Chapter 33
What Is This Church?
The Saints in northeast Mexico rejoiced on April 28, 2002, when President Hinckley dedicated a house of the Lord in Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico. It was the Church’s 110th operating temple—and the eleventh temple dedicated in Mexico in three years. As President Hinckley had envisioned, the fifty-eight temples dedicated since the Church began using the new temple design in 1998 had spread blessings and miracles far and wide. Saints who had once traveled several days to attend the temple could now reach one in a matter of hours or even minutes.
Among the first Saints to benefit from the temple-building boom were those in the Church’s Mexican colonies, whose isolation had inspired the new temple design. Dedicated in March 1999, the Colonia Juárez Chihuahua Temple was 6,800 square feet—the smallest in the Church—but it quickly became a beacon in the community.
Bertha Chavez, who attended church in nearby Nuevo Casas Grandes, was delighted when a counselor in the temple presidency invited her to be an ordinance worker in the new temple. It had been Bertha’s dream to serve in the house of the Lord since receiving her endowment in the Mesa Arizona Temple in 1987. Now her dream had come true.
“It was a great and beautiful surprise,” she recalled. “I jumped up, crying for joy, with gratitude to the Lord for giving me this tremendous opportunity to serve in His house.”
Across the Atlantic, Marilena Kretly Pretel Busto traveled from her home in Portugal to the recently dedicated Madrid Spain Temple. A year earlier, her 101-year-old grandmother had passed away. Now Marilena was eager to receive ordinances on her grandmother’s behalf.
In the house of the Lord, Marilena expected to feel something special when she was baptized for her grandmother, but she didn’t. Nor did she feel anything during the confirmation and endowment ordinances. At first, this absence of feeling left Marilena anxious. But by the time she knelt at the altar in the sealing room, ready to have her grandmother sealed to her parents, she was simply happy that she’d done the temple work.
Then the sealer began to speak, and Marilena felt a shock course through her body. She could not describe exactly what she felt, but she was sure that her grandmother was rejoicing in the spirit world.
In Bolivia, meanwhile, many of the nation’s one hundred thousand Saints had prepared themselves to attend the Cochabamba Temple after its dedication in April 2000. Believing that strong families prepared Church members to attend the temple, María Mercau de Aquino, a stake Relief Society president in Cochabamba, organized a meeting designed to strengthen marriages and give women a greater sense of their value.
In the same stake, Antonio and Gloria Ayaviri could see how the new temple strengthened their family. “Raising children is much easier now that we have the gospel and temple blessings in our lives,” Antonio testified. “In our home we have a piece of heaven.”
A house of the Lord in Fukuoka, Japan, was also changing lives. More than thirty years had passed since Kazuhiko Yamashita, the president of the Fukuoka Stake, had joined the Church after watching Man’s Search for Happiness at the world’s fair in Osaka, Japan. His faith in the plan of salvation continued to give him direction. He and his wife, Tazuko, had been sealed in the Tokyo Temple in 1980, and they had six children together.
The Fukuoka Temple was now the centerpiece of the Church in southern Japan. During the open house, Kazuhiko was pleased to see that many Saints had enthusiastically invited their family and friends to see the house of the Lord. Several Saints who had drifted from the fold had also returned, their faith rekindled by the undeniable influence of the temple. Sitting in the celestial room during the dedication, Kazuhiko felt perfectly at peace. He had a strong sense that the Lord was there and that He loved the Saints in Japan. When he glanced at President Hinckley, Kazuhiko saw tears in the prophet’s eyes.
The new temple in Monterrey, Mexico, soon brought blessings of its own. Román and Norma Rodríguez had joined the Church after attending the temple open house. At the time, they had been thinking about renewing their fifteen-year marriage in a lavish ceremony. But something about that plan had never felt right, prompting Norma to pray to God for direction.
The next year, she and Román returned to the Monterrey Temple with their three children. They no longer desired an extravagant wedding. In the beautiful, eternal promises of the sealing power, they found the marriage ceremony they had always wanted.
When Anne Pingree was called as second counselor in the Relief Society general presidency in April 2002, she was concerned about literacy among Latter-day Saint women. From 1995 to 1998, she and her husband, George, were mission leaders in the Nigeria Port Harcourt Mission. Many of the women she met during that time could not read, making it hard for them to serve in the Church.
As the Church grew in developing nations during the 1970s and ’80s, teaching people to read had become part of its mission. In 1992, Relief Society general president Elaine L. Jack had made literacy a major focus of her presidency, leading to the creation of the Gospel Literacy Effort to teach reading and encourage Church members to study the scriptures, instruct their families, and improve themselves.
