Twenty minutes before midnight, on a Monday night in 2022, nine Ukrainians showed up at the home of Mimmu Hartiala-Sloan in Sahalahti, Finland, a scenic village about two hours north of Helsinki.
Fleeing Ukraine after the Russian invasion with a dog and a cat in tow, the family had trouble getting into the refugee shelter. A mutual friend had directed the group to Hartiala-Sloan, who from the start of the war made her stance clear: if any Ukrainians needed a place to stay, her home was open and they could stay as long as they needed. “If you stay in a place for two weeks, you can’t really settle,” Hartiala-Sloan later told me.
Hartiala-Sloan found a bed for everyone. She cleared her desk so her guests could set up an office for remote work. To the longtime member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, this was not a grand gesture of sacrifice. Welcoming strangers in her home was the essence of her faith. “This is what sharing is — this is what the gospel is all about,” Hartiala-Sloan told me. A life of radical generosity has also been the only life she’s known — both while in Finland and in the United States.
I met Hartiala-Sloan this fall after a friend tipped me off to her remarkable life story. I went on to learn that Hartiala-Sloan, who turned 80 this year, is something of a legend in the Finnish Latter-day Saint community. Hailing from the prominent families of Lutheran priests, her parents’ conversion to the church in 1951 stirred a “national scandal” among Lutherans, as Hartiala-Sloan described it. Baptized 72 years ago, she is believed to be the oldest member of the church in Finland, a country of about 5.5 million people, including about 5,000 Latter-day Saints.
But what struck me most was the way that Hartiala-Sloan lived a life of faith in a country that for many years was skeptical, and often outright hostile to Latter-day Saints. She opened her home to the Scouts, to the Lutherans and the Orthodox, to anyone who was in trouble. When the local Lutheran church needed more singers for their choir, she joined, along with her 87-year-old husband.
Although about 60% of Finns belong to the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the membership, and baptisms, have been steadily declining. In an increasingly secular Finland, Hartiala-Sloan’s beliefs stand out more than ever.
But she’s never shied away from them, putting her faith to practice and serving those who needed her, regardless of their circumstances. “I live my religion, I don’t just talk about it,” she told me, during a conversation we recently had when she visited Boston.
In an increasingly secular society, where religion is often relegated to a private sphere, perhaps, Hartiala-Sloan’s life can offer a model for living a life of faith publicly and bravely.
Radical hospitality
Although missionaries of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were first sent to Finland in 1875, the Finnish Mission wasn’t established until after World War II, in 1947. In the late 19th century, one Lutheran parish minister wrote: “We have heard it spoken of Baptists, Methodists, Hihhulites, and other such, but at least from the Mormons … one has hoped to be spared.”
Hartiala-Sloan’s father had picked up the Book of Mormon while traveling in Europe in the late 1940s, but it wasn’t until later that a missionary rang his apartment’s doorbell. After seven months of serious investigation, Hartiala-Sloan’s parents were baptized in the frigid Baltic sea in 1951.
But their decision spurred some controversy. Her grandmother and grandfather, who were doctors, came from Lutheran ministers’ families. So the decision to break away from the Lutheran tradition was met with hostility among the neighboring Finns. At the time, Latter-day Saints faced opposition in Finland — much of it from communists, who accused missionaries of being spies.
But despite the pushback, Hartiala-Sloan’s parents got busy building their new community, which then had only two hundred church members. Both parents worked on translating the Book of Mormon, one of the church’s foundational scriptures, into Finnish — her father was the president of the translation committee. The group often met in their home. “We had more room than the church did,” said Hartiala-Sloan, recalling peeking in a keyhole to see her parents and others kneeling around a table. “For a long time, I thought the Book of Mormon was translated on the knees. Because every time I looked, they were praying.”
Before bedtime, her parents read to the children from the freshly translated text of the Book of Mormon in Finnish.
One of five children, Hartiala-Sloan was baptized in the swimming pool built for the Olympic Games. Shortly after, she was put to work. At 11 years old, she was teaching three-year-olds. At 14, she was in the youth leadership position. “I wasn’t called to be a teacher because I was so good, but because there wasn’t anybody else,” she said. Later on, she went on to serve as a president of Relief Society, the church’s women’s organization, six times.
