Conference Address

I desire your faith and prayers, my brothers and sisters, for I feel terribly in need of them. There is nothing, I believe, that I appreciate more in all the world than my membership in the Church. It is the last thing I would ever want to lose, and I trust that with your aid and the aid that I can get from the Spirit of the Lord, I shall be able to carry on in a life of service unto the Church and unto my brethren and sisters. I want to thank all of you who are here who have been kind to me in the visits that I have made to your conferences. I realize that it is a burden many times upon you, and I appreciate it very, very much, just as Bishop Richards has expressed his appreciation. ¶

Service Brings Happiness ¶

The great value, I believe, that the Church has for us is the opportunity it gives us to serve, for, after all, the great benefits of life come from service. Generous, open-hearted, full service to our fellows, I believe, is the thing which brings us the greatest happiness. We can serve our families and gain happiness by it; we can serve our friends and gain happiness by it; but if we would be happy we must serve and serve generously, and I believe myself that the greatest happiness that comes to me from observing the standards of the Church and meeting my obligations to it is the spiritual values that I get out of that service. I would like to be able to say that I always serve for the sheer love of service. I don't know whether I can honestly say that or not, but I hope I can. I would like to suggest that all of us who serve, serve for the same motive, out of sheer joy and love of service. I would that every man who accepts a responsibility in a priesthood quorum would accept it because of the opportunity for service which it offers him; not that he be a good deacon so he may be the president of his quorum. Not that he be a good priest that some day he may be made president of the elders' quorum. Not to be a good bishop, that when the stake is reorganized he may become the president of the stake, because if he serves with that motive, there is very likely to be a day of disappointment for him, but if he serves because he loves to, if he serves because he loves his fellows, then whether the other things come or not, he is never disappointed. ¶

Service of High Quality ¶

People may not appreciate his service, always, but he will always have deep down in his heart a feeling that he has done his best, and that is the great satisfaction, I believe, that comes from it. That is the motive that prompts our young men and young women to accept calls for the mission field. .We have heard this afternoon of the great numbers that are in the mission field, preaching the gospel, trying to tell the world that after all there has come back to the earth a true testimony as to the personality of the God we worship and his Son Jesus Christ. We believe that through that testimony, through the acceptance of that testimony and the adherence to the standards and the requirements that the Church offers its members that there is a guarantee to us, a future, even after this life, of exaltation in the presence of our Heavenly Father, the boon that is greater than any earthly blessing that we may enjoy. We feel duty bound, because we have that privilege, to carry it to other people and to offer it to them. That is service in its high sense. ¶

The other day when I asked a young man who wants to go on a mission why he wants to go, he said it was because he had always grown up with the idea that he would like to go out and serve the Church in that capacity. Another young man whom I asked why he wanted to go, said that while he was in the service of his country he gained a fervent testimony as to the truth of the gospel, but he saw the woeful lack of that testimony in the lives of his associates, and he wanted an opportunity to go out and teach repentance to the people of the world. That is service of a high degree and a high quality. Service is the great blessing, I believe, that we get from it all. ¶

Loyalty to the Church demands that we render that service to it, whether it be a financial obligation of which we have just heard or whether it be a spiritual calling, for we do distinguish in our minds usually between the temporal and the spiritual. The Church asks that service of us, and loyalty to the Church demands that we give it. ¶

Missionary Opportunities at Home ¶

Now in the giving we sometimes miss our opportunities, and I wonder if you would allow me to call your attention this afternoon, for just a moment, to a field for missionary work that is not always emphasized but which seems to be always with us, and to me is a very, very important field. I have called the attention of the various officers of the stakes I have visited this year to this, but there are many of you here whom I shall not have the opportunity to visit and whose attention I wish to call to it. ¶

The other day in visiting a stake, a stake within this valley, I discovered that there are within that stake two hundred and fifty men, more than twenty-one years of age who have never been sufficiently interested in the priesthood to be ordained to any office in it. I wonder who they are. I wonder why they are. I wonder if they are in that position because some of us, who have undertaken the responsibility of guiding our quorums, have been negligent or at least have overlooked a responsibility and an opportunity. Now those men, in most cases I believe, are men who have been born in the Church. They represent the same fine qualities as to their heritage that the active members do, but for some reason they were never brought into service and have never been ordained. Those of us who are neighbors to those people have a responsibility toward them, it seems to me. We may live by them, week after week and month after month, and even year after year, and we take them for granted, and we never offer them an opportunity. We never offer them an inducement to go with us as we perform our religious service. I have known of cases of men who have been offered such opportunities who were brought into activity and made rapid progress within the Church, and I recommend that all of us make it a personal responsibility to do all we can to bring into activity those men who are near us. ¶