Anne had served on President Jack’s board before her mission, and when she arrived in Nigeria, she had worked with missionaries and local Saints to promote gospel literacy. The Relief Society general board and an artist in Utah had also helped her create some simple training posters and booklets to assist women in the mission who had difficulty reading. As she used these materials, she saw more and more women fulfilling their callings with confidence and understanding.
During her first year in the Relief Society general presidency, Anne was assigned to lead the organization’s literacy projects. Studies showed that women in the developing world had less access to education than men, resulting in lower literacy rates. Evidence also suggested that Saints were more likely to stay in the Church and attend meetings regularly when they knew how to read. Along with Anne, Relief Society general president Bonnie D. Parkin and first counselor Kathleen Hughes believed that helping Relief Society members learn to read would empower them to serve effectively in the Church, strengthen their families, find better employment, and gain firmer testimonies of Jesus Christ.
Under President Parkin, the Relief Society board continued to emphasize the Gospel Literacy Effort. They also encouraged the Saints to use Ye Shall Have My Words, a literacy manual first developed by the Church Educational System. Like Anne, they understood that many Church members, through no fault of their own, struggled in their callings because they could not read or understand the Church’s many handbooks and lesson manuals.
As the presidency discussed these problems, Anne spoke about how simplified training booklets like the ones she used in Nigeria could be used around the world. President Parkin thought the Relief Society general board should develop similar booklets to help members in areas with low literacy rates.
To help with this work, the general board recommended Florence Chukwurah, a Latter-day Saint Anne met in Nigeria, to serve with them. Florence was visiting Salt Lake City while her husband, area authority seventy Christopher N. Chukwurah, received training at Church headquarters. A nurse by profession, Florence had grown up in poverty and understood what it was like to live in a place where the Church was still new.
The First Presidency approved the recommendation, and President Parkin assigned Florence to work with the literacy committee. Before long, she was working with other members of the board to develop simplified training booklets.
Anne was overjoyed to see the work of literacy moving forward. “This is all happening so fast,” she thought. “I scarce can take it in.”
Back in the Philippines, Seb Sollesta was grateful to be home again. His absence had unduly burdened his wife, Maridan, and their three sons. Now the family spent every day together, and Seb felt blessed. He could talk with his sons face to face, encourage them to be active in the Church, and help them prepare for missions.
When Seb returned, Maridan was serving as the Church’s public affairs coordinator for the stakes in Iloilo City. In this calling, she helped community and government leaders learn about the Church. She also paired the Church with religious and service groups to assist with eye screenings, blood drives, and other projects. Seb, meanwhile, became a high councilor in the Iloilo North Stake.
At the time, the First Presidency remained concerned about the Saints in areas with low Church attendance. The Philippines had nearly five hundred thousand Saints, but only around 20 percent attended meetings regularly. In response to this concern, President Hinckley called Elder Dallin H. Oaks to serve as president of the Philippines Area and Elder Jeffrey R. Holland to serve as president of the Chile Area, which was facing similar challenges. Both apostles began their service in August 2002 with a plan to occupy these positions for one year.
In the Philippines, Elder Oaks and his counselors met regularly with stake, mission, and area leaders. During a special training meeting in Manila, Elder Oaks spoke about the importance of embracing a “gospel culture” based on the plan of salvation, God’s commandments, and the teachings of modern prophets. He observed that elements of gospel culture were found in local cultures everywhere. Yet there were also aspects of these cultures that were out of harmony with the teachings of Jesus Christ.
“The covenants we make at baptism commit us to live changed lives,” he taught. “We must change all elements of our existing cultural practices or behaviors that are in conflict with gospel commandments, covenants, and culture.”
Elder Oaks emphasized that gospel culture strengthened families and individuals by promoting chastity, temple marriage, honesty, self-reliance, and equal partnership in marriage. He urged the leaders to make teaching the Savior’s doctrine and building faith in Him their top priority among the Saints. He also counseled them to fortify their wards by balancing missionary work with greater reactivation efforts and holding regular youth activities.
Following the training, Seb and other leaders in the Iloilo North Stake asked ward bishoprics to identify families to bring back into the fold. They believed that if a father and mother returned to church, they would likely bring their children with them. The children would then become future missionaries and leaders in the Church.
As a father of teenagers, Seb was especially concerned about the youth. Low activity in Aaronic Priesthood quorums and Young Women classes was a major issue in their area. Less than 10 percent of wards and branches in the Philippines had all three quorums of the Aaronic Priesthood functioning. And most units did not have midweek activities for youth.
The Iloilo North Stake addressed this problem by encouraging wards to hold regular youth classes even if they had only one or two members. With functioning classes and quorums, no matter how small, young women and men could invite their friends to Sunday meetings and weekday activities.
