Chapter 29
One Great Family
In early 1996, in the Philippines, Iloilo Stake Relief Society president Maridan Nava Sollesta received good news from her stake president, Virgilio Garcia. A few months earlier, she had written to the Relief Society general presidency to request a visit from Chieko Okazaki, the first counselor to President Elaine L. Jack. Sister Okazaki’s faith-promoting conference talks inspired Maridan, and she believed the women in her stake would benefit from hearing her speak in person. And now, President Garcia told her, Sister Okazaki had received an assignment to visit their stake.
Recently, the Church had reached a significant milestone: there were more Saints outside the United States than within. Maridan and her husband, Seb, had both joined the Church more than a decade earlier. They were sealed in the Manila Temple in 1984, and they had since had three sons, who were now ages seven, nine, and ten. In the five years since Maridan’s call as Relief Society president, the Church in the Philippines had grown by more than 80,000 members. The total membership in the country was 360,000 members, making it the fifth-largest population of Latter-day Saints in the world, surpassed only by the United States, Mexico, Brazil, and Chile.
The number of general authorities from outside the United States was also increasing steadily. Already the First and Second Quorums of the Seventy had included such members as Angel Abrea from Argentina, Hélio da Rocha Camargo and Helvécio Martins from Brazil, Eduardo Ayala from Chile, Carlos H. Amado from Guatemala, Horacio A. Tenorio from Mexico, Yoshihiko Kikuchi from Japan, Han In Sang from South Korea, and Augusto A. Lim from the Philippines. In 1995, the First Presidency created the role of area authority to replace the position of regional representative, adding to the number of priesthood leaders around the world supporting local units. Sister Okazaki, who was born and raised in Hawaii, was the first person of Asian descent to serve in a general Church presidency.
In Iloilo City, Maridan was witnessing the growth of the Church firsthand. There were now eight wards and six branches in her stake, and visiting every congregation was becoming more difficult for her and other stake leaders. Maridan owned and operated a pharmaceutical company, which kept her busy. But she did her best to minister to the women in her care. Although many new converts had grown into strong members, there were also many Saints in the Philippines who had stopped attending their Church meetings. Sometimes, when Maridan visited them, they would not talk to her. Others accepted her visits and appreciated the interest she took in them.
As Maridan talked with these women, she learned that some were upset with fellow Church members. Others had lost their faith or returned to former ways of life. Some women had been unable to enjoy or get much from meetings because they did not know English or Tagalog, the two main languages the Church used in the Philippines. Although the Church had been working to make materials available in more of the country’s nearly two hundred languages and dialects, communication was a major problem among Church members.
Sister Okazaki arrived in Iloilo City on the morning of February 24, 1996. Maridan and President Garcia were part of a welcoming committee that met her, Elder Augusto A. Lim, and Sister Myrna Lim at the airport.
For the rest of the day, Maridan and the members of her stake were taught by Sister Okazaki and Elder Lim. In her first lesson, Sister Okazaki used Doctrine and Covenants 107 to emphasize the importance of learning and fulfilling one’s duties in the Church. Later in the evening, she spoke to the entire stake about seeking blessings from Heavenly Father.
“My dear sisters and brothers,” she said, “we can ask for the desires of our heart. We can ask with faith and with confidence. We know that a loving Father listens to us. He will willingly give us what we want when He can.”
The following day was Sunday, and Sister Okazaki attended meetings of the Iloilo City Ward. During that time, she instructed and encouraged Maridan to counsel with Relief Society sisters in their native language so they could understand her instruction. Before leaving that afternoon, Sister Okazaki gave Maridan a book about leadership.
A few months later, Maridan and the other Filipino Saints had the chance to see another Church leader: President Gordon B. Hinckley. Since becoming Church president, he had traveled throughout the world visiting with Saints. In the Philippines, he visited Manila and Cebu City.
While in Manila, he answered questions about the Church for local television stations. One question referred to “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” a recent declaration by the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. For many years, Church leaders had been concerned that traditional teachings about marriage and family were changing throughout the world. The proclamation affirmed that marriage between a man and woman was ordained of God and that the family was essential to His plan of salvation. It upheld the sanctity of life, declaring that all people were beloved sons and daughters of heavenly parents, created in the image of God, with a divine nature and destiny. It also urged parents to love their children and raise them in righteousness, working together as equal partners as they established a home based on “faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities.”
“The family is the organization ordained of God,” President Hinckley explained to the interviewer in the Philippines. “God is our Eternal Father, and we are His children, regardless of race, color, or whatever. We are all His children. We are part of His family.”