Record of Stake Missionary Work ¶

During the ten years that these stake missionaries have been operating under the direction of the First Council of the Seventy — it is eleven years now I believe — but in the first ten years we made a baptismal record of twenty-two thousand odd baptisms and at the same time we reported back into activity through our stake missions thirty odd thousand people. Not too long ago I made an analysis of those twenty odd thousand baptisms and, brethren and sisters, I was astonished to find out that one out of three of those baptisms was the baptism of a person over nine and under fifteen both of whose parents are members of the Church. Now, why is that? Why do we let them slip by us that way? Is it the fault of the father or the mother? Is it the fault of a ward teacher? Is it the fault of a ward clerk who fails to notify his bishop of the approaching age of the children of his ward, or is it our fault when we don't bring it to your attention from the pulpit? But it certainly must be the fault of somebody because when our stake missionaries approached those young people, seven thousand of them asked to be baptized, and have come into the Church to receive its opportunities and its blessings. There are others we know, over fifteen, of Mormon parentage, who have come back through the ministry of our stake missionaries. They have done a grand work, but the thing that startles me is that unless we pay strict attention to our duties as leaders in the priesthood that that condition is likely to go on and on, and next year there will be an additional group written off the records of the Church because nobody has taken the care to teach them the importance and the value of baptism into the Church. And then I find that we have an army of forty-nine thousand people at home who are over twenty-one years of age and still in the Aaronic Priesthood. Many of them are fine men at heart and they just lack the inducement that some of us, if we were in touch with them, could render to bring them into activity, and activity is what it takes to keep them going. I have known those men who have started in the welfare work to go right on to advancement in the Melchizedek Priesthood, and when I tell you that I have visited stakes where there was only one out of three families in the stake who had a man in it holding the Melchizedek Priesthood, you will realize that we have another responsibility to teach our boys and girls the value of being married in the temple of God for time and for all eternity. It has already been suggested to you this afternoon. I have found one stake where only thirty-five families out of a hundred could possibly be represented in the Melchizedek Priesthood, and later I found one worse than that. The best I ever found was a hundred and seven percent. ¶

CONCERN FOR INACTIVE NEIGHBORS ¶

Brothers and sisters, while we are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, as we are, to send men to Japan and Africa and all intervening points what are we doing with these people who are right around our doors, to bring them into activity? I give that to you as our great objective in the missionary work for the immediate future. Let us see, brothers and sisters, if we can do it. Now for that purpose perhaps each and every one of us will have to make of himself a specially-called emissary to his neighbor, especially his inactive neighbor, that he may show him the benefits and the blessings of the gospel; but before he goes to that neighbor he must trim his sails. He must analyze himself, and he must bring his conduct into strict conformity with the teachings of the gospel, and if he can go to him and show him by the life he lives the benefits he gets out of activity in the Church, the chances are far greater of a conversion than if he has to apologize for his own conduct when he tries to teach the advantages of adhering to the teachings of the Church. ¶

That is our problem, brethren and sisters, to live in a way that every man who comes amongst us to study us will see the fine side of the gospel reflected in our lives and that he will have no just cause for adverse criticism of us. That is a large order, I will admit, but nevertheless it is the duty and responsibility of every man and woman in the Church to show by the way he lives the values that are in the gospel, and those values are usually spiritual. If you are highly spiritual, those values will shine from your eyes like the reflected light from a diamond. You can't prevent it. When you live it, it shows, and when you don't, it shows too, but it is a dark light which comes forth when you are not living the gospel of Jesus Christ. ¶

Now I trust, brothers and sisters, that we may have the power of God to do it. When we bowed our heads here this afternoon, we asked God to give us his Spirit. It is my experience that when I enjoy the Spirit of God, it is because I try to put myself in conformity with it, and when I do that, I enjoy hearing what is prompted in others by the Spirit of God. If I can't do it, I get no pleasure out of it. So when we come to these gatherings, brethren, and when we undertake our duties as leaders in the wards and stakes, let us try and put ourselves in a position so that we can expect, when we ask it of God, his Spirit to guide and direct us. ¶

May he bless us I pray in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen. ¶