Seb believed the youth needed to participate in Church activities where they could form friendships and find good role models. When local leaders expressed concerns that they did not have enough budget to pay for the cost of activities, Seb and other stake leaders told them to go ahead and plan the activities. If they needed extra funds, the stake could provide them.
As Seb served the Saints in his stake, applying what he learned from Elder Oaks, he reflected on his own responsibilities at church and at home. When speaking about gospel culture, Elder Oaks had counseled the Filipino Saints against leaving their families for an extended time to work, as Seb had done. Some people in the Philippines had little choice but to work abroad, but Seb knew that he and his family could live happily and provide for themselves in Iloilo City.
And for him, no amount of material gain could make up for being away from his family for so long.
In April 2003, fourteen-year-old Blake McKeown arrived at a stake center in Baulkham Hills, a suburb of Sydney, Australia, with his seventeen-year-old brother, Wade. Typically, the stake center was a calm, quiet place. But today, a large canopy tent had been set up in the parking lot, and the grounds were teeming with youth from stakes across New South Wales. They had come to take part in an Especially for Youth conference—now known in Australia as Time for Youth, or TFY.
After the success of EFY in Brisbane, the area presidency encouraged stakes in Australia and New Zealand to organize events of their own. In 2002, Mary McKenna and her committee organized a TFY in Brisbane and one in New Zealand in 2003. The TFY in Baulkham Hills was the first one held in Australia outside of Brisbane.
Although Blake had grown up in the Church, he had never seen so many Latter-day Saint youth in one place before. He and Wade were from Penrith, about a forty-five-minute drive from the Baulkham Hills stake center. They had a strong youth group in their ward, but Latter-day Saints made up only half of 1 percent of Australia’s population, so youth activities—even at the stake level—rarely had more than a few dozen people attending. In Blake’s high school, there were only two members of the Church besides him and his brother.
Once TFY got underway, he and Wade rarely saw each other. Following the EFY model, everyone at the event joined a small group led by a young single adult counselor. In these groups, the youth rotated through activities. They also took part in service projects, listened to devotionals and talks, learned songs, studied the scriptures, cheered each other on in a talent show, and attended a dance.
The theme of the conference was “We Believe,” with a focus on that year’s seminary course of study, the Doctrine and Covenants. The speakers and counselors drew on the theme as they shared spiritual experiences and encouraged participants to come unto Christ, pray, keep journals, and live the other fundamentals of the gospel. Testimony meetings also gave the youth an opportunity to share their witness of the Savior and His restored gospel with their peers.
In church, Blake was often restless in meetings, but he came to TFY with a good foundation of faith from his parents. He and Wade were third-generation Latter-day Saints, and their parents and grandparents had always been great examples of faith and service.
The Young Men program had also strengthened him. As a deacon, Blake had been called as the quorum president. His bishop asked him to select two counselors and a secretary from the eleven other boys in his quorum. After praying for guidance, Blake came back to the bishop the next week with three names. The bishop showed Blake his own list, which had the same three boys. He had arranged the names in a different order, but he adjusted his list to match Blake’s. The experience had given Blake confidence in prayer and in his ability to lead.
Blake wasn’t very outgoing, but he enjoyed making new friends from other wards and stakes at TFY. At the end of each day, he and Wade would return home to rest up before heading back early the next morning.
Neither of them noticed how three days at TFY affected them, but their mother saw changes. Amid the fun and games, TFY provided youth with opportunities to feel the Spirit in a new environment. When Blake and Wade returned, they were more focused on the scriptures and a little more confident in their testimonies.
On the afternoon of January 10, 2004, Georges A. Bonnet gathered with President Hinckley, Elder Russell M. Nelson, and thousands of West African Saints in a sports stadium in Accra, Ghana. The prophet had come to the city to dedicate its new temple. But before the dedication, he had asked the children and youth of Ghana’s stakes and districts to commemorate the occasion with a cultural event featuring joyful music and dancing. He believed holding such celebrations at temple dedications would help young people make unforgettable memories and get excited about the Church.
After an opening prayer, groups dressed in colorful costumes performed on a large stage adorned with beautiful murals. Some of the performers sang songs. Others performed Ghanaian dances, like the Adowa and Kpanlogo, or played traditional music on drums and bamboo flutes.
A highlight of the afternoon came when missionaries stepped onto the stage and sang the missionary anthem “Called to Serve.” Eight hundred and fifty Primary children, all dressed in white, also climbed onto the platform and sang “I Am a Child of God” with the missionaries.
