Transcript for Mosiah 18-24 Part 1 • Dr. Melissa Inouye • May 20-26 • Come Follow Me

For me, this is one of the kind of pivotal chapters of passages in the whole scriptural canon. There's a lot of days since we have this unique idea of what baptism is which is informed in large part by this chapter and by the description of the people and the church. The passage just talks with such affection about the waters of Mormon like this place. It was so beautiful the people just because of what they did there all over the world. There are places like that, waters of Mormon, places where people were baptized, places where people came together for the first time. Right, work in the Church history department and we have a whole division dedicated to historic sites. So, you know, famous places. A lot of those sites aren't famous. They're just famous kind of locally to the people who know what happened there. They're really special there. So, love this chapter 18 in particular and this larger section in general.

Oh, it's such a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

How do people read my name? you know you a you know it's not fearful it's a it's a weird romanization um that was like used at the early 20th century but since then it's much simpler it's I and O you eat so the why gets in the way people there what do you do with the why you know actually do anything with it so I can't imagine yeah substitute teacher in school going oh no Well, actually, this is very significant for our topic today, because I would like to talk about the global histories of the church. And so often, we have these records that have problems, because they were being kept by people who didn't speak that language natively, like, you know, missionaries. And so we'll have all sorts of different names and different spellings. It can be quite hard to find people in the archives. The work that church has been doing in the Church history department to kind of bring out those better sources and the kind of original voices of Latterty Saints is really inspiring. And it brings to mind all the time for me this scene. Alma is gathering the church and forming. I really intention all church community for the first time. That's happening all over the church. My friend, Tonnel, and Ford, the church's studio department says, it's always 1830 similar in the church. And that's the same thing for the Book of Mormon as well. For someone, there's always the waters of Mormon.

Well, if we start right at months I at 18, we are dumping right into that story. Before the chapter we had a kind of a downer, which was it, I've been a diet. sealed his words with his own life. But then in this coming chapter chapter 18, we have a sign of the seeds that have been at I planted coming to fruition. So, Alan was a priest who believed have been at I and who went about teaching what a bit of I had taught. And not only did he teach, he was widely listened to. People began to gather around him. They began to form a community. And we have this beautiful scene in chapter 18 versus eight through ten. That's kind of a key to this covenant. We're discussing today. Should we shake it up to someone else when we read it?

This is such a beautiful scripture. And at the end of verse 10, it says, baptism is a witness that we have entered into a covenant with the Lord. The content of the covenant is expansive, right? Which kind of laid out in eight and nine? What I think is beautiful is that we have both this vertical covenanting with the Lord, but the covenant also involves these horizontal connections to others, to be one people, to bear one another's burdens, to mourn with those that mourn and comfort those that stand in need of comfort. I see as this really kind of beautiful tie between what's in heaven and what's on earth, what's really beautiful are stories of Latter-day Saints everywhere who are entering into the same covenant. So this is beautiful picture of the first baptisms in Nigeria. People have been pleading for the church to send missionaries and to have formal church organization for decades. Shortly after June 1, 1978, when the church's policies regarding racial restrictions on priesthood changed, then members in Africa were able to organize officially, and there's this beautiful picture, which you can see showing this long line of people waiting to be baptized in this spot in the river, such a beautiful peaceful place, and this feeling that like, we've waited long for thee. That leads to this big question. Well, I think it's a big question. When we do missionary work, you know, we're like, go out there and convert the whole world and bring them all in. We kind of have this idea that people are going to, the missionaries will go out there and find a bunch of people and then those people will all be kind of just like us. I'll be like, like the church that we recognize. But actually, when missionaries go out into the world that had a ton of different kinds of people, different political views, cultural views, views on honesty, views on marriage, views on charismatic experiences, like whether angels or spirits appear to people nowadays and so on. So much difference. And then people come into the church, they come in as they are. We are then in a covenant to bear their burdens also. If anyone can think of someone in their local congregation that they find hard to get along with, you don't have to say it out loud or anything, but you just imagine someone in your neighborhood, the congregation who's hard to get along with. And then imagine how that is on a worldwide scale. So many other personalities. that are really hard to get along with. This in terms of where we come from. What are different expectations are? I find this covenant in this scene so universal and also so intimate because in order to understand people, to more with them, you have to know them and to comfort people. You have to have love in your heart to give to them for comfort.