The home of Hartiala-Sloan’s family became the hub of bustling Latter-day Saint life — parties, meetings and overnight guests. After the war, her family opened their doors to the displaced and the young people who came from the outskirts to Helsinki to work. Once, the church’s then-apostle and later president, Spencer W. Kimball, even stayed at their house.
The family was active in the Lutheran scouting program and later helped start the church’s scouting program. “There was always somebody in our house, who needed a home,” she said.
“Mimmu has always had an open mind with tolerance to people with different worldviews,” Pekka Roto, former Tampere Stake president and former Helsinki Temple president, told me over email. Roto, who attends church in Tampere with Hartiala-Sloan, had met her in the 1960s as a college student in Finland. “The missionary work with love and good deeds is her specialty.”
Inspired by her parents, Hartiala-Sloan internalized the ethos of being the first one to help. She said: “Because I was a scout and I was in the church, you learn to respond immediately.” She was never overbearing with her beliefs in her engagements outside the church, she said — and she didn’t need to be. The way that she lived radiated the values that shaped her life.
Open doors
When you ask Hartiala-Sloan how many children she has, she offers an unusual answer: “We have five homemade kids, and then we had 11 others.”
She prefers the term “homemade” to “biological” when talking about the five children she had with her husband, Jim Sloan, a scientist she met when as a 23-year-old she came to Boston to learn English. After the Vietnam War, the couple took in Cambodian kids. Hartiala-Sloan raised her sister’s daughter and help with the two other “niecelings” as she calls them. She helped raise a boy from across the street, whose mother was struggling with mental illness.
Like her parents’ home growing up in Finland, she made her home in the U.S. a hub of warmth and belonging for anyone who needed it. “They would just ring the doorbell and come overnight,” she said. While living in Boston, she was the president of the local Finlandia foundation, hosting Finns who came to Harvard, MIT and other Boston area universities. Although she barely spoke English, she joined with other local women in starting a women’s magazine called Exponent II.
Hartiala-Sloan went on to live in the United States for 41 years. But in 2008, when her husband retired, Hartiala-Sloan and her husband decided to move back to Finland. She had dual citizenship, she raised her children in the U.S., and had built a community, but she longed to return to her homeland.
“Why? Because I’m Finnish,” she said.
Latter-day Saints in the Lutheran choir
The group of nine Ukrainians who showed up at Hartiala-Sloan’s house in 2022 eventually dispersed: one person went to Ireland, others moved to Portugal to work. A few others stayed in Hartiala-Sloan’s home for almost a year. “They became such dear friends,” she said. That act of hospitality drew curiosity — and admiration — from the Lutheran community. “They were all excited about the fact that Finland was taking in the Ukrainians,” she said.
While the relationship between the Latter-day Saints and the Lutherans has improved, prejudices still exist. Roto recalled when a decade ago, a Lutheran church refused to host the funeral for a Latter-day Saint brother inside their church, while the Latter-day Saint chapel was under renovation.
Hartiala-Sloan said her Latter-day Saint congregation in Tampere, Finland, is vibrant although it has dwindled in numbers over the years. “Of course, now people don’t go to churches very much,” she said. But Hartiala-Sloan continues to respond wherever she’s called. Even when the call is coming from outside her own religious tradition — even the Lutheran community.
Their local Lutheran church choir needed tenors, for example, and approached Hartiala-Sloan and her husband for help. “Most young people don’t sing in the choir anymore,” she said. The choir includes five Lutheran ministers. One of the ministers even got curious about Hartiala-Sloan’s faith and asked the couple for the Book of Mormon. When two of the ministers from the choir died, the couple sang at their funeral.
The children of Hartiala-Sloan, four of them who live in Finland, are continuing their mother’s legacy of service, generosity and openness. After all, they had grown up with this. “The doing is the important thing,” said Hartiala-Sloan. “Today, we’re alive; tomorrow — we don’t know. So there is no reason to stop.”