The next morning, Georges awoke feeling gratitude. Dedication day had finally arrived. At nine o’clock, he joined President Hinckley and Elder Nelson in the celestial room for the first dedicatory session. It opened with a cornerstone ceremony conducted by President Hinckley. Afterward, the temple matron and president spoke, followed by Elder Nelson and Elder Emmanuel Kissi, now an area authority seventy, who had led the Ghanaian Saints during the freeze.
In his talk, Elder Kissi paid tribute to Joseph William Billy Johnson, who was in the congregation. He also spoke of other early Saints who had made it possible for the Church to grow rapidly in Ghana.
“Our dreams have come true,” he said.
Near the end of the session, President Hinckley spoke humbly of the Lord’s help in building the temple. “The Lord heard our prayers,” he testified. “He heard your prayers. He heard the prayers of many people, and the temple now stands completed.”
The prophet then dedicated the building. “We thank Thee for the brotherhood that exists among us, that neither color of skin nor land of birth can separate us as Thy sons and daughters who have taken upon us sacred and binding covenants,” he prayed. “May Thy work spread in this land and in adjoining nations.”
Later that day, during the third dedicatory session, President Hinckley called on Georges to speak. Surprised, Georges approached the pulpit. “I want you to know that our God is a God of miracles,” he testified. “Miracles happen because of faith, and many, many have exercised their faith through prayer and other forms of worship to make this great day happen.”
“I believe that having a dedicated temple in West Africa might be one of the most important events since the Atonement of Jesus Christ and the restoration of all things,” he continued. “There are millions of Africans who have passed on who are rejoicing with us today.”
After the dedication, Georges joined President Hinckley, Elder Nelson, Elder Kissi, and others to visit John Kufuor, Jerry Rawlings’s successor as president of Ghana. Since taking office in early 2001, President Kufuor and his administration had been helpful and supportive during the temple’s construction. In 2002, he visited the First Presidency in Salt Lake City to learn more about the Church and thank the Latter-day Saints for their humanitarian and religious contributions to Ghana. He had also attended the recent temple open house in Accra and received a tour of the building. What he saw impressed him.
“Your church,” he now told President Hinckley, “has gained citizenship in Ghana.”
In June 2004, Angela Peterson waited in her car for a safety and emissions inspection near Washington, DC. Several cars stretched ahead of her, the line snaking around the parking lot. This was going to take a while, she realized.
Instead of letting her car idle, she turned off the engine and rolled down the windows to enjoy the summer afternoon breeze. As she waited, she picked up a copy of “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” which she had brought along with her. A few weeks earlier, her stake president had invited the members of her young single adult ward to memorize the proclamation, promising that doing so would bring them blessings. Angela believed that promise, so she had been trying diligently to memorize the document.
In the nine years since the family proclamation was announced at the September 1995 general Relief Society meeting, it had become central to the Church’s message about families. Parents organized their homes around its principles, Church members framed it and hung it on their walls, and Brigham Young University offered an entire course on its one page of text. Angela had been a teenager when President Hinckley introduced the proclamation, and she wasn’t sure if she had read it before her stake president’s invitation.
After finishing high school, Angela had moved from her tiny hometown of Stirling, Alberta, Canada, to attend university in Logan, Utah. After graduation, she took an internship in the Church’s Public Affairs Office in Salt Lake City before securing a full-time position in its International and Government Affairs Office in Washington, DC. The capital city streets, lined with museums and monuments and government offices, were very different from the dusty roads of her youth.
When Angela reached the front of the line, she went to a waiting room while a mechanic checked her car. The inspection took longer than she expected, and she began to worry as she watched other customers come and go while she continued to wait. Was something wrong with her car? How much would it cost to get it fixed?
Finally, after what seemed like hours, the mechanic came in and told her that her car had passed its inspection.
Relieved, Angela paid and left the building, still unsure why it had taken so long. At her car, she found the mechanic waiting for her.
“Miss,” he said, “I want to apologize for taking so long with your car inspection.”
He told Angela he had been drawn to the copy of the family proclamation on her passenger seat. He had read it over and over, moved by its message about families.
“What is this church? What is this document on the family? Can I have a copy of it?” he asked her. “It says it was written by apostles. Do you mean to tell me that there are apostles on the earth today just like in Jesus’s time? Please, I need to know.”
Stunned, Angela collected her thoughts. “There are apostles and prophets on the earth, just as in the time of Jesus Christ,” she told him, explaining briefly about Joseph Smith and the Restoration of the gospel. She gave him her copy of the family proclamation and a Book of Mormon.
He then gave her his name and phone number to share with the missionaries. As Angela drove home from the garage, she blinked back tears, grateful that she’d left the proclamation on her passenger seat.