Yeah, this question of, come into the fall of God and be called one people and to bear one of his burdens. What does that even mean? You think in a church where global we exist in different parts of the world? maybe you'll sort of mission to one country. But then what does it mean that you don't know everybody? In the early church, for example, we see they want some really hard times and we'll see times when someone will say, Jane Manning, James gave me some flower, which is about half the flower that she had left and I was able to feed my family. So those were face-to-face relationships. But do you find it hard to identify with saints who are not, you know, the same country, who don't speak the same language, who you don't see all the time?

Yeah, that's super. It's an incredible feeling when you can go into a meeting and not speak the language and just feel totally at home. So then I just push you on. There's a little tiny that would you know how to bear the burdens of the people in that word, as well as in your own congregation?

And it's so tricky because it's the church gets bigger and bigger. That's the reality for all of us. We have our local communities, our local words or branches. People we know well and then beyond that are people that we don't quite know as well. I think it's a huge challenge for us in the 21st century coming to terms, getting a grip on what it means to be a global church.

Yeah, I think so. It's really exciting actually. The tabernacle choir has this new program. Well, they'll have guest singers from around the world come in and sing at conference with the tabernacle choir. That's fantastic. And I think again, an attempt to kind of help all of us get a grip on what it means to be a kind of global congregation, the global community.

At the Church history department, I'm in charge of the global histories. They are the Church's short 500 word or less. stories of Latter-day Saints all around the world. The great thing about being 500 words or less is that you could use a whole story and its entirety and the talk and a lesson. We also found out that none of Jesus' parables were longer than 500 words, so we feel like it's a good story like. It's good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for us.

What's really interesting about these stories is they let us know that for a long time, the church was founded in the United States, but even from the very beginning, it's dependent very heavily on people from outside the United States. So for example, at the time of the Navu, the end of the Navu era, when people were beginning to gather and to go west, There were far more Saturday Saints in England than there were in the United States. In those early days, we had saints from Wales, from Scotland, from the Scandinavian countries. And they really also made a mark on the church. My ancestors, my grandparents, are from Gunnison, Utah, and that's in Sampee County. And in Sampee County, there's still a pretty heavy Scandinavian influence. And it comes from people's last names. I guess, you know, Christiansen's in your hands and but it also comes to kind of like in the local culture and like the local treats.

And then the church outside the United States has often affected the church inside the United States. So for example, there was this woman in Guatemala in 1942 and she was playing ping pong. at this ping-pong place, and a friend called her over and says, hey, Carmen, come here at this green go-ins to meet you. He said, and Spanish. And she says, like, why in the world is a woman have to go to a man in Spanish? Thinking that he wouldn't understand. She said, if he's a gentleman, he can come and meet me. And so then he, like, locked across the room and replies in perfect Spanish. where in the world have you been and after that they like began dating. Eventually got married and that Carmen joined the church. She was actually the first member to join the church in Central America and she noticed some things as they were trying to implement the church in this new place. People from indigenous communities were coming in a long way, coming in with driving in for hours to attend these different meetings which were on different days like primary Sunday school, sacrament meeting and so on. She's like, this is just not working. In the 1970s, then now kind of established a lot of decent family. Carmen came up with a number of ideas, which he suggested to leaders at church headquarters. Like, could we have a consolidated median schedule? That was a three hour block, which was then piloted in Guatemala. That way, people can come in, make that long journey only once. And can we have smaller median houses? We don't have to have these massive median houses that cost a lot of money and look like they come straight out of Bountiful Utah. We can have smaller median houses, fake, fit, the needs of our people here. Those kinds of things also, the simplified Sunday school lessons, which we now call gospel essentials, and that was also a karma-no-donald idea. If the church becomes a more global church and grows, we all influence each other. You know, it's not just this flow of culture and influence from the United States outwards. It's like the whole world is kind of mixing up and flowing in together. And I love that because I think it really exemplifies the kind of horizontal movement in these verses come into the fold of God and be called this people and are willing to bear one of those burdens that they may be liked. Sometimes, if something is a burden for people in Guatemala, maybe that's a burden for people in other places, too. Maybe we can change this. There are some macro-level changes that have happened. And then also, I think, another trend that we've seen in the churches adaptations to local situations. So, for example, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where I visited the church once. I noticed that Sunday School, like the Sunday School classroom, was like underneath the mango trees. It was a great classroom and a great place to have that gathering, but it didn't have to be in a building.

