Author: Wilfried Decoo

In last General Conference, Elder Uchtdorf reiterated the 1999 counsel of the First Presidency, a counsel that has actually been given since the 1950s.

Saturday afternoon on a rainy day in Antwerp.

Jessica is sad.

The phone call was innocent. Sister Walker, the mission president’s wife, wanted me to come over for dinner.

A busy downtown intersection. No traffic lights, no road markings, no speed limits, no sidewalks, no pedestrian crossings. Cars, cyclists, pedestrians, all move on the same street level, side by side, carefully merging.

There is a tiny village, on a remote hill in Burundi, Central Africa, committed to my memory as the place where two priesthoods, Catholic and Mormon, joined.

Cyril doesn’t know how to dress, except for his tie.

It happened in the back of the former living room we called our chapel. The church itself was an insignificant Flemish rowhouse. Thirty-six chairs crammed the room. Six rows of six. When half of them got filled, we boasted on the Church’s growth in our city.

It happened. From pictures and testimonies we can grasp somehow what happened.

Our worldwide missionary effort is plurilingual. The Church has always been involved in outreach efforts to other tongues, now translating material into 185 languages. There are wards and branches, led in the local idiom, in 165 countries.

When God became American is the novelized biography of Joseph Smith by the French author Marc Chadourne: Quand Dieu se fit Americain.

When the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake were being announced, I remember how in our priesthood meetings in Provo exciting plans were forged to turn the event into a massive missionary opportunity: we would fill the streets with members passing out copies of the Book of Mormon and taking referrals.

In my Belgian environment, I’m an oddity. A university professor who is a Mormon. Colleagues and students whisper about it. They can’t place me in the normal spectrum of the centuries old allegiances to our society. They wonder: how can this scholar believe the rigmarole of that foreign cult?

They were all to their love. A silent, suffering love, eyes staring into eyes. Standing at a few inches from each other, the fence between them. A huge fence, of strong wire-netting that would not let a hand get through. Both were barely twenty years old.

– And, Brother Decoo, could you come in your native dress? It’s this time of the year again. Circus by the aliens. Officially it’s called Cultural Heritage Night, or International Fashion Show, or LDS WorldFest. Mormons love it.

Karl was a stutterer and he had to say the sacrament prayer.

Some of us like to throw in some Latin from time to time.

Sixty years ago the death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated. Behind the barbed wires, many of the survivors could not stand on their feet to greet the liberators. The average weight of an adult was 77 pounds. Emaciated, with hollow eyes, those breathing skeletons, covered with a thin layer of tensed skin, only experienced a…

My parents died a few years ago, both in their nineties, after a fulfilling life and with the memories of having survived two world wars and sixty years of marriage on the Old Continent.

The sustaining of the second counselor in the Relief Society Presidency in our ward was unanimous. The bishop, who asked the question for opposing votes, had just a quick glance over the audience, while gathering his papers to sit down. No opposing votes. Of course not. But again, I felt relieved.

Belgium, December 29, 2004. For days now I have been confronted with TV-images of bloated and rotting bodies littered along shores, of parents crying over the corpses of their children, of living children staring dumbfounded into a camera and holding up a note with their name and the question “Seen parents?” – while it is…

I cannot remember when Brother H. came to our branch for the first time. Somewhere in the late seventies or early eighties. A middle-aged man, single, not too tall, graying hair, with lips drawn between an angelic and an ironic smile. Was he brought in by the missionaries or did he find us? I am…

Married, but only one of the partners is Mormon. In the “mission field” such part-Mormon couples are numerous, probably more than in area’s where Mormons have lived for generations. Sociologists study this phenomenon among various affiliations. “Religious intermarriage”, “religious homogamy / heterogamy”, “interchurch / interfaith marriages” are some of the key words of this academic…

Her name was Sister Pooters. Petite, energetic, single. She was around seventy when I, a young convert, met her at our local Mormon branch.

Though I have never been on a formal mission, my first five years in the Church were closely tied to missionaries. I was their age, I worked intensely with them.

To continue with the international perspective I was asked to give, here is one post that opens the door to some political debate… I hope it will not deviate too much from the questions asked at the end! Two items to set the perspective: 1) First, the vast majority of Mormon pioneers who came from…