Historic missionary Prep training held in Paris, France

A historic missionary preparation seminar was held in Paris, France on February 2, 2013.  This brief video shows 66 prospective missionaries attending the first such seminar from all over France, part of Belgium, and Switzerland.  The institute of religion has been preparing for it for over 2 years by teaching them in classes which included classes by telephone when they lived too far away from centers to travel there one evening per week.  They spent all day hearing from brother Euvrard, brother Petion, and President and Sister Poznanski of the France Paris Mission things that will help them prepare to enter an MTC some where in the world.  It was the first of three that will be held during 2013.  In 2012 there were 69 missionaries called from this same area and we expect to double that number this year.  Several of them have already received their call from President Monson.  One young sister has been called to serve in St. George, Utah beginning in March.

Dixie and I along with others were busy for weeks preparing for this event and although it was a very long day, we appreciate the opportunity to rub shoulders with these wonderful and faithful prospective missionaries.  They had the opportunity to be assigned companions just like in the MTC and teach with them for a couple of hours during the day and share wonderful testimonies of the gospel of Jesus Christ.  We expect them to serve all over the world.  We are getting excited calls from more young people who want to attend in June and submit their papers for service within the next few months.

Humpty dumpt took a great fall

I am a little slow this week because I have so many things to do.  I had a little accident on January 8th that has also slowed me down a little.  I hope that I can get the video I made about it on this blog.  It has been posted to my Facebook page.  We have had snow for the past week which has slowed the traffic in Paris and made things sloppy with slush and slippery on hard packed snow.  They have very little snow removal equipment here and people are not used to dealing with this much snow.

Dixie and I are busy with institute assignments.  I will make a presentation to the young adults on January 25th about indexing and a family history institute class that I will begin teaching on Feb. 8th.  The emphasis is to get all of them involved in the church indexing program and then tell them about the class which will focus on personal and family histories.  We will help them complete a project by the end of May in which they will prepare a personal or family video sharing their stories.  Dixie is busy planning and helping prepare food for each family home evening as well as refreshments after institute classes on Tuesday and Thursday nights.  She has a huge responsibility to prepare food for about 60 prospective missionaries who will come to the St. Merri Center for an all day training experience on February 2nd.  We will be assisting in this effort once each quarter.  The importance of this training has increased as a result of the age requirement change for missionaries and the need to give them training before they enter the MTC.  We have heard from the French Branch Presidency at the Provo MTC that the length of time missionaries learning French will decrease from nine weeks to six weeks and this affects even those from France who will be leaving soon.  The number of missionaries serving from France, Belgium, and Switzerland will double from about 60 serving now to about 120 by the end of this year.  So every effort is being made to help them be better prepared even before they reach the MTC.  The institute becomes one of the biggest players in this effort and Dixie and I are thrilled to assist.

Family History work in Paris France LDS (Mormon) Temple

January 6, 2013

I have spent a lot of time this past week learning about the history of France and more importantly the history of the Mormon church in France.  The 3 part series mentioned last week, “The Road to Zion”, has been very helpful.  It can be accessed by going to http://soc.liE4plhgc on the internet.  This address will take you to the first hour’s presentation hosted by a young French sister speaking English and French.  She served as a missionary at temple square.

I mention this first presentation because it became very clear why a personal history is so important to our family.  I have been invited to teach an institute course next month about Family History and feel it is timely because a temple will soon be built here in France. 

Paris France LDS (Mormon) Temple

I have been encouraged to help the Young Adults of Paris become involved in Indexing which goes hand in hand with the Family History Institute class.  The project we will work on for the term is to prepare our personal history for publication or produce a DVD about our family.

 

The great cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, France

The members of the church in France have truly been pioneers.  Since I was here in 1963 through 1965 the church as grown from what was considered a “cult” to a “religious movement” if you look at the definition in the French dictionary then and now.  The church has more than 115 buildings and about 30,000 members with third and fourth generations in the church.  Most of the wards have French members presiding.  There is a good history found on Youtube entitled “Road to Zion” in France.  It is a 3 part series produced for BYU TV.  A couple of members from the Talence ward in Bordeaux, where I served at the time, shared an in depth view of the building of a chapel on which I worked during my mission.  Some of the members who joined the church in the 60’s and 70’s when the greatest growth of the church took place in France, were interviewed.  Many of those joining the church today here, are pioneers in their own families and the strength of the church is in families.  We had dinner last week with one such family.  Brother and Sister Collin have one returned missionary son who is going to college close to Bordeaux, France, and another who will certainly go in 3 or 4 years, and two other children who are married.

Christian Euvrard, our St. Merri Institute director, is another individual who fits the pioneer profile and has done extensive research of the history of the LDS church in France and contributed a lot to the series mentioned above.  It is a pleasure to work with him.  He also serves as a counselor in the Paris East Stake Presidency.  He and his wife are great examples of how effective the leadership here in France really is.  We enjoyed a wonderful Sunday afternoon with them and their two boys, sharing excellent French food that sister Euvrard prepared for us the Sunday before Christmas.

We also took the time during this holiday season to visit the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris which is a few block from our building at St. Merri.  Notre Dame is celebrating 850 years of existence this yer.  It is an example of the cathedrals in Europe but the thing that echoes in that experience is how big and unused they are by the French people.  The numbers of people attending mass is ever decreasing.  Visitors can buy almost any souvenir within its walls as well as candles to be lit.  As we witnessed the noon mass with all the sight seers milling around it felt as cold as the building itself.  A far different feel from the meetings I am used to.