Yeah. That's the beauty of the global churches. You see all these different ways that people are trying to fulfill their comes. We also see different ways that people that live in the Gospel.

Well, it was February 1992 or maybe 1994.

Yeah, ever since then, there's been more members outside North America than inside North America. The fastest growth is taking place in Africa. Though currently, that's still only about a small, you know, single digit percentage of our membership.

The most spoken language in the church is English. After that, I believe it's Spanish. After that, I believe it's Portuguese. If you get English, Spanish Portuguese, you get about 90% plus of the entire church membership. It's actually impressive that we invest the resources that we do in trying to get German, Russian, and Chinese, and Thai, and all of this different languages, we're really trying to be a quote.

Okay, another story. Talking about Maria, just a little bit. She was pregnant with her first kid when they fled from Angola and went to Portugal with refugees. We've been Lisbon for a while and got on their feet got jobs and had a new life during that time decades in Portugal. Maria kept on having dreams of herself and something churchy in Angola. So like she dreamed about Spencer W. Kimble to sister missionaries and herself somewhere in Angola, or she dreamed about another missionary and herself in Angola. So she kept on bringing about herself in the church. So she decided to go back to establish the church there. So she filled up her suitcase with manuals from the Lata wards building and brought all the manuals to Angola. And when she got to Angola, she started holding meetings in her house. So people would come to her house. They would worship. They would sing Maria taught all the lessons. She taught primary. She taught really society. She taught priesthood. She organized a choir. They were singing hymns, a lot of they sang hymns. Finally, like in 1992, I believe a general authority was passing through Angola and was just astonished to see this group of 100 Latter Day Saints. meeting in Angola they met him at this for a conference at the hotel and the choir was in these special choir shirts and skirts and everything and that she had told all the men to wear an under shirt so at first you thought they were all members because you thought they were all wearing garments and doubt just kind of funny yeah he was just stunned that they had it you know so many people he's like wow Will you please organize a church in Angola? She's like, can I do that? He's like, yeah, he gave her a blessing. He said, this is a very solemn and sacred process. We don't go in through the back door. We don't give bribes. Murray has set out and she prepared all the paperwork with help from the area office in Johannesburg. All the paperwork was required to get the church officially registered with the government. That would make it subject to civil protections to religious freedom protections and so on. they'd be allowed to meet officially and if you recognize this legitimate group in Engel and Society. She gets the papers together and the day comes when she's ready to take the papers. Right at this time, unfortunately, there's this huge flare up in violence that becomes known later on as the Halloween massacre. And in the course of three days, about 20,000 people in the capital of Luanda where she lives are killed. there, fighting the streets, people go house to house, pulling people out of their houses, some people just disappear. In the midst of this huge civil unrest, you know, she doesn't know how long it's going to last. She takes the papers. There's no postal system, and she marches from her home to the government building, and as she's walking there, all along the road she's walking past the bodies of the dead so she goes to the government office and she says here's the papers that the church of Jesus Christ we need permission for the church to operate here and the government official says forget it you got to get in line and that could take a long time she's like well you know I need these now lady people have been waiting for this some people have been in line for 20 years she says this little prayer to God to the end. What should I do? And God says, I'm better than all of them go ahead and submit the papers. So she's like, OK, here, here's my papers. And she turns them in. And then it turns out about two weeks later, there's this announcement from the government, which is it all of the religious organizations that were waiting for approval have been approved. So we don't know exactly what was going on. behind the walls of the bureaucracy in Angola. But we know that Maria's story and her courage played a role in a 20-year wait becoming a two-week wait. And it blessed not only the latter days since, but just all the people who wanted to worship God in that country. Thank you for talking about how simple the church community can be. And I think in that story of Maria de Silva and the congregation that she brought together in Angola and then brought into legal existence as well. It really shows us how it's not that complicated. We just have to have people who are going together and love.

