Being Challenged by the Temple Challenge

It's time to talk about the Temple Challenge I was involved in with the ward, but I probably better start at the very beginning. I've been the Family History Leader in my ward for over a year now, basically since I moved in. During that time, I've seen a little interest from some members of the ward, but not nearly as much as I would have hoped. It's been a point that has troubled me for quite awhile, as I see my role as having the primary responsibility to get people excited about family history and secondarily to help them do the work. I've mostly felt like a failure at the first goal, though moderately successful at the second.


So about this time last year, I did baptisms, confirmations, and initiatories for 5 family members in preparation to send them to Marinda on her mission to do the endowments as a birthday gift. I'd never done that much work for family names in succession before and found it to be a very uplifting experience. I decided then that I wanted to complete all of someone's work in succession and hoped to get people from my ward involved in the project somehow.

Fast forward to RootsTech this year. I had a great time there and felt very inspired to work harder at helping individual members of my ward engage with family history. I was even planning to talk to the bishopric about arranging some goals or something to encourage a greater push in the ward. The very next day as I was walking into sacrament, Bro. McDonald, our First Councilor, asked me to co-chair a newly created Temple Challenge Committee. I didn't get any details at the moment, as church was soon to begin, but of course accepted the new calling. I found out later that Bishop Lemon had been inspired that as a ward we should all prepare family names and then take them to the temple to complete all the ordinances in one day. I was amazed by how perfectly this plan fit my own impressions and desires over the last year!

The process ended up being both a personally challenging and thrilling endeavor. Fortunately, I had an experienced co-chair to work with and some very helpful consultants called, which made a big difference. The original date planed for attending the temple was in June, which I figured gave us plenty of time to individually meet with people and help them prepare. While we were still in the process of getting people called and organized, however, it was decided that the temple date needed to be moved up to Apr. 18th. This cut our time in half and seriously impacted some of the things I might have liked to do, but I think in the end the shorter time-frame helped to keep enthusiasm high throughout and lent a necessary urgency to everything.

The magnitude of what we were trying to accomplish was at times pretty overwhelming for me. I'm a fan of being systematic and meticulous on these sorts of things, but due to the lack of time, I ended up sacrificing much of how I would have liked to proceed in favor of moving quickly to serve more people efficiently. This meant I didn't have the luxury of teaching people how to do solid, sourced research as I would have liked, but I decided that it was more important to help as many people as possible have a positive initial experience in family history, even if we ended up duplicating some work due to not doing the research fully.

As far as organized events went, we did two Family Home Evenings where we simply had everyone looking for names on FamilySearch with the help of floating consultants on our committee who we had previously trained in doing descendancy research specifically. Organized chaos is probably the most accurate description for not just these, but every group meeting we did, but somehow, good managed to come out of each meeting. Both FHEs yielded about 15 new people finding names, which I felt was quite good considering.

More informally, we did smaller open group workshops after church for 4 weeks. The first one was at my co-chair's house and had about 20 people attend at some point. We had some pretty good success with people there too, despite the fact the the internet got kind of overwhelmed. Because that had been quite successful, I decided that I would just do open office hours at my apartment every subsequent week. Basically I just opened a 4 hour window in which people could come and have my help working on their lines. The first week, no one came, but it was also not publicized very well, so I wasn't discouraged. The nice part of the arrangement was that I just did the normal Sunday activities I would have done anyway at that time. The next week, a couple of people showed up and I was able to help them, and the last week about 10 came at some point. That week I was busy the whole 4-hour time because there were always at least a few working. I was just glad they were spaced out enough through the period that I could reasonably give each some individual attention.

Most informally, I also had the chance to sit down with 6 members of the ward in their home and work one-on-one with them for a few hours. This was my favorite, as it allowed me to have a better chance to get to know the person and their family situation. It was also fun for me because in most cases, I got to meet and work with the ward member's immediately a bit as well. I talked to a number of mothers, siblings, etc. and saw their excitement in talking about family matters as a family. This always left me a bright hope that the conversations would continue in the family long after I left. I was also delighted that most of the people I worked with individually were able to find a name during our time together.

Because I wanted everyone in the ward to be contacted and realized our small committee would never had time to do all that ourselves, I decided that we should conscript the ward missionaries to help us. Everyone on the Temple Challenge Committee was given a few focus names to specifically contact and work with while the rest were farmed out for ward visits. In my ward, visits are done by anyone willing to attend on Tues. and Thurs. Mostly it's just ward missionaries who show up, but we have a lot of those, so there are usually about 10 people, sometimes more, sometimes less.

Typically we visit people from the family stakes that feed into our ward that could attend our ward, but don't. I talked it over with our Ward Mission Leader, who agreed that we could have all but a few ward missionaries each day of visits go see members of our ward and talk to them about family history and temple work, checking to see what their status was on if they had a name, needed help getting a recommend, etc. It also worked out well because we were able to check up on our members generally to make sure they were doing well and uncover any un-adressed needs.