 

13 million people live in Paris

It has been a very busy week because we helped prepare a dinner for two different missionary zone conferences that were held at the St. Merri chapel.  We fed over 100 missionaries with the help of the other two couples who serve in the visitors center.  Elder John Prince served with me 47 years ago in Limoge, France and he along with his wife, Beverly, arrived a couple of weeks ago to replace Elder and Sister Hadfield when they leave next month.  Elder Prince was a dentist in Midway, Utah, and Elder Hadfield was a Brain Pathologist, Virginia.

 

We are finally legal in France.  It required a 2 hour exam including blood and Urin tests, Chest X-ray, blood pressure, Eye test, a visit with a doctor and finally a stamp in our visa saying we are legal.  I thought it was bad before our mission but this took the cake.  The French love red tape.

We enjoyed a 5 coarse meal with Brother and Sister Euvrard at their home in the country about 15 miles away from our home in Bussy-St. Georges.  They have 2 adopted sons from Nepal, India who were there, along with their friend Fabian, the Paris East Stake Young Adult Representative who is a member of our Torcy Ward.  Elder Szuch and Elder Simoes, our Torcy Zone Leaders who live in Bussy-St.Georges joined us too.  We had a wonderful dinner and then Brother Euvrard and I discussed the content of the institute class I will begin teaching about Family History in February.

I am really excited to teach Family History which I think will help the students to better prepare to increase the temple work here in the Paris area.  We will be placing an emphasis on preparing to share their family stories using the media that is currently available.  It will be interesting to see how well it is received because it is one of three different classes offered during the next semester.

This will be our first Christmas away from home as it is also for Andrew, our grandson who just arrived in his mission field and is serving in “Many Farms”, New Mexico among the Navajo people.  He is teaching where people are few and far between and we are working in Paris, a city of 13 Million people.  He and his companion, Elder O’Connell, drive a truck around the reservation while Dixie and I travel into Paris by train, about a 35 minute train ride plus about a 15 minute walk to our Center at St. Merri.  The transportation system here in Paris moves about 3 million people a day.  Christmas Eve is not nearly as important to the French people as New Years Eve. 

Notre Dame Cathedral - Paris, Franced

However they do spend Christmas Eve with their family for the most part.  Many of them go to midnight mass in large cathedrals around their city.  Dixie and I look forward to a nice quiet couple of days at home without the crush of people.  Later in the week, we will join Elder and Sister Prince to see some of the sights of Paris.  The longer we are here, the more we love the land and the people of France.  It will even get better when we can understand their language completely especially the everyday language that you hear on the streets.  During my first mission, I became acquainted with the gospel language, not so much of the everyday language.  We hope to also, not only understand the accent, but be able to speak it too.  You can understand the grammar but unless you speak with a French accent, people can’t understand what you say.  In fact many of the French people don’t speak grammatically correct themselves, just like Americans don’t always speak grammatically correct.  Merry Christmas to everyone and may the new year bring more prosperity than the current year.

Christmas time is also busy in Paris

What a great week.  We have begun to meet and remember the names of many of our Young Adults who come to the Center.  We have also attended some parties for the Young Adults. 

 

Brother Gilger (standing on my right next to the door ) is a counselor in the Paris ward Bishopric and his wife is the Relief Society President.  He works for IBM here and they invited us along with the Young Adults in the ward to their apartment near the Arc de Triomphe in the center of Paris for a Christmas party.  We had a wonderful time with them and were joined by Elder and Sister Hadfield and Elder and Sister Prince who direct the work in the Visitors Center at St. Merri.  We enjoyed wonderful food as well as singing Christmas carols and watched a great presentation about the birth, life  and mission of Jesus Christ.

Snow fell for the first time this year during the week but didn’t stay long because it had melted in the rain by the afternoon.  It did remain cold for a couple of days and we saw frost.  The English conversation class is going well with about a dozen people attending.  We will be busy next week preparing Christmas snacks for two Missionary Zone Conferences.

 I was particularly pleased to sustain along with the other members of the ward a couple (pictured here with Dixie) from the our home ward, the Torcy ward, to serve as ward missionaries.  Brother Lazerus is a retired medical doctor who has helped many missionaries with medical needs including me.  He and is wife speak good English and will be excellent additions to the missionary work in the Torcy ward.  As you can see they are younger than Dixie and I because people can retire earlier here in France.  We look forward to other couples joining them.

Starting to visit sights in Paris, France

Everyone who heard that we coming to France expressed envy and so we have started to visit the famous tourist sights and will share them with you over a period of time.  Of course the most famous is the Eiffel Tower and we took some pictures there from across the Seine River where the Mormon Tabernacle Choir has sung.

 

    

 

We also visited the Versailles ward where the new Paris Temple will be built.  While there we visited with our Mission President, President Poznanski and his two daughters.  They are French and are doing a wonderful job.  Dixie particularly loves the fact that they speak english and help her by doing so when she is around.  They took us to lunch one afternoon and we had a delightful visit with them.

 

 

 

Unlike the St. Merri chapel that very old, the Versailles chapel is realatively new.  It is a little smaller than our chapel in American Fork, but it does have a cultural hall with a stage.