Well, that reminds me of the time when our award really came through for us. So I've been a cancer patient since about 2017. Every kind of wiggle in my family's path, you know, our words have always been there to help us. Most recently, we were on a family vacation in the summer. Last summer, we came back. It was late at night, and I noticed there were barclips leading up to our front gate, and we had never had barclips there before. We're also like in the middle of some summer landscaping, so everything kind of weird. That's weird. Like, walk to the bright chips. Now I open the door at the backyard and our ward had gone through our crazy, overgrown garden. the raspberries reaching everywhere and snagging everywhere. They tied them all up. They put them all back. They'd put down barchips between the pads, the garden beds, made it this really beautiful, peaceful space. I do a lot of outdoor yard work. And I was just calculated in my mind the number of wheelbarrows of barchips that would have been required for this. And I was like, whoa, this was like a multi day. task with like a lot of people. They try to remain secret. We figured out who some of them were, but it's just like you said, John, sometimes you, you don't know and you don't know how to say thank you. And then that makes you feel bad because you can't like repay it in a kind of personal way, but you can to keep putting things into the universe that are good. And that's why I have this cough. There's like something pressing on my diet for it. I'm or something is really annoying. So sorry.

Yes, a long time. It's getting really old.

Well, when I've had big surgeries, my family and members of the ward have always come and helped me. I think it's also just really important. I mean, sometimes you can't take away pain from someone, right? Let's just, you just can't do it. What I think the next best thing is just to be a witness to just kind of sit with them and say, this is really hard. And then it gives a person who's in pain or who's going through a hard time. Just that recognition. Yeah, making this up. This is a real challenge and you're tackling it. So I think that's really helpful. People who have cancer often talk about how their friends kind of vanish. That hasn't happened to me. But I think it's because people just don't know what to say anymore. They feel like it will be awkward. They don't say. They don't know how to help. And so they don't come. But for me, it's really powerful. to have people come and just say, this is really hard for you. And you say, it's really hard. And they say, it looks like a kind of sucks. And you're like, yes, it sucks. And it's just nice to have someone there with you that way. I mean, yeah, I think that's why Jesus in the garden of guests and many asked the apostles to come to witness. It was hard for them. But I think that's what he wanted. He didn't want to be alone during that time.

Hmm, so I really think it is, and what really helps me also is when I think I have problems, I think my life is hard, and then I'll read some stories of fellow Latter-day Saints who have shown so much strength in fortitude and the face of this unimaginable difficulty that I like actually Melissa likes. Stop whining, get over it. For example, in Rwanda during the Rwanda in genocide, There was a young girl named Agnes Tuggaramaria, and she was about 11, and she saw her neighbors slaughter her parents, her siblings, and a bunch of her cousins. She grew up with this horrible feeling of depression in this anger in her heart. She said she just didn't have any peace, which you can totally imagine. Why? She kind of struggled through it and later on, she was a student at the university and her cousin had become a member of the church. So her cousin asked her to come with her to church and so she went with her to church and she just loved the people. She found it to be a really warm and welcoming community and she said they behave like children of the Lord. So she eventually joined the church and eventually was able to get a temple recommend and to go to the Johannesburg Temple to be sealed to her family members who had been killed during the genocide. And she said that encountering the gospel of Jesus Christ gave her the ability to forgive the people who had done this to her family and that forgiveness brought her peace. So inspiring to me that we're part of a community of people who have gone through really hard things all over the world and we can learn from each other that way.

Yeah, I like a list of qualities that are the opposite of was described in another book of Mormon passage on the natural man. The natural person say to be inclusive of me as a woman. The natural person is an enemy to God as a scripture because, you know, we're selfish or heart-hearted. We only want to do our own thing. We don't want to listen to God. Then here in the scriptures, we have kind of opposite thing. People are not going off as lone wolves. They're coming together. They're not being selfish. They're very one another. There's burdens. And they're all together to witness of God as opposed to pretend that God doesn't exist.