Later, while speaking to a coliseum full of thirty-five thousand Saints, he noted that people sometimes asked him why the Church was growing so rapidly in the Philippines.
“The answer is simply this,” he said. “This Church stands as an anchor, a solid anchor of truth in a world of shifting values.”
“Every man and every woman who joins this Church and clings to its teachings,” he continued, “will live a better life, will be a happier man or woman, will carry in his or her heart a great love for the Lord and His ways.”
One evening in March 1996, Veronica Contreras stood with her husband, Felicindo, outside their ward building in Santiago, Chile. They had just moved to the capital from Panguipulli, a much smaller city in southern Chile, hoping to find better educational opportunities for their five children. They would also be closer to the Santiago Chile Temple and belong to a stake, which could provide established seminary classes and youth activities. Although it was not Sunday, the couple thought they might find some other Church members at the meetinghouse. But when they got there, they found the doors locked. No one was around.
Later in the week, the couple stopped a pair of missionaries on bicycles and asked them to help their family contact the bishop. Soon after, the bishop came to the Contrerases’ house and welcomed them to the ward, but his visit did not prepare them for what awaited them on their first Sunday at church.
In Panguipulli, the Saints had treated their meetinghouse like their home, keeping it clean and well maintained. But when Veronica stepped into the meetinghouse in Santiago, she was surprised to find that the floors and walls were scuffed with shoe marks and tire skids from children riding their bicycles through the halls. During sacrament meeting, most of the pews sat empty, even though the ward had more than seven hundred members on the records.
Sadly, the problems the Contrerases found in their new ward were not unique to Chile. The number of convert baptisms throughout South America had increased rapidly during the 1980s and early 1990s, leading to the creation of dozens of stakes. Yet many new members across the world struggled to maintain their commitment to the restored gospel after their baptisms.
Church leaders had been concerned about retaining recent converts for years and had tried to address the issue in various ways. In 1986, the local priesthood office of seventy was dissolved, adding strength to local elders quorums. Missionaries had also been encouraged to spend more time fellowshipping new members, and the Church created a series of six new-member lessons to help recent converts adapt. Yet many people never received these lessons. And wards like the one in Santiago were often overwhelmed by the enormity of the work. There were just so few members attending meetings compared to the total number of Saints in the ward.
The Contrerases’ new bishop was a good and faithful man, but he did not have any counselors to help share his workload. He also had to put in long hours at work and often couldn’t meet with members on weekdays. When Veronica and Felicindo met with him, they offered to help by serving wherever they were needed. Soon, their oldest daughter was playing the organ in the ward, and their sons were serving with the other young men. Felicindo began assisting with family history and temple work and serving on the stake high council. Veronica, meanwhile, was called as the ward Relief Society president.
Others joined them in their service. But there was still much to do to help the ward function better.
When the Hong Kong Temple was announced in October 1992, Nora Koot Jue was overjoyed. More than thirty years had passed since her service in the Southern Far East Mission. In that time, she had emigrated to the United States, married a Chinese American named Raymond Jue, and raised four children. But her experiences as an early Chinese convert to the Church in Hong Kong had never left her. They were the stories she had told her children at bedtime.
Raymond thought the entire family should go to the temple dedication.
“No,” Nora said. “That’s a lot of money.”
Raymond insisted. “We have to go,” he said.
The family began saving money. The children were now adults, and they knew how important the house of the Lord was to their mother. When she emigrated to the United States in 1963, she had stopped first in Hawaii to receive her endowment in the temple in Laie. Later, she and Raymond were sealed in the Los Angeles Temple, and a short time after that, the Oakland Temple was dedicated near their home in California’s San Francisco Bay Area. Nora and Raymond had eventually become temple workers there, giving Nora the opportunity to administer temple ordinances in Mandarin, Cantonese, Hmong, and other languages.
After the Hong Kong Temple was finished in May 1996, the Church held a two-week open house. Nora and her family arrived in the city on the evening of May 23, three days before the temple dedication. When they stepped out of the airport, Nora felt the warm, humid air surround her.
“Welcome to Hong Kong,” she told her family with a smile.
Over the next few days, Nora took her family on a tour of the city. Her oldest daughter, Lorine, had also served a mission in Hong Kong, and they enjoyed revisiting the area together. As Nora showed her children the streets and buildings she once knew, the stories they had heard as children came alive. One of the first places she took them was the temple, built on the site of the old mission home where she had spent so much time as a young woman. Nora could not be happier to see the location put to such a sacred purpose.
