"Let's Roll!"

This little mission president calling has become a non-stop blur of activities, leaving virtually no time or energy to record them.  

October 2017 Africa West Area Mission President Seminar, Accra, Ghana

In late October, we returned to Ghana to attend the dedication of the new Ghana MTC with Elder Bednar, followed by a mission president seminar with him, the Area Presidency and the 15 other West Africa mission presidents and wives.  It was a fabulous week, and I came back energized with a blazing vision of what we needed to accomplish here and a frantic sense of how little time there is to get it done.  We took our first four months here to set a foundation and learn the ropes, but it is time to kick into gear and move the mission to the next phase.

Last month we participated in conferences for Liberia’s two existing stakes (created 6 months and one year ago) and I have been guiding our two remaining member districts in planning a joint conference scheduled for next weekend where they will also become stakes.  The Area President and another Seventy arrive on Wednesday and I have lined up two days of interviews for them to identify two stake presidents, get counselors, bishops and high councils selected and called.  We will have joint conference meetings on Saturday and Sunday including taking over Liberia’s official inaugural center for our Sunday combined meetings.

We have no competition for the inaugural hall since the presidential elections, held every six years, which were to be completed in October, are stuck in political limbo over allegations of fraud and tampering.  With luck, the courts will make a final ruling this week, and they can squeeze in the campaigning, runoff election and validation of the results before the end of the first week of January.  That is the date the old government is out of power by constitutional mandate.  I personally think it would be bad to have no functioning government.  We have drawn up contingency plans for our missionaries, but organized a countrywide fast this weekend for Liberia’s first peaceful transfer of power since 1944.

Once the two new stakes are formed, it will clear my slate of a ton of responsibilities for the 5,000 members and 16 branches in those two districts. At that point, my responsibility in the four stakes across Monrovia, the capitol city, will be reduced to preaching the gospel and baptizing converts. This, incidentally, is what mission presidents across the rest of the world do with their time. 

90% of our missionaries will be working in those stakes, but I still have direct oversight of three mission branches and 1,000 members in Harbel and Kakata, both an hour outside Monrovia and the only areas where the Church is organized outside the capital. The gospel started up in both of those cities ten years ago and I sense that it’s time to shake up the status quo. So, for two straight Sundays, we started taking the gospel and the missionary work out to the hinterlands. 

While the quality of Liberia’s “roads” generally fluctuates between abysmal, gridlocked, or non-existent, the Chinese government made some recent infrastructure improvements around the country in a “charitable” exchange for the rights to much of the Liberia’s natural resources (e.g., lumber, water, fish, minerals, oil, arable land).  The silver lining to that future geopolitical storm cloud is some new and very navigable intercity roads that connect Monrovia with a nice coastal city a couple of hours down the coast and some mid-sized cities in the northeast sector of the country for the first time ever.    

Another key part of the current equation is that the recent Ebola crisis and the civil wars created a temporary diaspora, as Liberians all across the country fled to surrounding countries to escape the violence, famine and disease.  While there, many of them joined the Church, then returned home, only to discover that the Church presence is limited to Monrovia.  With no money for transportation, they are currently scattered across the country, often sending us letters asking when their Church will be coming to their area. 

With the new roads and the new-found freedom from four stakes being created in Monrovia during the past year, the answer is "NOW!"

On November 12, we took one of our senior couples, loaded a pickup with 50 chairs, sacrament trays, hymnals and Gospel Principles manuals and drove just over two hours northeast to Totata, a town of 10,000, located an hour beyond Kakata, the nearest branch and started a new member group in a large thatched shed.  We have two returned missionaries in their mid-30s living in Totata, one married with two kids, who form the nucleus.  Seven members attended the meeting, along with 25 visitors, mainly families who know and respect our members and came looking for information. 

November 12, 2017. The new Totata member group leader, answers questions from visitors following 

the first-ever  LDS Sunday Services in Totota, Bong County Liberia

I called the two returned missionaries living there as the group leader and assistant, and we held a brief sacrament meeting and Sunday School class for 90 minutes, covering the essentials of the gospel and the restoration.  At the end, all the visitors remained for nearly an hour asking questions about Church doctrines, the Book of Mormon and expressing their hope that a local branch would be created so they could formally join the Church and help support it financially instead of just being “hearers of the word.” 

The next Sunday we repeated the process in Buchanan, a coastal port city of 60,000 two hours southeast of Monrovia.  In Buchanan, we were aware of a former Monrovia district president who recently moved there and another member in his mid-thirties. We took a pair of senior missionary couples along, a visiting member of the Seventy and my assistants with our standard load of chairs and equipment and held a meeting in a vacant house with 13 members and 29 visitors present.  Several families came as guests of local members, but most of the visitors accepted invitations from the assistants, who spent 10-15 minutes just before we started inviting people living nearby to come. They hurriedly dressed up and walked into our new chapel as families, anxious to hear the word of the Lord.

November 19, 2017. Members and guests are all smiles following the first ever LDS Sunday Services in Buchanan, Grand Bassa County in Liberia.

Just like the prior week, we had great talks covering the fundamentals of the restored gospel, a wonderful spirit and great excitement that the missionaries will be arriving soon to teach the gospel.  

November 19, 2017. Five baptisms near Harbel, Margibi County

We capped the day off by stopping at the branch in Harbel on our drive back from Buchanan just long enough to witness five baptisms taking place in a scenic creek just down the road from the chapel, because the baptismal font was broken again.  I personally suspect the missionaries.

Meetings in Buchanan and Totata are in now their third and fourth weeks.  We located fifteen more members in those towns just by word of mouth, secured a missionary apartment in Buchanan and put a pair of missionaries there last week.  Today they told me that have scheduled five baptisms for later this month.  In the much smaller Totota, we are scrambling to locate a more suitable chapel and a missionary apartment, but the plan is to move missionaries up there next month.

I now have the real estate team scrambling to locate possible rental chapels and apartments and 90 elders champing at the bit for a shot to open a city where the gospel has never been before.  I am also beginning to grasp the logistical challenges of assisting and supporting two groups of members and missionaries, both located over two hours away in different directions.  

In the meantime, I am exploring dividing some of the existing mission branches and possibly creating new member districts.  I am also trying to figure out what just happened to the relative calm I was anticipating would come in December when we unloaded all the existing member districts. 

This is a seriously crazy way to spend your retirement.