Tad Talk
A tweet this week from a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints described how a mother told a local leader about an ailing family member and two hours later a bishop 11 time zones away visited the person and provided a blessing.
While I was in Tonga in May, I experienced a similar phenomenon. A local church leader told me how a Tongan congregation in the Bay Area of California in the United States and a bishop of a congregation in Hawaii had heard about the typhoon that devastated Tonga and offered help. Eventually, that help became shipping containers full of plywood used to build homes for people displaced by the storm.
This especially interested me because I had done some legwork before traveling to cover President Russell M. Nelson’s trip to the South Pacific this spring about the number of Tongan and Samoan congregations in Utah. I asked the church for that information, then expanded my request to the number of Pacific language congregations worldwide, broken down by country and, in the United States, by state. The findings were very interesting.
For example, Tonga has 168 Tongan-speaking wards and branches. Utah has 37 and California has 28, followed by New Zealand with 19. Also, seven of the 19 Marshallese-speaking congregations are in the United States.
As I spoke with a number of adult Pacific Islanders in the United States, like a bishop in the Seattle, Washington, area. I called him from the Los Angeles airport while waiting for our flight out to Samoa. He expressed deep gratitude for the opportunity to worship in his native tongue, and said that was especially true of first-generation adults. But I also found that many who attend Samoan or Tongan congregations in the United States had the same experience as those in the Spanish-speaking ward in my neighborhood in Provo, Utah: Most of their children are not fluent in their parents’ and grandparents’ native tongue, so Sunday School and Primary classes are held either in English or in both English and the native language. |
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| Here is the full chart of Pacific-language congregations: |
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Samoan-speaking congregations:
Samoa 159
United States 45
American Samoa 36
New Zealand 20
Australia 15
Tongan-speaking congregations:
Tonga 168
United States 80
New Zealand 19
Australia 8
American Samoa 2
Bislama-speaking congregations:
Vanuatu 23
Fijian-speaking congregations:
Fiji 24
United States 2
Kiribati-speaking congregations:
Kiribati 34
Fiji 1
Nauru 1
New Zealand 1
Marshallese-speaking congregations:
Marshall Islands 12
United States 7
Niuean-speaking congregations:
Niue 2
New Zealand 1
Rarotongan-speaking congregations:
Cook Islands 5
Rotuman-speaking congregations:
Fiji 1 |
Tahitian-speaking congregations:
French Polynesia 19
Tok Pisin-speaking congregations:
Papua New Guinea 6
Pacific-language units in the United States:
Samoan-speaking congregations:
California 12
Alaska 2
Hawaii 5
Nevada 1
Utah 23
Washington 2
Tongan-speaking congregations:
California 28
Alaska 1
Hawaii 8
Oregon 2
Nevada 1
Texas 2
Utah 37
Washington 1
Fijian-speaking congregations:
California 2
Marshallese-speaking congregations:
Arkansas 1
Hawaii 1
Oklahoma 1
Texas 1
Utah 1
Washington 2 |
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What I’m Reading ...
When I was a young boy, my family lived in Massachusetts and New Hampshire before moving west. One year we attended the famed Hill Cumorah Pageant in Palmyra, New York. The free pageant is a production by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with scenes from the Bible and Book of Mormon on a 10-level stage. Now that the church has announced the pageant will be closed after the 2020 performances, people are expected to flock to New York to see it this year or next for the first time or one last time. This story says 8,000 to 9,000 people are expected each night this week and next.
I wrote in December about which pageants the church is discontinuing and which will remain.
As the father of a 12-year-old daughter who is capable of spending hours a day on social media watching videos and then talking about the influencers she watches, this story about Latter-day Saint teenagers who try to maintain their standards while becoming popular YouTube “influencers” resonated with me. Our daughter has watched a lot of Brooklyn and Bailey, who are mentioned prominently in this piece.
In the 1990s, Jeff Call and I worked together covering BYU football and its coach, LaVell Edwards, first for Cougar Sports Magazine, which we helped launch, and then for separate papers. Jeff worked for the Deseret News, and I was with the Daily Herald in Provo, Utah. We also covered Kalani Sitake while he played at that time, and I really enjoyed Jeff’s piece this last week about how Kalani is following in LaVell’s footsteps.
I miss LaVell. He was very good to me. Maybe I’ll share more about that another time, but here is my coverage of his funeral, where I interviewed Kansas City Chiefs coach Andy Reid. |
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