On the morning of Sunday, May 26, the family attended a special sacrament meeting with Nora’s mission president, Grant Heaton, and other former missionaries from the Southern Far East Mission. During the meeting, President Heaton and the missionaries bore testimony. When Nora’s turn came, she stood up. “The Spirit is burning within me,” she testified. “I am a product of this land and of this mission. And I am grateful.”
The next morning, Nora and her family sat together in the celestial room of the Hong Kong Temple. Nora’s face was bright and smiling as President Thomas S. Monson opened the meeting and Elder Neal A. Maxwell of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles spoke. She felt as if her life had come full circle. Forty-two years earlier, she had pleaded with Elder Harold B. Lee to send the Church back to Hong Kong. There were only a handful of Saints in the city at that time. Now Hong Kong had a house of the Lord, and she was there with her husband and children.
At the close of the meeting, President Thomas S. Monson read the dedicatory prayer. “Thy Church has grown and blessed the lives of many of Thy sons and daughters in this place,” he prayed. “We thank Thee for all who have accepted the gospel and who have remained true and faithful to covenants made with Thee. Thy Church in this area now comes to full maturity with the dedication of this sacred temple.”
Tears streamed down Nora’s face as everyone sang “The Spirit of God.” When the benediction was over, she gathered her husband and children in her arms and embraced them. Her heart was full.
That evening, the family attended a mission reunion. They arrived a little late and found everyone already chatting together in a room. The crowd quieted when Nora entered, and her family watched in awe as person after person greeted her with honor and respect.
While Nora chatted with old friends, an old man tapped her on the shoulder. “Do you remember me?” he asked.
Nora looked at him, and a flash of recognition crossed her face. It was Harold Smith, one of the first missionaries she had met as a young girl. She introduced him to her children.
“I didn’t think I made a difference,” he told her. He couldn’t believe she remembered him.
“You don’t forget people who save you,” Nora said.
In May 1997, the government of Zaire collapsed after years of warfare and political turmoil. President Mobutu Sese Seko, who had controlled the nation for more than three decades, was dying, and he was now powerless to stop the demise of his regime. Armed forces from Rwanda, Zaire’s neighbor to the east, had entered the country in search of exiled rebels from its own civil war. Other eastern African nations had soon followed, ultimately joining forces with other groups to oust the weakened president, replace him with a new leader, and rename the country the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC.
The Church continued to function in the region as the conflict raged. Around six thousand Saints lived in the DRC. The Kinshasa Mission covered five countries with seventeen full-time missionaries. In July 1996, several couples from the region had traveled over seventeen hundred miles to receive their temple blessings in the Johannesburg South Africa Temple. A few months later, on November 3, Church leaders organized the Kinshasa Stake, the first stake in the DRC and the first French-speaking stake in Africa. There were also five districts and twenty-six branches spread throughout the mission.
In Luputa, Willy Binene, now twenty-seven years old, still hoped to serve a full-time mission, despite the unrest in his country. But when he shared his hope to Ntambwe Kabwika, a counselor in the mission presidency, he received disappointing news.
“My brother,” President Kabwika told him, “the age limit is twenty-five years. There is no way to call you on a mission.” Then, trying to console him, he added, “You are still young. You can go to school, get married.”
But Willy did not feel consoled. Disappointment welled up inside of him. It seemed unfair that his age prevented him from serving a mission. Why couldn’t an exception be made, especially after all that had happened to him? He wondered why the Lord had inspired him to serve a mission in the first place. He had postponed his education and career to follow that prompting—and for what?
“You can’t be troubled by this,” he eventually told himself. “You can’t very well condemn God.” He resolved to stay right where he was and do all the Lord asked of him.
Later, in July 1997, the Saints in Luputa were formally organized into a branch. After Willy was called as a financial clerk and branch missionary, he came to realize the Lord had been preparing him to establish the Church where he lived. “OK,” he said, “my mission is here.”
A few other Saints in the Luputa Branch were also called as branch missionaries. Three days a week, Willy tended his crops. The other days he would go door-to-door telling people about the gospel. Afterward, Willy would wash his only pair of trousers so they would be clean the next day. He wasn’t quite sure what drove him to preach the gospel so diligently, especially at times when he had to go out on an empty stomach. But he knew that he loved the gospel, and he wanted his people—and someday his ancestors—to have the blessings he had.
The work could be challenging. Some people threatened the branch missionaries or warned others to avoid them. A few people in the village even gathered together to destroy copies of the Book of Mormon. “Burn the Book of Mormon,” they’d say, “and the Church will disappear.”
Yet Willy saw the Lord work miracles through his efforts. Once, when he and his companion knocked on a door, it opened into a foul-smelling house. From inside, they heard a quiet voice calling out to them. “Come in,” it said. “I’m sick.”
