to attend the temple.
“Don’t worry, sister,” he said. “You can go and do baptisms.”
A short time later, Consuelo took a bus to Mexico City with other youth and adults from the ward. When they arrived, no one was sure where the temple was, so they began searching for it on foot. It was a bright, sunny day, and the group of youth attracted the curiosity of passersby as they wandered the streets.
Finally, one of the young men spotted the temple’s spire. “There’s the Moroni!” he said. Consuelo and the other youth followed his gaze, and sure enough, there was the spire, towering above them.
Consuelo had never seen a house of the Lord in person before, and its grand size and ancient Mesoamerican–inspired architecture impressed her. They entered the temple, and workers greeted them kindly and instructed them on where to go and what to do. Consuelo felt the Spirit strongly as she was baptized for those who had died. One of them was an Indigenous woman, and her name lingered in Consuelo’s mind. She imagined meeting her in the next life and celebrating the work she had done for her.
After Consuelo returned to Monterrey at the end of the summer, she learned about an upcoming Young Women’s celebration called The Rising Generation. After introducing the seven values at the satellite broadcast, Young Women general president Ardeth Kapp had invited young women everywhere to write a personal message of hope and faith in Jesus Christ. They would then gather in their respective areas, attach each message to a helium-filled balloon, and release them together into the sky.
“Though you may be geographically isolated from many other young women in the Church,” President Kapp explained, “we want you to feel the strength of their sisterhood and numbers as you stand together, committed to gospel values.”
Consuelo was eager to share the gospel with others, and she wanted to participate in the event with young women from around the globe. But since the city of Monterrey restricted public religious demonstrations, her Young Women group could not take part in the celebration unless they received permission from the government.
Still, Consuelo took a sheet of paper and wrote a letter to President Kapp in Spanish. “I am a seventeen-year-old Laurel,” she wrote. “It’s been a week since I found out about the celebration of faith and hope that the Young Women will have worldwide. So, a special joy has filled me, and I want to participate.”
In the letter, she attached the message she wanted to send and asked President Kapp to include her in the activity:
I had hope and I did not let it die. I developed my faith, and as I nourished it, I discovered charity, yes, the pure love of Jesus, whose perfect love takes away all fear. Then I discovered peace. I discovered that peace puts us in harmony with others, respecting their beliefs and treating them as brothers and sisters.
“I would like you to imagine how much I want someone to receive and understand my message,” Consuelo wrote to President Kapp. “I hope that someday all those I know and love will feel the same way we feel.”
When she finished her letter, she put it in an envelope and sent it off to Salt Lake City.
In August 1986, President Ezra Taft Benson stood at the foot of the Hill Cumorah on the outskirts of Palmyra, New York. It was a Sunday morning, and a crowd of about eight thousand people had come to hear him speak at the place where Joseph Smith had received the gold plates from the angel Moroni.
President Benson and his wife, Flora, had attended the Hill Cumorah Pageant the night before. The pageant—an annual event since the 1930s—ran for a week each summer and attracted thousands of visitors. Performed on the hill itself, the production involved elaborate sets and a huge cast of volunteers who acted out the history of the Book of Mormon, culminating in the dramatic appearance of the resurrected Savior to the Nephites.
Now, as President Benson addressed the large crowd in front of him, he focused his remarks on the sacred text celebrated in the pageant.
“The Book of Mormon was written for us today,” he told the crowd. When he was a young man, many Church members did not regularly study or quote from the Book of Mormon. The Saints had been doing better in recent years, but he believed there was still room for improvement.
“We have not been using the Book of Mormon as we should,” he said. “Our homes are not as strong unless we are using it to bring our children to Christ.”
For decades, President Benson had been pleading with the Saints to come to Christ through a study of the Book of Mormon. As a young missionary in England in the 1920s, he had developed a love for the book. One time, when he and his mission companion were invited to speak to a group of critics, Elder Benson had come prepared to preach about the Apostasy. As he stood to speak, however, he was prompted to set aside his prepared text and speak only of the Book of Mormon.
