April's Message from the Bishop

Lately we’ve been blessed as a ward with some excellent talks from members of the stake high council, who are doing their best to refute Mormon folklore about how terribly boring “dry” council talks can be.

(Have you heard the joke about the high counselor and his wife who are kidnapped by terrorists and given a last request before they’re to be executed? The high counselor asks to give just one more talk before he dies. The poor terrorists, not being LDS and therefore not knowing what they’d be in for, agree to his request. Then, the wife takes a long, hard look at her husband, turns to the terrorists, and calmly says, “All I ask is that you shoot me before he starts his talk.”)

This week, I’ve been pondering one of these recent high council talks in particular, the one given by Alan Mcintier from the 3rd Ward. I’m sure many of you remember this talk, too.

Brother Mcintier used the analogy of a building foundation to discuss the significance of prophets, seers, and revelators to the foundation of Christ’s Church, the Savior himself being the chief cornerstone. As he said at the beginning of his talk. Brother Mcintier usually isn’t very big on analogies because they can sometimes be trite and inadequate, but, in this case, the analogy really works, especially for him, because he’s the stake’s physical facilities representative and also works full-time for the Church in a similar capacity. In short, Brother Mcintier knows Church buildings.

His central example for the necessity of laying a firm foundation involved the Mexico City Temple, the construction of which was complicated by the fact that Mexico City is built on a dry lake bed. As a result, many of the buildings in the city have settled unevenly, compromising their foundations and causing serious damage to their structures. Of course, because the Church architects and engineers attended primary and remembered singing “the wise man built his house upon a rock,” they knew that they had to find some innovative way to lay down a surer foundation for the Mexico City Temple, which, like all latter-day temples, is supposed to last through the millennium.

They came up with a brilliant and successful plan. First, they drove huge pilons deep into the lake bed. Then, they built a structure on top of these pilons onto which they mounted huge jacks, which would support the temple’s foundation and could be adjusted as needed to keep the temple balanced evenly—no matter what kind of shifting occurs within the dry lake bed.

Like the foundation of the Mexico City Temple, the Church’s foundation of prophets, seers, and revelators has the capacity to support the ever-growing Church membership as well as the ability to adjust to whatever shifting occurs throughout the world. We’ve witnessed this foundation working in exactly this way during the recent General Conference of the Church, the first after the death of President Gordon B. Hinckley.

We had the opportunity in a solemn assembly Saturday morning of sustaining a new prophet, Thomas S. Monson, along with a new First Presidency and new member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, D. Todd Christofferson, as well as a number of other new General Authorities and auxiliary leaders. We in the Salem Utah West Stake should feel a particular closeness to Elder Christofferson because it was he, almost four years ago, who reorganized the stake with the release of President Green and the calling of President Silcox and his counselors.

As the conference moved forward, it became clearer and clearer that the mantle of the prophet had settled firmly on President Monson and that the Church would move forward as it always has, from the calling and death of the Prophet Joseph even until today, under the direction of the Savior, whose Church this is.

As a bishopric, we are deeply grateful for our testimonies regarding the sure foundation of this Church. We are also deeply grateful to be able to serve with all the members of the Salem 12th Ward in this great latter-day work and pray always that each one of you will be blessed abundantly in your lives.

Love, Bishop Snyder and the 12th Ward Bishopric