Willy and his companion were afraid to enter the house, but they stepped inside and found a man who seemed to be wasting away. “Can we pray?” they asked.
The man agreed, so they offered a prayer, blessing him that his disease would go away. “We’ll be back tomorrow,” they told him.
The next day, they found the man outside his house. “You are men of God,” he said. Since their prayer, he had been feeling better. He wanted to jump for joy.
The man was not yet ready to join the Church, but others were. Every week, Willy and the other missionaries met people—sometimes whole families—who wanted to worship with the Saints. On some Saturdays, they baptized up to thirty people.
The Church in Luputa was beginning to grow.
On June 5, 1997, President Gordon B. Hinckley stood at a pulpit beneath a large canopy in Colonia Juárez, Mexico. Around six thousand people were seated in front of him. “Some people in the Church feel a little sorry for you,” he joked with the audience. “You seem to be so far away from everybody.”
Church members from the United States had settled Colonia Juárez and other towns in northern Mexico during the U.S. government’s raids against plural marriage in the 1880s. These towns were situated in the arid Chihuahuan Desert, about two hundred miles from any major city. Their local Church-run school, the Juárez Academy, was turning one hundred years old, and President Hinckley had come to commemorate the occasion.
President Hinckley knew the history of the Colonia Juárez Saints, and he admired their determination to keep the faith. “You have helped one another in times of trouble and distress. You had to because you were alone,” he told them. “You have become as one great family.”
The next day, President Hinckley spoke at the school’s graduation ceremony and rededicated the newly remodeled academy building. Meredith Romney, the president of the Colonia Juárez Stake, then drove him two hundred miles north to the airport in El Paso, Texas.
The road to El Paso was rough and bumpy. At first, President Hinckley passed the time talking with President Romney. But after a while the conversation lulled, and President Hinckley quietly reflected on the Colonia Juárez Saints and the great distance they had to travel to attend the house of the Lord. “What can we do to help these people?” he wondered.
The question was relevant to Saints all around the world. With more than a dozen temples currently planned or under construction, 85 percent of Church members would soon be within three hundred miles of a temple. In northern Brazil, for example, Saints who had formerly traveled thousands of miles to attend the temple in São Paulo would be much closer to the new temple in Recife, a city on Brazil’s northeastern coast. A newly announced temple in Campinas, a city some sixty miles north of São Paulo, would likewise make the blessings of the temple more available to Brazil’s six hundred thousand Saints. Soon, temples would also be needed in cities like Porto Alegre, Manaus, Curitiba, Brasília, Belo Horizonte, and Rio de Janeiro.
But President Hinckley wanted to bring temples even closer to more Saints. He believed the house of the Lord played a vital role in helping Church members stay committed to the restored gospel of Christ. Recently, the prophet had learned that only 20 percent of new converts were still attending and participating in the Church after one year. The startling percentage troubled him and his counselors, and in May they had sent a letter to all Church members.
“We are deeply concerned about many of our brothers and sisters of all ages who have received a testimony of the gospel of Jesus Christ but have not felt the sustaining warmth of fellowship among the Saints,” the letter read. “Too many are not receiving the blessings of the priesthood and the covenant promises of the temple.”
“Every new member needs three things,” the letter continued, “a friend, a responsibility, and spiritual nourishment through gospel study.”
In Colonia Juárez, President Hinckley realized, the Church had nearly everything it needed to provide this kind of support for local Saints. The only thing it lacked was a house of the Lord. The same was true for stakes in other remote places across the globe. But it was hard to justify building temples in places where there were not enough Saints to use and maintain them.
He thought about the high cost of laundry and cafeteria facilities in temples. Both features provided a convenient service for temple patrons. But what if the patrons brought their own temple clothes and found food elsewhere?
For years, President Hinckley had thought about modifying the design of some temples in order to build more of them around the world. Already, the Church had adapted temple designs to meet the needs of local Saints in places like Laie, São Paulo, Freiberg, and Hong Kong. Why not build a temple with just the essentials: a baptistry and rooms for confirmations, initiatories, endowments, and sealings? If the Church did so, the Lord’s house could be established in lands far and wide, bringing sacred covenants and ordinances closer to many more Saints.
Later, President Hinckley sketched out a simple floor plan for the kind of temple he envisioned. The inspiration came clear and strong. When he arrived in Salt Lake City, he showed it to President Monson and President Faust, and they approved the concept. The Quorum of the Twelve Apostles also supported the idea.
Finally, President Hinckley brought the sketch to a Church architect. The architect examined the drawing.