President Benson fervently believed that the Book of Mormon could lead people to Christ. Over the past few decades, Church leaders had spoken more about the Savior than ever before. In 1982, the Church had added the subtitle “Another Testament of Jesus Christ” to the Book of Mormon. The addition emphasized the Savior as well as the book’s vital place alongside the Old and New Testaments. Church leaders believed the new subtitle would bear powerful testimony of the Savior and guard against false claims that Latter-day Saints were not Christians.
As he traveled as Church president and met with the Saints, President Benson often testified of Jesus Christ and of the Book of Mormon as a special witness of His divinity. And in his first general conference talk as president of the Church, he urged the Saints to read it every day.
“The Book of Mormon has not been, nor is it yet, the center of our personal study, family teaching, preaching, and missionary work,” he taught. “Of this we must repent.”
Six months later, on October 4, 1986, he again spoke about Jesus Christ and the Book of Mormon at general conference. “The Book of Mormon is the keystone in our witness of Jesus Christ, who is Himself the cornerstone of everything we do,” President Benson testified.
“There is a power in the book which will begin to flow into your lives the moment you begin a serious study of the book,” he promised. “You will find greater power to resist temptation. You will find the power to avoid deception. You will find the power to stay on the strait and narrow path.”
On October 11, 1986, young women throughout the Church took part in the Rising Generation celebration. President Ardeth Kapp led the activity from Ricks College, the Church school in Rexburg, Idaho. As a cold wind howled across campus, President Kapp spoke to the young women in an auditorium before everyone stepped outside to release balloons carrying messages of hope, love, and peace. Elsewhere in the world, young women listened to a recording of the same message before they too sent their balloons off into the sky.
“You are a generation known by your Heavenly Father,” President Kapp declared. “Now you are being called to come forward, to exert your influence, and to become a mighty force for righteousness.”
Fourteen hundred miles away, in Monterrey, Mexico, the restriction on religious demonstrations prevented Consuelo Wong Moreno from releasing a balloon on October 11. But a short time later, she was surprised to get a personal letter from President Kapp. The letter was in English, so Consuelo tried her best to decipher its meaning. When her older sister Aida came home, she helped translate it.
“Dear Consuelo,” President Kapp wrote, “I received your beautiful letter expressing your hope to participate in the ‘celebration of faith and hope that the Young Women are to carry out.’ I wanted you to know that your message was sent up with a balloon by a young woman here.”
President Kapp told Consuelo she had mentioned her letter when speaking to the young women at Ricks College. Consuelo was honored that President Kapp had shared her words with so many people. She felt stronger knowing young women across the world were just as eager as she was to spread the gospel.
Weeks later, after much prayer, the young women in Monterrey received permission from the local government to hold their own Rising Generation celebration. Consuelo and Aida joined a hundred young women and leaders from multiple stakes at a plaza in the heart of the city. They arrived before dawn, the sky gradually brightening as they gathered into groups and helped inflate white balloons. Consuelo attached her handwritten testimony to her balloon with a ribbon and released it into the sky with the others.
As she watched her balloon float away, she hoped it would land somewhere safe so someone could find it and read her message.
A short time later, Consuelo completed her Personal Progress goals. She and the other young women in her ward had begun learning about the new values and the colors associated with them. Each Sunday, her Laurel class recited the new Young Women theme. It reminded them that they were daughters of God with a divine destiny. Consuelo was grateful to know that God had a plan for her and cared about her well-being.
In January 1987, Consuelo received public recognition for completing Personal Progress at New Beginnings, an annual event for young women and their families held in wards and branches throughout the Church. New Beginnings was a chance to welcome girls into the program, celebrate young women’s achievements, and encourage their efforts. In Consuelo’s ward, the Young Women president invited parents to help their daughters complete Personal Progress goals. Next, several young women, each dressed in one of the new Young Women colors, spoke about the values. The bishop then presented medallions to Consuelo and the other young women who had completed their Personal Progress journey.
Consuelo was proud of herself for finishing, and she wore her medallion like she was carrying a trophy. Whenever it caught the attention of people who were not members of the Church, she would explain what it represented and how she earned it.