Tuesday, September 28, 2021

Martin Berkeley Hickman on David Matthew Kennedy's Attitude Pre- and Post-1978 Missionary Efforts in Sub-Saharan Africa

  

No issue has demanded more of Kennedy's time than the task of expanding missionary work in new areas. That expansion became the highest priority for him precisely because it was President Kimball’s first priority. When Kennedy and the President first began to consider which countries might be likely targets for expanding the missionary effort, President Kimball did not have a fixed list of countries to which he wanted to send Kennedy. His process was to examine the countries one by one, exploring with Kennedy the possibilities each offered.

 

In those early discussions in 1974, as they studied together the large atlas that the President kept in his office, Kennedy placed his hand over sub-Saharan Africa. That gesture eliminated most of the African continent from consideration because, he argued, the Church could not operate without local leadership, and exclusion of blacks from the priesthood precluded the development of that essential leadership. Kennedy took his hand away from the map of sub-Saharan African on June 8, 1978, when President Kimball announced to the world that he had received a revelation confirming “that the long-promised day has come when every faithful, worthy man in the Church may receive the holy priesthood . . . without regard to race or color.” On returning from the temple where he shared that revelation with the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, President Kimball met with Kennedy and told him he knew Kennedy would be pleased with the announcement. (Martin Berkeley Hickman, David Matthew Kennedy: Banker, Statesman, Churchman [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1985], 343-44—this was at the time when Kennedy was a special ambassador for the Church, meeting with government and ecclesiastical leaders in various countries)