A CHURCH HISTORY MISSIONARY

I know that on my blogs I write a lot about the things we are doing outside of the Church History Center. I don't think hearing about our everyday routine assignments is as exciting as hearing about our adventures.  But I decided I wanted to share with you a day in the life of A Church History Missionary.

This is where we enter every morning where our computer is ready to greet us. When we first arrived 7 months ago, we knew very little about the working of a computer.  We have learned so much about actually what a computer can do.  The IT people have been patient with us and taught us a great deal because almost everything we are required to do has to be accomplished on the computer. I am sure to the surprise of my family, I have learned Microsoft Excel and Power Point (of course, just the basics).

We have 24 Country Church History Advisers throughout the area that we work with....Zimbabwe, Zambia, Kenya, 4 in the DRC, Cameroon, Mozambique, Angola, just to name a few.  We train and give them direction. They then train their unit clerks on annual histories (every unit in the church all over the world has to write an annual history on the happenings in their unit for the year) and encourage them to fulfill their responsibilities with annual histories.  Each unit sends their histories to us at the area office and Dennis processes them and sends them to Salt Lake. In each history the unit leader writes a stewardship report of what great things the Lord has done for the people in his unit. They also do oral histories on church pioneers in their countries, process them and send them to us.  I record them, extract stories and then Dropbox them to Salt Lake.

We document the events of the church in this area.  To let you know the growth of the Church in Southeast Africa, there are 43 stakes, 29 districts and 14 missions. In 2015 there were 4 (2 in Democratic Republic of the Congo making it 13 stakes there) new stakes and 6 new districts created.

We are getting ready for the groundbreaking of the Kinshasa, DRC Temple on 11 February 2016. Elder Neil L. Anderson will be coming to be part of this momentous event.

The new Kinshasa DRC Temple in about two years

Of course, my favorite part of our calling is doing our own oral histories of the wonderful people around here.  Their stories are ones of strength, courage and love of their Savior which strengthens my testimony.  I hope to start sharing more stories with you.

We are busy now preparing for the training of our Country Church History Advisers.  At the end of the month we have 5 advisers coming to Joburg for training and the next two months we will be gathering advisers together in different areas for their training. It is quite an ordeal to get all the flights, accommodations, preparations for the seminar ready for the advisers arrival.  Can't believe that I am actually doing spreadsheets to keep me on target!

There is also Record Preservation Center where we collect items of importance for Church History, catalogue them and then store them in the RPC.  We also greet the people that come in the center - but, of course, most of those that come in think it is Family History so I direct them upstairs to their center.

Basically, that is what we do.  We keep busy but really not too interesting to share every week in our blog.  So from now on, when I say that we worked in the center, you can picture slightly what we did that day. 

So that is the day in the LIFE OF A CHURCH HISTORY MISSIONARY! 

We have been working on a poster that will be posted in every unit (633) in the Africa Southeast Area.