I see levels of intimacy in that tier. You could think about, for example, some people sometimes say that being a member of the church is just like, you know, a member of a moving collective. We do plenty of like physical labor in the church where we help people move. That we clean out houses that have been destroyed by hurricanes. We bring food to each other. It's even more intimate to mourn with someone, to mourn with someone you have to. I don't know if you have to know the person in the morning with, but I think you have to know about their circumstances and put yourself with them in that really dark place. And then to comfort those as standard need of comfort, I think of like a hug or physical touch. And, you know, you don't do that to everyone. You have to know people first.

Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey You have to really know someone in order to be there and that space with them.

And I should have just kept them out shut.

Just being there. Maybe that's also part of what it means to stand as a witness of God at all times and then all things in all places because most of the time we don't see God. God's presence isn't something that you can easily observe in the environment. I think at times when they're going to a really hard thing and you feel like you've been abandoned by God. when there are a bunch of people around you who share that faith in God. They, in a way, let me not say their standings for God, but their witnesses for the reality of that power and that presence and that love.

It's always hard to read your own books or your saying like, this drug is a secret, stop complaining. You know, embrace it when you're having a bad day. But I think we're allowed to do that too. A lot of my life has been really idiosyncratic, I guess since we are to use that word earlier on, I've lived in a bunch of different places and had a bunch of weird health conditions. And I've experienced church in a lot of different places as well. What often happens, especially with younger people, is that when younger people are looking at the church as an institution and as a global community, if you will, and wondering, like, is there a place for me here? They often make that judgment based on the political and social and cultural values of their place. And I'm not saying that we're completely shaped by environments and no one has any agency and no one can ever think their own thoughts or whatever. But we do know that where you grow up has pretty significant impact on your experiences, which has an impact on your ideas about the world, your assumptions, your politics, everything. A lot of times I see people who are struggling with the church because they want to be like Christ, they want to be part of a global community that follows Christ. And they see that some of the church's institutional policies look to them from their political cultural perspective as they exist on a spectrum, on a political spectrum, and sometimes they're conservative. Based on that kind of political morality, develop post-industrial countries. Often tend to have more liberal views and that previous generations, like just imagine like think about like, you know, your political platform in your head, whatever it is, everything that you would do. If you were to put in charge of America, like, here's America, fix it, do like nine things. Nine things. So everyone would have different platform. But what is the probability that you would be correct? That like what you wanted and what you thought was the best was indeed what 300 million people American needed. The probability is pretty low, right? Yeah. And we can apply that same thing to ourselves more broadly. My views are very different from like a Latter-day St. woman, you know, working class, family in Mexico, or my views are really different from a Latter-day St. man in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, rather than not let people who don't fit our views into our club, We have to remember that team Jesus, as it were, is everyone who wants to be on Jesus' team. It's not about us defeating other groups. Some people feel like from a certain point of view, like in post-industrial westernized countries, where on a global scale, it tends to represent the more liberal social side of how people do things globally. There's also a huge part of the church that is on the opposite end of that scale. people in developing countries tend to be more socially conservative and people in these wealthy countries. If people want to be disciples of Christ and want to serve the whole world, then we have to be okay with serving people. whose political views are really different from ours. A global perspective, well, not a cure-all or a silver bullet for faith crisis. I think a global perspective is really helpful because it helps us zoom out from our narrow political and cultural settings background. And this see that actually, probably from Jesus' point of view, politics really doesn't matter that much. And the most important thing is to be one people and to be witnesses of God. And sometimes our ideas of what it means to witness that way can come into conflict. But the most important thing is if We can do that lovingly and we can do it in the same room as it were. We can still be together, look at the global picture. It's a lot more complex. The church is not an automatic reactionary horrible thing. That's just trying to save it.

