When he was 11 years old growing up in Britain, Aly Conteh visited a cemetery in northern France where British and Commonwealth soldiers from World War II were buried.
Though not a “child who was into answering big philosophical questions,” he felt weighty curiosity as he walked among the gravestones.
“What happens to us after we die? What’s the purpose of our time here on earth?”
“I’d been taught by my mum to pray,” he said. “So from time to time, I would pray and ask Heavenly Father those questions.”
Three years later, missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were in his home “teaching us the truths of the gospel.” After he was given a pamphlet with the testimony of the Prophet Joseph Smith, Conteh read it.
“There were no fireworks,“ he recalled, “I just knew it was true.”
Now working as director of preservation at the Church History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ, Conteh recalls this experience as the “still small voice whispering to me that what I read was true.”
Previously, however, “I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it in that way,” he said.
Conteh joined Claire Haynie Brown and Keith Erekson, both from the Church History Department, in a panel discussion Friday moderated by Matthew C. Godfrey, senior managing historian for Outreach and Engagement for the Church History Department.
The Church History-sponsored event entitled, “I am in your midst”: Jesus Christ at the Center of Church History, was held at the Conference Center Theater on Sept. 5.
Hiding the history?
People are typically suspicious when they hear Erekson works in church history, he said. Someone will say, “Oh, I’ve heard of you guys. You hide the church’s history. You don’t want people to know about the church’s history.”
“And I usually answer with a big ‘yes, that’s exactly our goal. And I’m going to tell you where we hide things so that no member will ever find them. … We found this place called the gospel library app.’"
Erekson went on to reference and describe resources readily available in the app, along with the recently completed Joseph Smith Papers project.
New questions arise
When Conteh learned about the history of race and the priesthood in the church, it left him wondering if he was lesser, and ”it troubled me.”
Long before the gospel library app and other internet resources were available, Conteh described mostly relying on what others had heard, read or been told. Thanks to spiritual reassurance he had received on the “primary questions,” Conteh said, “I wouldn’t call it a faith crisis. I just didn’t understand.”
“But there was a resource that was available to me, and that was the scriptures,” he said, sharing a particular passage that came to him.
“And He (Jesus) inviteth them all to come unto him and partake of His goodness. And he denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female.”
“I really felt like God was speaking directly to me through the prophet Nephi,“ Conteh said, ”and that lifted a burden from me.”
“Do I know why the priesthood was withheld?” Conteh continued, “No … but God’s ways are not our ways, and I’m prepared to trust in my Father in heaven, to accept what he told me in this scripture, and to be comfortable and to use what I know to be true in those primary questions.”
He shared that earlier stories of African-American Saints like Jane Manning James “just brought great joy, almost tears to me, of her faith. And that strengthens mine.” And when the “Race and the Priesthood” Gospel Topic Essay came out with more information, Conteh said “that validated a lot of things that I believe to be true. It didn’t give me the answers, but I’m comfortable with what I know.”
He said he’s also “comfortable with not having all the answers.”
Extending grace and charity to past members
Recalling favorite lines from Preach My Gospel, “all that is unfair about life can be made right through the Atonement of Jesus Christ,” Brown said. She broadened the application to “include that all that seems unfair about the things that happened in church history can be made right through the Atonement of Jesus Christ.”
That includes “the things that we don’t quite understand, the people who were imperfect, who made decisions that perhaps seem wrong to us, those things can be made right because of the grace of our Savior, Jesus Christ.”
“My hope is that as we study the people of the past who are imperfect, just like ourselves,” Brown said, “that we will extend them the grace that God offers to us through his Son.”
Godfrey echoed that remark, explaining that “just as we try to offer charity and grace to those in the present ... I’ve learned as a historian to be able to offer charity and grace to those in the past.”
“We don’t know everything,” Erekson said, encouraging people to “not feel surprised or disappointed or betrayed” when challenging things come up in church or world history.
“These are people that God is dealing with,” he said — citing the revelation introducing the Book of Mormon as containing “a record of a fallen people and the fullness of (the) gospel of Jesus Christ.”
“It’s both of those. I can’t just have the Book of Mormon without the war chapters. I can’t see the miracles of Jesus without comprehending the woman who had an issue of blood for 12 years.”
This is a pattern he says goes “all the way back to the Garden of Eden, where God tells us that’s how you’re going to learn you are going to taste the bitter, so that you know how to prize the sweet.”
‘I started spiraling’
Brown shared an experience when she encountered things regarding plural marriage early on in her church history work that were troubling to her. She had previously read accounts of this being a difficult principle to live and accept — including Joseph Smith needing to be commanded multiple times to live this principle due to his resistance, while Brigham Young said he had “desired the grave” upon hearing about it.
Yet when Brown encountered another account of a faithful Saint who had been thrilled with the idea, this “started this spiral, this darkness for me of wondering what that meant about my value as a woman in the Lord’s eyes.”
“So many questions just started crashing in on me, and the only way that I can describe it is I just felt this spiral.” As she sat at her desk, Brown wondered, “what do I do with this experience?”
She felt a soft voice “pierce through that darkness,” encouraging her to be in the temple. So, on her lunch break, she participated in the initiatory ordinance. “For those of you who have experienced that,” Brown said to women in the audience, “it’s such an incredible manifestation of female priesthood power.”
“I felt in that moment such an overwhelming sense of love from the Lord, an overwhelming sense that I am of infinite and eternal worth in his eyes — worth no more, no less, than any other person, including men — that I was a divinely loved and cherished daughter of God.”
“It didn’t answer every question,” she said. “That experience didn’t give me a line-by-line, written-out-perfectly answer to my question, but it left me with enough peace and enough confidence in the love of the Lord that I was able to move forward.”
A church (history) of joy?
“We sometimes get a little dour when we talk about the challenges of church history,” Brown said, “and that’s not to minimize them, but I think it sometimes distracts us from the incredible joy that is to be found in church history.”
“Especially when we see Christ as the main character, as the center of church history,” she said, “we see this march of incredible miracles coming down to us from 1820 to today.“
“To just see what God is able to do with those who put their lives in his hands,” Brown added, “that instills in me a great amount of joy and hope in my own potential ... that I have the ability, when my life is in the hands of the Lord, to be something so much more than what I could ever engineer for myself.”
Another thing that brings her “incredible joy,” she said, is how this shared history “binds us together as a church ... that regardless of whether your ancestors pushed handcarts, those handcart pioneers are a part of our spiritual DNA as a church.”
Brown described being in Argentina recently with the Tabernacle Choir at a celebration of 100 years of the church in South America on assignment with the choir, and listening to the account of Joseph Smith’s first vision being recited in Spanish. “Regardless of whether you speak Spanish or Armenian or Thai … that is a part of who we are as a church.”
“It’s all of our history, and it’s just a beautiful thing that we get to share.”