I got a lot of valuable info from the reports of the missionaries, and as a ward missionary myself, also had the chance to spend at least a few minutes with a bunch more people myself, which was awesome. In the end, every ward member on the records was visited at least once and invited to participate. I was so grateful for the assistance of the ward mission, as we would have never been able to accomplish so much without them!

We also realized that it was important to focus on family history and temple work more in our regular Sunday meetings as we have a number of people who come on Sundays, but never attend other meetings. Part of that was a couple of sacrament meetings with focused talks, including a week where my co-chair and I spoke.

The Sunday before our temple day, we also spent the entire second two blocks of church helping people work on family history. While this sounds great in theory, it really was a lot less successful than I would have hoped, mostly thanks to overloaded internet that didn't work well. I have a healthy distrust of the internet in our building, so fortunately I was at least semi-prepared for technical difficulties. I'd warned my co-chair to be similarly prepared in a message, but unfortunately she didn't get my message until too late and was caught a little off-guard.

We separated into two main groups. Those who already had previously found names were in one room and were shown some additional resources and such by my co-chair, while I took charge of everyone who didn't yet have a name. Internet was especially essential for this group, and since it wasn't working well, we divided them into three rooms. The first few were put into the Family History Library and another slightly larger group were put into the Media Missionary Room which also has computers. The bulk of people, however, were left in the EQ room to struggle on with unresponsive internet. I had some of the consultants on my committee stationed to lend assistance in each room, while I dashed about from room to room and tried to wrangle things in the right direction as needed.

In the EQ room, the conference talks I'd previously downloaded came in really handy as most people weren't able to do much on the internet. At least there was something to give them some kind of spiritual benefit. More success was had in our two computer labs. Over half of those folks were able to find names that day.

The whole process of preparation took a lot of work, not just from me, but from a LOT of other people as well. I could never have accomplished so much without the aid of my co-chair, committee members, and many others. For me, at least an equal portion of the labor was spiritual. My fasting and prayers were intently engaged in asking the Lord to pour out the Spirit of Elijah upon us and to help our members find success as they faithfully engaged in the work. All that labor in both body and spirit was exhausting at times, but so rewarding. I was personally blessed to bear witness to a number of miracles.

Most of those simply involved watching people feel the draw of the Spirit of Elijah in a moment and receive a testimony of family history work before my eyes. As I helped people find and reserve temple work for their own family members, their eyes would light up and they would catch a vision of the work.

I remember one of the FHE co-chairs running up to me with her computer after searching diligently during the family history FHEs and asking if she had really found work that needed done. She was so excited, and I was pleased to confirm that she had indeed found eligible family members to reserve. She had come from pioneer stock family on both sides and had been convinced that there was nothing left for her to do, but was truly delighted to discover that she was mistaken. She is preparing to go on her mission soon, and I feel the experience with family history work will bless not just her, but the people she teaches as she serves. In the temple on the 18th, I spent awhile talking to her about the power of using family history work to help investigators, recent converts, and less-active members. I think she could really grasp the potential of the idea, and I hope she will embrace it as she serves.

The most memorable incident for me was the story of the Ward Mission Leader. He faithfully attended a number of the ward family history activities, but apparently was having no luck finding people. After our last 2 hour block of time on the Sunday before the temple day, he still hadn't found anything. That night he texted me to ask what the year limit was on when he needed to get permission from living relatives. I informed him it was 110 years, at which he frustratedly texted me (with lots of emoticons) that he'd just found a couple people who were at 108 years from birth. Despite his frustration he told me he was determined to find someone still. I affirmed that he could do it, and counseled him to say a prayer and then try pushing back a little farther on the line he'd found. About 2 hours later I heard from him again. I'm including a screenshot of the conversation after that below because I can't do it justice with simply paraphrasing it.

It was amazing! I was so pleased to see him gain a personal testimony of truths I've been blessed to experience myself. As with missionary work, seeing others experience the power of family history work for themselves filled me with inexpressible joy and reminded me of the blessings I have likewise received. It brought to mind my favorite passage of scripture found in Alma 29:9-10.

"Yea, and this is my glory, that perhaps I may be an instrument in the hands of God to bring some soul to repentance; and this is my joy.

And behold, when I see many of my brethren truly penitent, and coming to the Lord their God, then is my soul filled with joy; then do I remember what the Lord has done for me, yea, even that he hath heard my prayer; yea, then do I remember his merciful arm which he extended towards me."


How grateful I am that I was entrusted with the opportunity to experience so many wonderful things. Honestly, it was not easy a lot of the time, but it was vastly worth any sacrifice I was required to make. Next time, I will talk about what I experienced in the temple on the 18th.