Brother Garff [of the building commitee] mentioned that ... There are 30%, or 785,000 people who do not have access to a temple. ... Elder Garff said that he felt that what we should do is bring the temple to the additional membership of the Church. He said it was the committee's proposal that we buy a ship and outfit the ship and make it a temple ship and that we take this ship to the ports of the earth where our people are. He said that with a ship we could outfit a temple and take that temple to 30%. Included in the 30% would be people in the United States who are not accessible to the temple and those throughout the world. He said that this could be done for between a million and a half and two million dollars, that a ship could be purchased and remodeled and that we could get the crew and could sail the seas at about a half a million dollars a year. ... He said that such a ship could travel up the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers and that the entire inland part of the United States could be covered. ... He expressed the view that once every year or every eighteen or nineteen months we could touch all of these particular areas with the vessel. ...
Elder [Alvin R.] Dyer mentioned a matter that he said bothered him somewhat[,] and that was [that] in the very early days of the Church the Prophet Joseph had said that the waters would be cursed, that he did not know exactly what that might mean but that we should not be insensible to that. ...
The brethren said that they should not do this at the present time. The brethren were agreed that the matter was deserving of careful consideration.
[Alvin R. Dyer, minutes of a meeting with the First Presidency, President McKay's apartment, recorded in Elder Dyer's diary, Oct. 11, 1968, in Anderson, Devery; The Development of LDS Temple Worship, 1846-2000: A Documentary History, http://amzn.to/TempleWorship]
No comments:
Post a Comment