That's a great question. You know how Jesus says how can someone know a master that they haven't served? How can we serve fellow saints that we don't know? So a great thing is to go to your gospel library app. and open the church history section and go to the global histories. I'm there stories there from basically every place where we are with a few exceptions because of sensitive politics. I'm so on. I'm sure you can imagine. And just start using them in your lessons, in your talks. especially to youth to help them see, yeah, here's someone who worked really hard to go to the temple. You often go on temple trips. In the United States, certainly in Utah, where a little spoiled when it comes to proximity to temples, but you would have these people leaving Cameroon in their church clothes, where in their temple clothes, originally supposed to go in three buses, but then later stuffed into two buses because the third bus didn't work. taking basically 24 hours to get from their starting destination to the temple at times they were pushing the bus through the med In their church clothes, someone would like have to walk ahead of the bus to find out where the deep holes were and they pushed the bus through that. They finally show up at the temple in Nigeria. Local saints receive them and they held them get cleaned up and washed their clothes and they have a beautiful couple of days to temple and they really appreciate being there because of the work that it took to get there. But just a story like that, it's such a blessing and when we work for things, it feels like even more of a blessing for some reason.

Yeah, and they're also figuring things out. Sometimes, as a people, we're too hard on ourselves. If our church community isn't perfect, or we have problems, or we don't feel united, we kind of throw up our hands or say, no, it's not true. It's not working. When something's hard, it's a feature, not a bug of reality and the kind of life that we chose under the plan of salvation. Jesus said, like, love your enemies, but better place to find enemies and in your local ward, you know, to learn how to love them.

That's right. Well, I thought about the members of the first racially integrated branch in South Africa called the Soweto branch. I don't know if you ever heard of like Soweto riots before. So Eto was a kind of township outside of Johannesburg. So during South Africa during apartheid, Johannesburg was largely for white people and these townships outside were the areas that were reserved for black people to live and they were strict racial segregation. There were enough black members of the church who wanted to meet. They would travel to Johannesburg, but it would take them hours they'd have to get up really early and take buses for a long time and walk for a really long time to get to this mean house in Johannesburg. Finally, the church leaders decided to set up a branch and so I took the township and members of a Johannesburg congregation were brought in to attend this branch. and to help train the newer members on how to run a church congregation. But it was so hard because this is like But before apartheid has been lifted, and there's all these racial stereotypes that people have, and there's also the political history of just violence. These two groups really fear each other physically. They worried that they could come to harm, and they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. In 1981, they organized this branch in Soetto, and it was just beautiful. opportunity for the members of the church to really grapple with what does it mean to be one people. What does it mean to worship together? One anecdote was told by the release society president, Marine Benzill. She was white. She came from Johannesburg and she said, well, we thought that I'm in the release society. We should do something unifying, like sing the national anthem or something. to the sting, the national anthem in our least society. But what they didn't realize was for black members of the church, the national anthem was seen as a kind of hate music. The kinds of things that like white supremacists would sing as they were marching off to persecute black people. Now is a big learning experience. This other experience was where these young men in the world were about to attend church conference and the branch president who was also white wanted to make sure that they didn't stick out in a weird way and that they kind of fit in. He went his own closet and he got his own. Sunday closed, and he passed them around to all the young men. One of the young men noticed, you know, after the conference, and they gave them all the clothes back. He noticed that the branch president was wearing the same clothes that he had been wearing. And he thought, like, there's no way that he was just so touched that the branch president had shared his actual clothes with him. And he didn't think that was something that most people in his society at that time would do. Do something so personal. and intimate. I used can't imagine how difficult, how much social pressure there was, how much political pressure there was, how frustrated they must have been, both the black and the white members of the Soetto branch just trying to figure each other out, like these two groups of people who hadn't interacted all for years in this setting. I think it's really impressive and I think it speaks to the power of the gospel to overcome all of those hurdles and to continually push us. towards that ideal that it's expressed in the baptism of covenant. We're not always perfect and we often mess up the church and the gospel possess.

pretty soon, thereafter she is doing laundry or in the middle of some sort of task. When she has this prompting to call this woman, she's like, okay, well, maybe I'll finish my task and then she's like, no, no, no, no, I'm gonna do it. So she jumps on her phone and she calls the person.